Aksyonov was a big favorite of my mother’s, mainly I suspect because I was a big favorite of his. He was uncomplicated and full of spontaneity.
He thought of me as his daughter, often addressing me lovingly as “Dochen’ka”,
an affectionate rendering of the word for daughter in Russian.
No knowledge, therefore no self-doubt
When Akysonov gave me my very first teaching job in 1969 at
the Institute of Oriental Languages at Moscow State University, he knew that I
was no Tamizh language specialist. He hired me to spend 3 teaching sessions
every week offering practice in spoken Tamizh for the one and only batch of
students specializing in that language.
These students were all in the fourth year of their 5 year study program
and I was at that time a third year student of Russian Philology.
I was no pedagogue. I
knew nothing about curricula, syllabi, teaching materials, and methodology when
I walked into the classroom to be introduced by Aksyonov. Thankfully for my
students, who were working towards their M.A. in Indology with Tamizh as their
main language, their professor for the formal linguistic and literary aspects
of this language was Mr. Soboliev, who had compiled a two volume, Tamil-Russian
and Russian-Tamil bi-lingual dictionary, and who worked at Moscow Radio, if
memory serves.
Did I have any hesitation or self-doubt about the assignment
or even an idea of the enormous responsilbilty Aksyonov had placed on me then,
I ask myself.
Ill-prepared as I was, I went forth, seldom preparing for a
class, picking up randomly for reading and class activity a journalistic piece
from a bound volume of newspaper clippings that served as the reading material
for the entire course. Other than the advantage I had of being a native of
speaker of Tamizh with some familiarity with its literature, I was in every way
less of a genuine student of that language than the group I was supposed to
teach.
I guess I provided a good break for the students from the other
demanding courses they were taking for
their degree. Most of the time we enjoyed ourselves talking about this and
that, my contribution limited mostly to building vocabulary besides providing
background information on elements of culture and tradition in context.
In return I reaped rich rewards, in material as well as non-material
terms.
First, there was a huge financial reward. I received 90
roubles monthly, the exact amount as my scholarship as a student at the Faculty
of Philology.
I got to make friends with senior students—my so-called
students—from a different section of the university. It is a matter of deep satisfaction and some
wonder that I am in regular touch with one of those people. Sasha Dubyanski and
I have met a few times in India in the last 10 years or so. Over the years, Sasha
has regularly greeted me on 8 Mach, International Women’s day. He is a renowned
scholar of ancient Tamizh, and has made significant contributions to Indology
and Tamil studies in his capacity as a professor at Moscow State University.
My first experience as a teacher, unworthy as I was to be
inducted at the extraordinary center of learning that Moscow State University
was, showed me where my future lay. From that time as a greenhorn in 1969, for
forty years I pursued teaching as my profession of choice.
At the Movies in Moscow
I discovered the movie theater within our imposing Moscow
State University building soon after moving to the dorm there on the 11th
floor. My friends and I saw many old and
new Soviet films there, although I couldn’t name even one now, sadly owing to
my lack of interest then in keeping a journal.
The films I do remember from those four years turn out to be
popular ones we saw at the movie theater Litva (the Russian word for
Lithuania), which was within walking distance of our dorms on Lomonosovsky
Prospekt. Tickets cost 50 kopeks, which
was entirely affordable, given that my monthly stipend was 90 roubles.
When I liked a movie, I returned to see it
several times, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. Vinay Shukla, a year my
junior, and I must have seen the Russian comedy “Brilliantovaya Ruka” (The
Diamond Arm) no less than three times. My roommates and I made a habit of
seeing the French romance “A Man and A Woman”—a marvelous chick-flick in today’s
parlance—almost weekly through its long
and successful run at the Litva.
That's Shukla and I on a cheery winter's day in Moscow. 1968 perhaps.
Raj Kapoor and V. Shantaram made a splash during those years
with their “Sangam” and “Geet Gaya Patharon Ne” respectively. Bulky men reeking
of cheap tobacco in their fur-lined jackets lined up evening after evening to
see Raj Kapoor lip-syncing to Mukesh’s doleful laments. During intervals, it wasn’t unusual to be
stopped by a middle-aged man to be quizzed about Raj Kapoor’s family and his
life-style as if I would know him like a neighbor. Everyone registered shock
when they learned that Raj Kapoor didn’t sing. That didn’t seem to affect the
lofty place he occupied in the adoring heart of the average Russian movie-goer.
