We were running late and had to board a bus which was unusually full. Uncle Triple K didn’t get a seat and had to travel standing. A young man, maybe one of his students, offered him his seat, but my uncle declined. We travelled for an hour and then the front tyre of the bus exploded. There was a loud noise and the bus skidded, shuddered and stopped.
Luckily the shoulder of the road was sandy and the driver, clearly used to such mishaps, halted the bus without tipping it over. We were ordered to get out and wait for his young assistant to change the tyre. Uncle Triple K didn’t want to wait. He spotted a camel cart and asked the old man on it for a ride. He knew the brick kiln and dropped us near the village, where a young man, Yadav, had brought bicycles to meet us.
Yadav worked for the local trade union and had invited my uncle to meet the labourers. We rode for half an hour along a dusty track, avoiding potholes and the sharp spikes of kikar trees.
At the kiln we found three children playing with a bicycle wheel. They ignored us. One of them was using a stick to steer the wheel as he pushed it with his left hand and ran along with it. The other two, a boy and a girl, completely naked, ran with him, whooping and shouting. The girl, the youngest, would stop every now and then to cough and catch her breath.
Uncle Triple K was not pleased. He hadn’t expected the kiln to be shut and deserted. Yadav, however, didn’t seem at all surprised. He told us he had been expecting something like this. The bonded labourers who worked the kilns were illegal and banned by the government. Occasionally the police raided and freed anyone they found there. But the contractors had their informants among the police who gave them advance warning of the raids. They would round up the labourers in advance and drive them off into neighbouring villages.
Yadav checked the kiln and as we were about to leave we heard someone scream from a hut near the large furnace. The boy stopped running with the wheel. We all froze. Then again we heard the desperate howl. We rushed in the direction of the hut, following the three children.
When we entered the tiny dark space, the older boy was already inside. ‘Amma is ill,’ he said. She was leaning against the wall clutching her large belly and breathing heavily.
‘She’s in labour,’ my uncle said. ‘Quick,’ he continued, ‘we need a doctor – urgently.’ Yadav ran outside and cycled off to get the doctor from the neighbouring village.
Meanwhile Uncle Triple K asked me to find a bucket and fetch some clean water. The boy showed me the well, the rope and the bucket, and together we pulled up a load of water and took it to the hut. My uncle had already found a lantern and settled the woman on a mat on the floor. He told us to light a fire and heat up the water. Outside the hut the boy and I put together some of the bricks that were lying around, gathered some dry wood, leaves and scraps of paper, found some kerosene and managed to get the fire started.
Meanwhile the woman in the hut had stopped screaming, but by the way she groaned we knew that she would soon start wailing. My uncle asked the boy if there was a clean sheet in the hut. He pulled out a worn but clean Bengali sari from a basket in the corner. The woman glanced at the sari, nodded, smiled and then began to scream again.
All I remember are her screams, which seemed to go on and on. Then all at once she stopped and looked at Uncle Triple K, raised her hand and pointed at something in between her legs.
‘Look, the head,’ he whispered. ‘The baby is coming out.’
I couldn’t see much in the darkness of the hut. Uncle Triple K raised the lantern. I watched the woman take a long breath and gather all her strength to push. That’s when the baby slid out. My uncle quickly dropped to his knees and caught the child in hands that were trembling slightly. Then he cut the cord, cleared the baby’s mouth and the first cry of the newborn girl echoed round the hut. He washed the baby, wrapped her in the sari and my woollen jumper and gave her to the mother for her first feed.
It was more than an hour before Yadav returned with the doctor. He examined the mother and the baby and said they were both fine.
The three children who had witnessed the birth of their new sister had not said a word. They still looked stunned. Then the little girl got up and went up to the baby, to touch her face. When the baby gave a cry she quickly withdrew her hand.
The doctor invited my uncle and me to stay overnight at his house. Uncle Triple K gave Yadav some money and asked him to buy food and milk for the family. The doctor’s wife found two blankets, a sari and some clothes for the children. She also packed a small box of sweets, to mark the happy occasion of the birth.
