A Bohemian Interlude

GVK,

It seems our Blog2Blog has somehow turned in to a monologue from me, and the counterpoint like a shruti that we provided each other seems to have gone silent. Maybe you will chime in again, as I am describing a Yugoslavia that was part of Nehru’s Pancha Shila ideals of non-aligned countries being able to assert their views on a world run largely by neo colonialists. What is your take on these years?


Let me recap: when my journey began, and as we walked across No Man’s Land at Wagha border, took a two day train across a barren mountainscape to Iran, with smugglers as fellow travellers, befriended students and fellow scribes in Iran, crossed over in to Turkey, watched a wrathful Mount Ararat when we received our Manna from Heaven, did we imagine all of these “stranger than fiction” events? Did we really face a Hobson's Choice in Turkey? Do historical monuments which seem so timeless Dream History ?


Having left Turkey behind, anxious to touch European soil, we were once again in the no man’s land of a Greek Customs and Immigration building, held in a windowless room with cold walls, just a bare table with a few painfully uncomfortable chairs. It seemed to us that Athens was twitchy about journalists arriving on their borders, especially from a geopolitically inconsequential country like India. We felt like a couple of Konrad Lorenz’s zoological specimens whose fate was being discussed within our earshot. Finally there seemed to be a decision. We would be given laissez-passer through Greece as long as we promised not to stop anywhere except to change from one bus or coach to another, primarily undertake not to go down to Athens at all but bypass it.


Exhilarated, we were back on the road again and were greeted with a few rousing Eurekas from a collection of truck drivers who were standing around in their khaki uniforms with company name badges, and rolling cigarettes or just kicking dust and chatting. Some of them offered to take us as far as they went and promised to find us further transport. Their halting English was good enough to engage in male banter with frequent references to Greek women as being the most beautiful in the world. One had to agree with the well travelled drivers of such behemoth vehicles. Greek women we caught glimpses of from our cradle seats in the drivers cabin were indeed doe eyed, alabaster skinned, swingingly buxom as they sauntered slowly but fully aware of the effect they had on men surveying them with their predatory eyes. I dreamt of being a European citizen, being in love with such a sensuous Greek beauty.


As if viewing a magic lantern story page we passed cities like Alexandropolis and Thesalonika. We had sudden glimpses of monasterial towns drowsing on a quiet perch off the Aegean sea, caught for ever in flowing sunlight. At dusk, home lights of a new town would appear as we descended, and the drivers would break out in a nomadic gypsy song and shout eurekas. We would join in with clapping hands held above our heads, singing our own instant non-Homeric odes.


I do not recall how many days it took us to cross Greece, but it was finally time to exit this mythical land of Cavafy, Seferis, of Kazantzakis, and Zorba the Greek and of course the Homeric Odes. Yugoslavia beckoned, with the expectation of meeting some of our old Delhi friends who were studying modern Art at a Belgrade Art school as part of an exchange program between India and Yugoslavia. We had heard that in spite of Communist rule and forced frugality due to shortages, students lived a Bohemian life, casual and louche, sitting for hours at bars watching the world go by. Money was in short supply and forced the students to eat horse meat stew as a staple, washed down with cheap beer and strong Arak.

Crossing over to Yugoslavia we saw a sea change in attitude. Yugoslav immigration officers smiled and warmed up to us when they saw our Indian passports: India and Yugoslavia were part of a union of non-aligned nations with the five edicts of Panch Sila
1. Mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty
2. Mutual non-aggression
3. Mutual non-interference in domestic affairs
4. Equality and mutual benefit
5. Peaceful co-existence

that we learned at school. The “neutralist magic” of these bonded several countries in to a make believe union of minds and hearts.

“Tito Nehru Bhai Bhai” they declared and then realising Nehru had died very recently apologised and hugged us as at a funeral. One of the officers broke rank and started to sing an Indian film song whilst others clapped and turned on their heels. Names of Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor, Nargis were repeated like a mnemonic rune. We had coffee and sweet biscuits and even a surreptitious offer of a Vodka. We were given a much thumbed map of Yugoslavia, given advice in dos and don’ts, mostly by ambidextrous sign language.

Our next stop was Skopje which will always be remembered for the big 1963 earth quake and the thousands who died. This monumental quake had unpicked the masonry of its ancient stone buildings. Blocks and blocks of stone lay strewn where they had fallen. We decided to make a stop to pay our respects to the living and the dead. We made our way to what looked like a well patronised cafe with crowded tables outside in the midst of an olive grove. As soon as we sat down, we were approached first shyly and then with increasing boldness by farm labourers whose faces lit up at the mention of India. Once again there was this routine of conveying of their condolences at Nehru’s passing, and then the zest for life expressed through singing Indian film songs from Awara and Char Saubis.