There is a translation of “Awara hoon” in Russian, which I’ve heard plenty of
times at parties as things slide down to sing-alongs.
In the midst of such devotion to popular movies, thanks to
Sasha Dubyanskij, I became acquainted with a movie theater that showed select
international movie classics. Was that theater called “Yantar’” (meaning
“Amber”)? I saw “Twelve Angry Men” with Henry Fonda there for the first time,
with the soundtrack dubbed to perfection.
In fact, Russians did a fantastic job of dubbing the
soundtrack with popular films as well. You forgot that the actors weren’t
actually speaking exquisite Russian. What did they do with the song sequences
in Hindi films? I’d have to ask my friends from those days, I guess.
One movie-watching experience stands out—it was a screening
of Sunil Dutt’s “Yaadein”, shown to a small audience at the House of Friendship, at some
India-related event. It made an indelible impression on me, because the entire
soundtrack was rendered in Russian as a voice over in real time by my friend
Zagrebelniy, who spoke excellent Hindi and completely fluent English.
“The Fate of a Man”, “The Cranes are Flying”, “Battleship
Potyomkin”, “Brothers Karamazov”, “War and Peace”… it was certainly a movie
bonanza for me those years in Moscow.
Such was the pull of movies for me that I quickly joined a film club
when I went to Brown University after Moscow. I daresay that my listening
skills in Russian developed at a rapid pace thanks to all those evenings at the
movies.
Dorm Life
When I began my studies in Moscow, I had no vision, no
long-term plan, and definitely no awareness of the glorious history of the
university I had entered. Things had
come my way too easily. As time went by,
I learned that every one of my three room-mates and my other friends at the
university had faced tough competition to find a place at the Philology Faculty,
having excelled at high school and then passed a difficult entrance
examination.
Interestingly also, my room-mates were all from different regions
and republics of the far-flung Soviet Union. One was from Kaluga, another was
from Tambov, and the third from near Tula. Someone who became a close friend
and a room-mate in my second year was from Ryazan. The very first Russian girl I
met on arrival for my initial temporary stay was from near the Urals. I was
fascinated that she knew of people who lived in Asia and went to work in Europe
every day.
I didn’t meet anyone from Moscow, perhaps because those
students lived at home. Living space was extremely tight in Moscow those days,
and I know for a fact that our dorms at Moscow State University were among the
best appointed and best maintained.
We lived in co-ed dorms. That was a big surprise but I got
used to it pretty quickly. We were four girls to a room, each with her steel
bed, 2 wardrobes for the 4 of us, individual study tables and bed side stands
with a reading lamp. There was a speaker in every room that broadcast Radio
Moscow in Russian all day long.
While many people found that speaker intrusive, I liked it.
I loved to hear the Soviet national anthem, the Kremlin bells, and feature
shows. Of course you absolutely needed it for the weather report. Beautiful classical music as well as sprightly
folk music came out of the ungainly little box on the wall.
Living in a dorm required all residents to contribute to its
upkeep. Following a roster, every room was assigned cleaning duties by
circulation. We cleaned the bathrooms, kitchens including the sinks and stoves,
and the length of the corridor on our floor. Cleaning duty allowed a few hours
of leeway to get to our classes. There was a student committee that came around
to check the cleanliness and orderliness of the rooms as well and awarded grades
that were posted on the notice-board.
For me all this was absolutely unfamiliar. At home in India,
cleaning was the work of the hired help. At the hostel in Hyderabad, at Osmania
University, there was kitchen staff, cleaning staff, a visiting dhobi to iron
clothes and whatnot. From that to doing your own cleaning of the dorm floor
should have been a jolt but it wasn’t, mainly because my room-mates were great. Where they could, they helped me, and together
we cheerfully cut corners like everyone else, getting away with the minimum
possible work. We also got smarter and found ways to avoid having duty days following
big holidays or on Mondays—kitchens were a disaster area on those days.