On our way back to Delhi, my uncle explained why the woman in the hut had been so pleased that her baby was a girl. Boys born at the kiln inherited the bondage of their fathers and were trapped there, whereas girls, when they grew up, were given away in marriage to husbands in neighbouring villages. They had a chance to be free.
Later when I was in Moscow there was a postscript to one of Uncle Triple K’s letters to me. ‘Do you remember the baby who was wrapped in your woollen jumper? She died before she was two. But don’t be sad (although I know you will be), because in a way it’s better that the poor child is dead. She escaped the suffering of that wretched life.’ He added: ‘It breaks my heart to know how little hope there is for these people. I feel despair knowing that, like so many others, I am unable to help them.’
It was eighteen months after our visit to the brick kiln before Uncle Triple K and Yadav persuaded the police to organise a proper raid to free the labourers. The contractor was arrested and charged.
My uncle returned to Delhi and wrote an article about the kiln-owners and the ruthless way they exploited their labourers, who included little children. ‘That evening in the village I helped a mother give birth to a baby girl,’ the concluding paragraph of his article reads, ‘but I am not sure how happy I am about that. Look around you: there are children everywhere, cleaning shoes, selling newspapers, serving tea, washing dishes, scavenging rubbish, collecting waste. I have seen them in stone quarries, carpet shops, on railway stations, in spinning mills, and in illegal bidi and fireworks factories. I ask you to pause and think. Do you see any future for them? And if not, is there any future for us?’
Uncle Triple K was a good writer, simple but persuasive. He wrote columns for newspapers, plays for street theatre groups, and songs, slogans and jingles for protest marches. What I liked most was his ability to explain complex ideas simply and gracefully. Perhaps that’s why the Sunday edition of a national newspaper began publishing his column, Notebook of a Dilettante. I used to collect these columns and read them, hoping to learn to write like him.
My collection of Uncle Triple K’s columns contains a brief news report which appeared on the fourth page of the Delhi edition of The Times of India. The report is short, very much like the incident it describes. For the reporter it was a minor assault. But it changed my uncle’s life.
One evening my uncle and Mala Didi were walking home after attending the editorial meeting of a literary magazine he had started with some friends. He had got off the bus and walked through the bazaar, paused for a few minutes to look at a cinema billboard, stopped at the paan-shop to say hello to one of his friends, declined his offer of tea, and gone into a grocery store. When he came out he had turned into the narrow lane behind the shopping complex just a few metres from his home.
Suddenly two men armed with lathis rushed at him from behind. They knocked over Mala Didi. One of them hit my uncle’s legs hard and he fell down. The other rained down blows on his back and his head.
Shaken and shocked by the attack, Mala Didi took some minutes to get up. Then she saw Uncle Triple K lying face down, bleeding and moaning. She ran across the lane and called for help. Someone rushed to get a doctor from a surgery across the street, the paan-wallah scurried to ring an ambulance, and an old man who had seen everything that had happened hurried to call the police.
The doctor found my uncle unconscious and badly hurt. A couple of ribs were broken, there was a s
mall crack on the back of his skull and part of his jaw was shattered. Worst of all, his left eye was damaged.
Jijee-ma didn’t let me visit my uncle in the hospital. ‘Not yet,’ she said firmly. ‘Maybe in a week, when he’s better.’ I saw him first after ten days. By that time, to use his own words, he was ‘nicely patched up and re-assembled’. Most of the upper part of his body, including his head and neck, was bandaged and there was a black patch over his left eye. His face was still scarred and puffy but he smiled as soon as he saw me.
‘Where is your camera?’ he asked. ‘Don’t you want to take my photo in this spacesuit?’ I said nothing. I was trying hard to hold back tears. He asked me to come closer but instead I ran from the room.
Mala Didi came to get me. ‘He’ll be fine,’ she tried to reassure me. ‘The scars will be there, but he’ll come out stronger and more determined. I know him well. He isn’t someone who will give in easily to those who want to hurt him.’
