Executive Times
		2005 Book Reviews
		The Bird Man and The Lap Dancer: Close Encounters with Strangers by Erik K. Hansen
		Rating: ••• (Recommended)
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	Community There are nine engaging essays in Erik Hansen’s new book, The Bird Man and The Lap Dancer: Close Encounters with Strangers. Hansen takes readers from one part of the world to another, and introduces to the strangers he met there, and presents them to us in ways that are memorable and poignant. Six of the essays come from Hansen’s travels, and span thirty years. After reading these essays, readers will be pleased that Hansen put the experiences on paper, and introduced us to fascinating people and places. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of the essay titled, “Life Lessons From Dying Strangers,” pp. 99-107: In the Spring of 1977 I decided to send two large steamer trunks and a wooden packing crate from Calcutta to San Francisco. Looking at the original shipping manifest, I can see there were Buddhist prayer flags, a Tibetan wool robe, a finely made traditional chopstick and knife set, and a half-dozen mismatched English tea cups and saucers that I collected during a six-hundred-mile walk along the Tibet/Nepal border. There was also a maroon-colored, handmade waxed cotton umbrella with split-bamboo splines that I acquired from a Buddhist monk near the Temple of the Tooth in Sri Lanka in exchange for a tube of toothpaste. One trunk was filled with an assortment of nineteenth-century jewelry-making dies from Sikkim, a dozen Afghan turbans from Mazär-i-Sharif, a complete set of cast-bronze antique opium weights from Mandalay, hundreds of matchbook covers, and a cast-aluminum nutcracker in the shape of a woman’s hips and legs. My most coveted possession was a six-foot by ten-foot hand-painted canvas Hindi movie poster of the actor Robin Bannerjee serenading three gorillas of unknown gender and an overweight woman clad in leopard skins in the 1950s Hindi movie version of Tartan. The other trunk contained first editions of Henry Miller (sold from under the counter as pornography, from a secondhand book dealer in Calcutta), kilos of cardamom pods and cloves, South Indian cookbooks and fragrant rosewood that, in log form, had been carried across a Calcutta lumberyard, by an elephant, to a gigantic band saw where a crew of laborers reduced it to rough-cut planks. Each of my trunks when filled to capacity weighed more than two hundred pounds and I kept them beside my bed at the Salvation Army Hostel on Sudder Street. As I looked into the different shipping possibilities, I continued to collect more items. Hand-pulled rickshaws arrived at the front gate of the hotel with cartons of sandalwood soap, Indian cooking utensils, a hand-powered jeweler’s-wire rolling mill, a collection of metal and wood antique locks from Northern Pakistan and Nepal, and a disassembled turned-wood chair from the mountains of Nuristan, a remote region of Afghanistan located north of the Khyber Pass. When I realized I couldn’t fit everything into the steamer trunks I ordered timber for the construction of a large shipping crate. I summoned two carpenters from New Bazaar. We agreed on a price and the men set to work in the hotel courtyard. They squatted on the paving stones and sawed and hammered rough-cut planks into a sturdy shipping crate. There was a surcharge to cover the cost of recycled nails, a small fee for coconut oil to lubricate the saws, plus a resharpening fee for the wood block plane and the two handsaws. When the carpenters were finished they sold the offcuts and sawdust to the pavement dwellers who lived along Sudder Street. These street people, in turn, resold the solid bits of wood for a small profit. They kept the sawdust to mix with water and fresh cow dung from the street which was then mixed into stiff, moist patties and slapped onto the walls of a nearby building to dry in the sun. When they started to peel off the walls the patties were used as fuel for cooking fires on the sidewalk. During the first week of my stay in Calcutta the hotel manager seemed to take scant interest in my activities, but by the middle of the second week he let it be known in the kindest sort of way that his hotel courtyard was not an open-air woodworking shop, nor was my room a storage shed. In Calcutta, packages weighing less than twenty kilograms (with a circumference of no more than one meter and eighty centimeters) could be sent by regular mail provided the shipper has gone to the Tourist Office and obtained a Certificate of Gift Parcel. In front of most post offices in India there were men who, for a few rupees, would stitch unbleached muslin cloth around your gift parcel, then seal the seams with dabs of melted red wax for security. If it was necessary to itemize the contents for insurance or customs purposes, there were other men on the sidewalk with manual typewriters who would bang out a list in the shade of a tree while you waited. Fresh coconut juice vendors were set