A Bitter Taste of Water

About the Book

📰 A Bitter Taste of Water — the premiere and an overview of the volume → Benares, Calcutta, an arrest in Kabul and unknown photographs from China.

Gorzki smak wody. Indie, Afganistan, Japonia, Chiny (“A Bitter Taste of Water. India, Afghanistan, Japan, China”) was published in October 2024 by Oficyna Wydawnicza Kontynenty — seventeen years after the author’s death. It collects the reportage the young Ryszard Kapuściński brought back from his first journeys outside Europe in 1956–1957. The texts appeared only once at the time, in the weekly “Sztandar Młodych”, and for nearly seven decades were never gathered in a book. The volume has not been translated into English.

Kapuściński was 24 or 25 and only just learning the world he would write about for the rest of his life. Even so, these pieces are well built and written with verve: funeral rites on the Ganges in Benares, Calcutta’s Sealdah Station turned into a camp for refugees shuttling between India and Pakistan, a conversation with a man who strangled a tiger with his bare hands.

He reached Afghanistan by accident. He was on his way back from India, but the Suez Canal was blocked, and his plane stopped over in Kabul — where Kapuściński, without a visa, was detained. That collision with the local bureaucracy produced texts that are both searching and very funny. The Japanese pieces are more ambitious: they try to explain a culture and its history to the Polish reader, not just to describe what can be seen.

The volume is completed by the author’s previously unknown photographs from India, Japan and China. It is the missing beginning of the road Kapuściński himself retold decades later in Travels with Herodotus — there, the memory of the first trip to India; here, the reportage written on the spot.

Structure

The book follows the route of the journey:

1. India — Benares, Calcutta, refugees after Partition.
2. Afghanistan — an unplanned stop in Kabul and a clash with bureaucracy.
3. Japan — Tokyo as a stop on the way to China, and an attempt to describe the culture from within.
4. China — photographs only: Kapuściński wrote about this part of the journey only in Travels with Herodotus.

Themes

• A first encounter with Asia
• Refugees and the aftermath of the partition of India
• Ritual, religion and death in Benares
• Bureaucracy meeting local mentality (Afghanistan)
• Japanese culture and history seen from within
• The birth of a reporter’s craft

See Also

• Travels with Herodotus — the same first journeys to India and China, retold years later.
• The Kirghiz Dismounts — a later, mature journey through Asia, this time across the Soviet republics.

Edition

• Publisher: Oficyna Wydawnicza Kontynenty
• Published: 23 October 2024
• Length: 192 pages
• ISBN: 978-83-972159-1-7
• Formats: paperback, e-book, audiobook (Polish)