‘But what about his eye?’ I asked her. She didn’t say anything then but after a few days told me the whole story.
As Uncle Triple K fell, his glasses slipped off and when he hit the ground his face smashed into them. Each blow from the lathis pushed his face into the broken metal frames. Their sharp edges pierced his left eye, dislodging the eye-ball from its socket.
His eye couldn’t be saved. It was removed, leaving an empty hole in his face.
For a few years afterwards he wore awkward-looking glasses. An eye transplant was suggested but quickly dropped because of the irreparable damage to the optic nerve.
He had a glass ball placed in the hole. Uncle Triple K soon learnt not only to live with one eye but also to joke about it.
‘What a shame,’ he would often say. ‘A Leftist forced to look at the world with his right eye.’
‘For proper balance, Kamrade Kakkar,’ his friends would say, and laugh.
Stalin’s Heart
Anna
That Vasu adored his Uncle Triple K terrified me. I wasn’t sure if I should tell him that in our family we didn’t feel comfortable with people like him, that we were highly suspicious of them and even feared them.
‘Stop seeing your Indian,’ Aunty Olga had told me. ‘He isn’t one of us.’
‘But that’s the very reason I like him,’ I replied.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said and warned me that nothing good would ever come from this relationship. I was glad when she returned to Kiev because if Vasu had phoned she would have told him to leave me alone.
I hadn’t talked to him for a while. Too busy planning the expedition, and then the message arrived from Poltava and I had to leave.
I didn’t want to leave Moscow so soon because of the fires and smoke. Most of the forests around Moscow were on fire and almost the whole of the south-west was covered in smoke. Papa had told me that the fires would continue for months, because once peat starts to burn it is very hard to control.
I was worried. Papa suffered from high blood pressure and often forgot to take his pills.
‘Don’t worry about me,’ he repeated and laughed. ‘Just concentrate on your work.’
He was right. That field-season in particular was extremely important for me and the expedition. I needed to focus on my work.
Maybe I should have phoned Vasu to find out how he was coping with his asthma in the smoke. Maybe he would want to join me in Poltava and work on the dig with me. I knew he loved old cities and what could have been older than Gelon? ‘Come, my friend,’ I imagined myself telling him, ‘and walk with me in the streets of a town so old it was described by Herodotus. We’ll map its shape and size and argue about the site where the Scythians chose to build it.’
If he came I could show him the remains of the Scythian boat which we had dug up the previous season. It had been buried in three layers of sand and clay and had taken us a week to get out.
Had I fallen in love again? Had I started to miss him? Of course, Vasu was in love, desperately. He would have dropped whatever he was doing and come to me.
There were five of us in my team, two men and three women. I would have preferred more men. It was easy to work with them, especially when you knew, as I certainly did, how to deal with their hungry looks and unwelcome advances. Boris Ivanovich Gryzlov, a linguist, was our leader. Vasu would surely enjoy discussing Sanskrit hymns and Hindu gods with him. Nikolai Nikolaivich Kravchenko, the second in command, supervised the diggings. The women in the team called him ‘Boris Godunov, the Usurper’. He and Maria Shulskaya, the surveyor, ruled jointly over us. Maria, from Leningrad, was so enormous it was hard to imagine that she had flown fighter planes during the War.
My special friend was Tetya Shura, born in a Cossack village not far from Rostov-on-Don. Her grandmother had died of hunger in Stalin’s famine and so her father had been brought up in an orphanage. Her grandfather joined the Red Cavalry of Budenov and was killed in a battle near Kiev, but not before he named his son Revolyutsiya (Revolution).
Tetya Shura was an expert on ancient pottery and knew the provenance of most of what was found in the region. She could date it merely by looking at its colour, glaze and ornamentation.
Each morning Kravchenko chaired a meeting to discuss the tasks for the day and plan the work schedule. Often a group of volunteers from the kolkhoz school or the technical college in Poltava joined our party.