Yugoslavia was a country with a big heart. Ordinary citizens we met all looked alike, broad shouldered Slavic frames with big grizzled sunburnt faces, Moslems, Croats or Serbs. Islam came to Yugoslavia with the Ottoman conquests. They sat and ate together, Moslems judiciously avoiding alcohol and pork meat whilst sitting next to each other in cafes. They even intermarried. The ethnic cleansing tragedy that engulfed Yugoslavia was still in the distant future.

We soon discovered that we could not refuse the hospitality of these simple folk which consisted of plates and plates of charcuterie (sliced salami sausages), fried eggs fortified by Arak, pale white in tall chipped glasses which kept getting re-filled to a chorus of encouraging clapping from even those who had not joined our table. We were the centre of attention. My last memory of this occasion was of my collapsing under a tree in slow motion, gurgling like a child, throwing up some of the breakfast, seeing the face of our unshaven host close up as he wiped my mouth with what seemed like a dirty wad of a handkerchief. I had not been able to stand up to the 90% proof Raki meant for stronger stomachs........

What saved the day was Subhash’s trouper like presence of mind , and his greater strength and ability to absorb and hold his liquor. It was time to go back to the highway, he whispered as he pulled me up from my bed of leaves, hauled up by my armpits. He half dragged both our mighty suitcases and me at the same time. Shoulders hunched at half a trot, carrying both our luggage, he helped me make our way back to the highway. This will always remain in my memory as a miracle. I began to address my travelling companion as St. Subhash, the Saviour, much to his embarrassment. Last thing I remember is collapsing in the back seat of a two door sports car with Subhash none the worse for all the drinking, engaged in convivial chat with the driver as we sped down the black ribbon motorway towards Belgrade.

We were planning on staying with my Delhi artist friend Rajendra Dhawan (R.K.Dhawan) in his small one bedroom flat trying to evade the watchful eyes of the landlady who lived downstairs with her mouse like henpecked husband. She exercised her power by doing Gestapo style inspections of the property daily at unexpected hours of day or night, apartment by apartment, as if looking for girlfriends smuggled in for a bacchanalia the previous night, for any signs of transgressing the law that she laid out. Dhawan and his friends had unkind things to say about her, naturally, aggrieved by her conduct. We waited and waited in a street corner cafe for the coast to be clear and the landlady’s lights in the downstairs window to be switched off before smuggling ourselves in, shoes in our hands, past her front door where her caged canary would often detect us and start squealing a high pitched disapproving alert. Out would come our harridan in her satin silk dressing gown, sharp tongued, threatening to call the police for infringing the law of her country. One night things went a bit too far and ended in a rather amusing slanging match between Dhawan and the landlady. If my memory serves me right, this is how it went..

Landlady: Kucha Mina, kucha Mina (emphatic gesture with her forefinger pointing to the floor (it meant: “House Mine, House Mine”)

Dhawan: in Serbocroat: “Not your house, not your house.. Tito Mina, Tito Mina – Tito’s house, Tito’s house”.

As a matter of fact there was little or no private ownership and in a sense all property belonged to Tito as the chief key holder of the State. This taunting declaration by Dhawan had the most miraculous effect on the landlady. She cowered as if struck in the face, and simply withdrew to her room, never to trouble us again. We came and went as we pleased. The landlady’s husband who was always pretending to be watering the plants in his window box dressed in his singlet, sporting scrawny tattooed arms seemed peevishly pleased with the outcome and grinned at us with his tobacco blackened teeth, flashing a gold crown.

Belgrade was a truly beautiful city, with its great squares bearing the names of its socialist “heroes of the revolution”, its gardens and its Turkish fortress perched at the top of a gentle incline. From this panoramic vantage point you could watch the Danube and the Sava spreading their glittering arms around the girth of the city. Belgrade seemed it had been there for a thousand years. One night, back from a trudge around the War Memorial cemetery, we sat in the gardens and watched the lights come on in new Belgrade like the distant arm of an asteroid belt, soft as silk in the glowing summer heat. You felt you could reach out and almost touch it.

We mused how we had spent almost all of our cache of dollars, so bravely borrowed from Col X in Ankara, by being generous in buying rounds of drinks for old friends and new acquaintances. Spending a reserve of money so recklessly without a thought for tomorrow is a characteristic that marked most of my financial conduct for several years of my youth.

We had made ourselves at home in Belgrade and we were reluctant to tear away from such an agreeable life. If only we could capture ourselves in a freeze frame of time, our week in Belgrade would be a prime candidate for nostalgia. Dhawan himself had a modest bursary which he had overspent and it was time for us to to move on. We bade good bye to a collection of friends and boarded our bus to Zagreb in Croatia on our way eventually in to Italy.

We did not for a second think that we would be without shelter and little food, other than an old loaf of bread and that we would turned out of the grand Railway station and be forced to spend the hot sultry night dipping our feet in the cool waters of the Rialto canal in Venice, whilst the Italian world would be feeding its gargantuan appetite at the familial dinner tables of Venetian restaurants all around us.

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