up nearby to provide customers with something cool to drink as the typists did their job. Light snacks were also available. One day while I was walking myself, step-by-step, through the procedures for preparing parcels for the post office, I was approached by a man selling small rolled-up paper cones filled with toasted chickpeas and lentils mixed with minced onion, chopped green chilies, and salt with a squeeze of lime. I bought a cone and while I ate the warm, spicy mixture I started reading the printing on the paper cone. It was in English. The lines sounded familiar, but the cone was too tightly wrapped for me to identify the author. Most street food in India is wrapped in banana leaves or recycled paper ranging from Chinese pictorial magazines and Soviet-era soya-bean production worksheets to pages from English novels, high school exams, and—if you are really lucky— personal letters. When I finished my snack I unrolled the paper cone to discover a page from Shakespeare. It was Henry I1/ Part I. I read a conversation between Falstaff and Prince Hal before wiping my fingers on the page and then placing the greasy, crumpled literature in a trash bin. Once inside the post office, with the stitched and wax-sealed gift parcel in hand, it was necessary to determine which line to stand in. The lines of customers were long and slow and it was not unusual to wait an hour or more before reaching a clerk who might politely inform you that you were in the wrong line. Stamps would eventually be purchased at one window and insurance obtained from a second window. A third line led to a postal employee who placed a postmark on the stamps that you had purchased from one of the previous clerks, before the final act of mailing could be completed at a fourth window. The entire process could take hours and sometimes days, but this sort of express mail service was only for gift parcels of less than twenty kilograms. If I had been thinking clearly, I would have immediately divided my goods into twenty-kilogram lots and sent them all through the post office. But, apart from the weight, the real problem was the oversized trunks that I had just purchased. I had found the trunks, purely by chance, at a secondhand furniture shop out near the old British South Park Street Cemetery. I had also been tempted by a wrought-iron four-poster bed with cast-iron finials and a soaring wirework mosquito-net support, but I managed to limit myself to the trunks. The sole purpose of my visit to that neighborhood of Calcutta was not to buy steamer trunks, but to look at the quirky British colonial gravestone inscriptions at the South Park Street Cemetery. The inscriptions gave tantalizing insights into several bizarre deaths. On one tombstone I discovered that the dearly departed was now resting in peace because of her addiction to mangoes. On another tombstone I learned that a man had been buried with his dog after some sort of hunting mishap. The steamer trunks were from the days of the British Raj. Each one had stitched leather handles, riveted metal exteriors, and massive locks with working keys. The trunks were covered with evocative P&O shipping stamps, as well as hotel stickers from places like the Strand Hotel in Rangoon, the New Oriental Hotel in Galle (Sri Lanka), Raffles in Singapore, the Peninsula in Hong Kong, and my favorite, the Gymkhana Club in New Delhi. There was no obvious reason to send the trunks home empty and so I filled them to the brim with new purchases and the hodgepodge of treasures that I had been collecting over the previous year. Once I had committed myself to the huge steamer trunks I had no other choice than to send them by sea through one of the numerous shipping companies that offer their services at the Calcutta Customs House. I set aside a week to complete the customs and shipping formalities, but after five days of strenuous effort it became obvious that I was going to be in Calcutta for quite some time. The hotel manager began to inquire about my proposed departure date and when I tried to sound reassuring by telling him I would be leaving in a matter of days he simply wobbled his head from side to side and said “Acha.” The days slowly grew into weeks. My first mistake was to try to organize all of the paperwork by myself. This was part of an intense, but short-lived, attempt to avoid paying a small commission to a shipping agent. To save the equivalent of $25 I spent my second week wandering through the debilitating heat of Calcutta. I made dozens of visits to the Customs House, the Reserve Bank of India, three different shipping companies, and an insurance agent before I got a feel for the huge scope of my undertaking. There were port charges to be calculated, shipping surcharges, cooperage fees, a bunker surcharge, as well as payment for documentation, typing, stamps, paper, and carbon paper. There was also the obvious problem of how to transport the trunks to the docks. No rickshaw could bear the weight, and I was uncertain how to arrange for a bullock cart or