Our work had so far revealed remnants of a town spread across the valley lying between the River Vorskla in the east and a dry creek which ran to the west before merging with the Vorskla a few kilometres south-east of Bel’sk.
The remains of three fortifications and a system of walls and moats had been exposed and mapped. The eastern fortification, we had concluded, had stood on a river terrace rising a hundred metres above the river valley. The northern fortification guarded the port. Boats from the eighth-century Greek colony of Olbia, in the delta of the River Bug on the northern coast of the Black Sea, would have sailed along this river. The Greeks would have traded wine, textiles and fresh olive oil for grain, cattle, hides, furs, timber, wax and honey. The rivers beyond Gelon weren’t big enough to carry large boats, so barges would have been used to carry goods and people to the north and east.
I was asked to join the team because they needed someone who knew how to describe and map both ancient and present-day landforms. My job was almost done. I had finished a map which I would have loved to show to Vasu because he understood patterns of ancient settlements better than I did. On it I had plotted the locations of the ancient Scythian settlements along the banks of streams criss-crossing the steppes between the River Dneiper in the west and the River Don in the east. Gelon was one of the biggest centres where the otherwise nomadic Scythians had decided to settle down. A complicated system of moats and walls was still visible in aerial photos although the fertile chernozem fields with their black topsoil rich in humus had been ploughed and planted for centuries. I used pairs of aerial photos to give me a three-dimensional view of the ancient kurgans we planned to dig. Unfortunately a large number seemed to have been disturbed, opened and robbed.
Three weeks after my arrival at the site Papa called to tell me that Vasu had been trying to contact me. He was surprised that I hadn’t let him know about going to Poltava. I told Papa that Vasu should come round and be available when I called the following week. He sounded terrible on the phone, wheezing and coughing. But he was following my advice, going swimming and taking saunas, which meant he felt much better. I didn’t even ask if he wanted to come to the dig. He already knew how much I wanted to see him.
Three days later he arrived, I met him at Poltava Station. I was delighted to see him; he looked and sounded much happier.
‘I am blessed,’ he wouldn’t stop whispering, which I found embarrassing. He is in love with being in love, I often thought. I knew that I was his first love, the very first woman in his life. This both pleased and alarmed me.
He began to accompany me on my mapping traverses, helping m
e understand the design of the ancient settlement. He had come prepared, carrying his own copy of Herodotus’ Histories pasted with stickers. I would often take him to the highest point in the area and spread my maps before him and he would pick the best sites for settlement, imagining he was one of the ancient architects. The words poured out of him and although his speech was slow and measured, the intensity with which he spoke amazed me. He would pull out his notebook and begin to draw, explaining to me how villages grew organically into cities. I was impressed by the delight he showed in being with me at the site.
‘He is in love,’ Tetya Shura would say to me and laugh. I was glad that she came to like him. He in turn appeared captivated by her warm husky voice and her melancholy ballads of Cossack horsemen, their lovely women and loyal horses.
One night he witnessed her in all her glory. The anger and anguish in her voice must have surprised him as he watched the drama unfold in front of his eyes.
We were sitting around the campfire after dinner, discussing the funerary ceremonies of the Scythians so vividly described by Herodotus. Tetya Shura seemed very aggressive, as if she were trying to pick a fight. Maria Shulskaya said something trivial about the funerary ceremonies, to which Tetya Shura reacted sharply. Someone hastily changed the subject to Saqqara, the Egyptian city of the dead built around a stepped pyramid near the western bank of the Nile. That’s when Gryzlov was able to show off. He knew more about gods and goddesses than anyone else on the team.
But Tetya Shura ruthlessly interrupted Gryzlov’s exposition.
‘My own favourite, you know, is Ma’at,’ she said. ‘She’s the goddess of fairness, or what the Egyptians used to call “right order”. Before committing a dead person to his grave, the Egyptians used to extract his heart, still warm and soft as a peeled mango. It was weighed in a balance against Ma’at. If the heart weighed more than the goddess, the person could look forward to a blissful life after death; otherwise he was condemned forever to live in horror and misery.’
After Love Page 5