Gateway to India: Dreaming History

Whenever I recount the story of our meeting with Col X, my friends tell me that it is a figment of my imagination, a false memory deeply embedded in my mind that I nourished into being. My friend GVK in his Blog to Blog said that my account was “stranger than fiction”.

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 accompanied by smugglers as fellow travellers, befriended students and fellow scribes in Iran, crossed over in to Turkey watched by a wrathful Mount Ararat when we received our Manna from Heaven, were we dream-walking alien space in an alien time? Did we imagine all this including our quandary over our visit to Col X? GVK has a point.

Even if this was an imaginary encounter, I have a need to recount it, because Kafkaesque it may be, it is real to me. Also I believe that youth and blind risk taking go hand in hand. I believe that we called on Col. X eventually one morning without the knowledge of Arshad and Seema. First we had to pass the gauntlet of edgy soldiers posted on both ends of the street where the salubrious single storied house stood. I had a letter of introduction from a very senior journalist in my New Delhi newspaper to a Col. X. in Ankara. Our letter of introduction was closely examined by the two soldiers and their walkie talkies crackled to life. Finally our letter of introduction was handed back to us and we were allowed the visit. Col. X. seemed reflective but very pleased to have heard from his Indian friend. He knew that his present incarceration was a mere temporary nuisance, an inconvenience that would not last. He explained that he was a consul in the Turkish Embassy in New Delhi when he made his friendship with my journalist friend. We had strong Turkish coffee and ghee laden pastries filled with almonds and pistachios and pine nuts and ate and ate with open delight. We skirted politics and talked mostly about his time in New Delhi.

Finally, the time came to leave when both Subhash and I blurted out our need for a temporary loan because of our “circumstances”. Col. X. responded with remarkable sang froid. Surely, he said, it would be no problem to help out “friends of my friend... Pick up 50 dollars tomorrow from my daughter who works in down town Ankara.” he said with considerable kindness in his voice. Subash and I stepped out in the street in full view of the two soldiers who seemed to be swirling slowly on their heels. We were sweating in the bright street of Ankara suburbia and raised our arms and clapped our hands to indicate victory. Subhash told me years later that he returned the loan on our behalf once he was earning in the UK. Recalling this “imaginary” event, I still get goose bumps on the back of my face and neck.

Seema, our host drove us around Ankara – a thoroughly modern bustling city - in her yellow Volkswagen Beetle which drew a lot of attention wherever we went. We visited the University where she taught, met her colleagues and were made aware of the intellectually bohemian atmosphere which prevailed in 1964. Ankara, we felt, could be in Europe and you could not tell the difference. Arshad and Seema in spite of their high ranking jobs and the social class they belonged to, were down to earth, kind and non judgemental. Finally, we bade good bye and Seema drove us, our battered bags and all, smelling clean in laundered clothes with a full breakfast in our stomachs to the highway that would take us to Istanbul. We never saw them or heard from them again, and looking down the telescope of time, I wonder where they are ..

The smells and sights of western Turkey give you intimations of Europe to come. You glimpse vistas of its towns nestling on hill tops, basking in the sun, sheltering Mediterranean shrubs and trees and herbs with their intoxicating scents. We saw the miraculous spectacle of skeins of white geese flying West in vast formations. They were headed the same way as us.

Once a capital of the Eastern Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul straddles the Orient and the Occident. The waters of the Great Bosphorus, shiny and blue and black and deep, full of hooting tugs and launches and ships and power boats exude the energy of commerce and of ordinary human life. Evenings, locals occupy a vantage point on the grassy knoll overlooking the Bosphorus, their picnic baskets laden with sweet pastries, lying on their sides with their heads supported by a cantilevered arm, just dreaming the history of a Constantinople brimming with treasures.

We spent our days loitering in the shadows of great Greco-Roman and Ottoman monuments: names roll off the tongue, Hagia Sophia, (the Church of) Holy Wisdom, now a museum with its unreachable firmament of a roof, Topkapi Palace, the ancient Hippodrome. We circled and circled Ahmet III Fountain that stands at the entrance to Topkapi Palace. We walked under the Aqueduct, the Galata Tower, Rumeli Hisari, the European Fortress. For us it was history with a face but we knew not its stories.......

Often at night we had to wait for a bed at the youth hostel which would not take non members until the last moment. I recall both of us at its doors sitting on our respective suitcases, in the hope of a bunk bed for the night. Our foray into the University in search of students to provide company and play host to us just did not work out in Istanbul. Fortunately we had a little money and slept in a hostel, where in the morning one had to shave in a mirror less bathroom looking at one’s silhouetted reflection in the frosted window panes. Istanbul might be heaving with treasures, and its souks with lusty food stalls and oriental silks, but we had had enough of it. We yearned for a Europe, clean and free of bazaars and souks, but egalitarian, democratic, welcoming. Greece, the land of Aristotle, Plato and Socrates was waiting for us. This was also the land where democracy was formulated in its senates and the teaching agorae of great philosophers. “We will be in Europe at last”. So we crossed the Bosphorus and headed for the border with a yearning in our hearts for a Europe we had travelled thousands of miles to see. Seeing Topkapi Palace recede was a huge burden off our chest.

We had no inkling that our visas to Greece meant little to the border immigration officers. The Greece we arrived in was not a democracy. But Greece, we remembered, was ruled by a paranoid military regime. How welcoming are such regimes to down and out travelling journalists?

Cold and cavalier and unfriendly, the immigration officers held us in a windowless room for hours whilst phone calls were made to Athens with frequent double syllable threats (Go back.. you go back) that we would be turned back to Turkey. Agitated and thirsty and sweating, we awaited our uncertain fate and prayed .....