a small truck. I applied for an export permit from the Deputy Controller at the Exchange Control Department at the Reserve Bank of India. The man was sympathetic, but he made it clear that I would first have to establish, in rupees, the value of each item. This was for insurance purposes. I returned to my hotel room where I unpacked the trunks and estimated, as best I could, the value of things such as a secondhand Robin Bannerjee movie poster and the dried bodies of the nine Dorcus giraffa beetles I had collected in the Khasi Hills of Assam. Another week passed, but each time progress began to seem like a possibility, a new set of permits, signatures and rubber-stamp impressions had to be collected, and paid for. The more I discovered about the shipping business in India, the less I understood how the process worked. Numerous complications and delays followed, but it wasn’t until the pile of documents and permits grew to fifty-three pages that I felt the first cold sweat of panic. On the recommendation of the hotel manager, I went to visit his second cousin, a Mr. J. B. Mukharjee at the Indian Mercantile Agency. As I approached the imposing stone facade of the Customs House I was slowly caught up by a chattering tide of office workers that surged into a huge hall where men, carrying trays of tea or with their arms full of bulging folders, crammed the aisles between the rows of desks piled high with yellowed forms. Antiquated telephones rang constantly and frantic shouts came from every direction. The impact of thousands of typewriter keys against paper, and the thunderous pounding of rubber stamps and staplers made normal conversation impossible. Surrounded by this scene of chaos, Mr. Mukharjee sat at his desk looking remarkably composed. He was a heavyset man dressed in an immaculate white dhoti and a long shirt, the sleeves and tails of which rustled in the breeze of an overhead ceiling fan. Mr. Mukharjee ‘s lips were stained a blood-red color from chewing pan and his catlike eyes were lined with kohl. Mr. Mukharjee shook my hand and gestured with a nod of his head to an empty chair. He ordered tea and then gave my pile of documents a cursory glance before chuckling to himself and setting them aside. He asked a few questions, then offered to handle all arrangements, including shipping charges, for 2,137 rupees (approximately $275 U.S.). I wasn’t sure how he came to that precise amount so quickly, but it seemed reasonable and I agreed to the price. My only stipulation was that the wooden crate and the steamer trunks were, from that moment forth, to be the sole responsibility of J. B. Mukharjee and the Indian Mercantile Agency. He assured me that there would be no problems. “My very, very dear friend, you have absolutely nothing to worry about!” said Mr. Mukharjee. He sat back in his chair and smiled at me with thick, fleshy, betel-nut-stained lips. Just the sight of him made me worry. By the end of the week I was back at Mr. Mukharjee’s desk filling out a thirty-six-page shipping manifest in triplicate because he had run out of carbon paper. I am not quite sure why I didn’t go buy him a few new sheets of carbon paper, or why I felt compelled to try to speed up a process that I did not understand, but it wasn’t long before I was once again spending my days collecting signatures and documents. The only noticeable difference in my routine was that I was now paying Mr. Mukharjee for the privilege of doing his work. I wandered around Calcutta from one warren of dimly lit office cubicles to the next and within days the heat and confusion drained me of all reason. “Patience, my good friend, patience,” Mr. Mukharjee implored. The purpose of retaining a shipping agent who appeared to do very little didn’t sink in until much later. But by then I was too distracted by the task of obtaining a Tax Clearance Certificate from the Foreign Section of the Income Tax Department to give the matter much thought. I remained positive but confused and found myself spending most of my time waiting uncertainly. I was looking for a sign, for tangible proof, that progress was being made. The extent of Mr. Mukharjee’s nonchalance remained unclear until the day he interrupted one of our conversations to eat lunch. On his desk he arranged my shipping documents like a place mat, then set out a stack of chappatis, a tin plate, and some bowls of rice and dal. The sight of him preparing his meal on top of those hard-earned documents had a sobering effect on me and I found myself wondering if, at the conclusion of his lunch, he would be using one of those precious forms as a table napkin. The Bird Man leaves readers hungry for more about the people and places introduced in each essay, and at the same time, satisfied with receiving memorable and interesting entertainment. Readers will finish The Bird Man and want to meet Erik Hansen and find out more about his interesting life and the strangers he’s met along the way. Steve Hopkins, May 25, 2005
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