Sudder Street, the requisite tourist residences three short blocks long,
cluttered with ramshackle grimy hotel cells, bland "Western food" restaurants, barefoot child beggars fluent in English, fax-phone services, drugstores with everything from green coconuts to Pantene, and used English-language bookstores surviving on sales of City of
Light, Mother Teresa biographies and the prolific genius of VS Naipaul. Cozy mornings at Curd Corner drinking a buttery lassi and swallowing "jam butter tost," tired evenings across the street, savoring oily chow mein from a cheap Chinese street stall. Packs of testosterone-cramped local teenage boy's in tight blue jeans and thick leather belts survey the neighborhood for Western females. Most travelers are content.
