Show Your Tongue

Book excerpt: Gunter Grass and his wife, Ute, spent six months in Calcutta, 1987-1988. Throughout, Grass kept a diary in words and drawings that record everyday sights: the poverty, the heat, the resigned anxiety of those who no longer have anything to wait for. Showing one's tongue in Bengali is an experession of shame. And shame is what Grass, as a man and as a citizen of one of the most prosperous countries in the world, feels about the human condition in India. -- taken from p. 4 of cover.