The oddest thing for me were the shower rooms. In my first dorm where I lived for two years,
all the shower rooms were located on the ground floor. Boys had their own rooms
and the girls theirs, of course. You had to go down at specific hours when a
shower room would be open, and have your shower in one of the many cubicles. Girls
in our dorm made it a communal activity. A whole group would set off together. Once
there, everyone stripped down casually. I couldn’t believe the loud chatter and
all the bonhomie as steam built up and the noise of jets of water drowned
conversation. My discomfort and the way I tried to hide from view just didn’t
make sense to my room-mates, for whom a shower at night was a
high-point.
“May the steam be light!” they’d wish each other, using a
traditional greeting before one got into the shower. I am from a culture where even “thank you”
doesn’t exist as phrase in my mother-tongue. Naturally, such ritual greetings made
an impression.
Thankfully for me, the 11
th floor room in the
main university building to which we moved in our 3
rd year had its
own attached private shower. What a relief.
Where’s the dining hall?
But for my classmate Raman , I don’t know how I would have
found anything to eat on the day I arrived in Moscow. His initiative introduced
me to the café across the motorway from our dorm, where I could get a fragrant
bread roll and a glass of delicious milk.
In India, student hostels nearly always provide all the main
meals for a fee. It doesn’t work that way in Moscow. Students eat at cafeterias
and dining halls spread around the campus. On every street with shops one would
find a little standing-room only café for milk and bread rolls. Public dining
halls hid in basements on streets set a little away from main thoroughfares. Here you could get a dish of soup and a main course with a cup of tea and
a few hearty chunks of black bread
As a result, when we lived in the Lomonosovsky Prospekt dorm,
we used the kitchen on our floor regularly. My room-mates couldn’t have afforded
to eat all their meals in the student dining hall on their 30 rouble stipend.
Besides, on cold winter evenings, one hardly wanted to pull on shoes, put on
heavy coats and step out in the frost to stand in line for unpredictable fare.
Having never cooked a meal until then, I ended up depending
on my room-mates for my food. We had a kitty and shared the shopping expenses.
Our supper consisted generally of boiled potatoes, some cucumber or tomato in
brine, bread, butter, cheese, and tea with fruit preserve. The last was
home-made, as Russian parents supplied generous jars of strawberry and cherry
preserve that they prepared and stored in the summer for the long cold months.
My Indian classmates were all boys, several of whom
were pretty good cooks. I learned to make dal and fry vegetables when we ate
together. As we were all on the same floor , we got together frequently.
I tended to do the dishes for the guys, who spent serious amounts of time
fixing lip-smacking dishes cooked in butter, which was plentiful in Moscow. Kitchens were an experience in international
cuisine with aromas of Vietnamese stir fries permeating the steam rising from
Hungarian goulashes. Things changed when
we moved to the main university building’s dorms, where walking through the
nicely heated corridors and wide halls to a cafeteria was no big deal.
I was a vegetarian when I arrived in Moscow. I had no plans
to change that because I felt that I couldn’t bring myself to put a piece of
meat in my mouth. Such was the powerful influence of a home tradition where, to
my knowledge, no one in our very large circle of extended family and friends
ever ate meat.
My father had tried from time to time to get us children to eat eggs but with his and my mother’s face
registering barely concealed aversion to the smell of cooking eggs, it
wasn’t possible for us to keep down the oozy yellow stuff that tasted of
nothing and offered nothing to chew.
Getting used to eating eggs was major
breakthrough in my first year in Moscow, and that made eating much more of a
social experience for me. I have Mrs. Iyer to thank for that useful training—she
didn’t eat eggs herself, though. She was a kind and soft-spoken home-maker, wife
of an IAF officer, who was posted at the Indian Embassy, and whose hospitality
I enjoyed through my student years.
Did I ever begin to eat meat?
Hot meals
Russians are particular about eating a hearty bowl of hot soup
with black bread for the main meal, called dinner (ob'ed) in the afternoon. The regularly featured
soups on a menu are cabbage soup, beet soup, the Georgian “kharcho”, and occasional
clear broth served with a piping hot stuffed pastry.
All broth and stock were meat-based in my time, and
therefore not of any use to me. Every day
my room-mates would ask if I had eaten the first course and every day I’d say
that I couldn’t. So, essentially,
through nearly my entire first two years in Moscow, I ate cold food in the day
and hot meals at supper, which is not the custom if you are a Russian raised in
a Russian home.
Once I began to eat eggs, a few things changed, as I said. There
used to be a dish in the dining halls called “entrecote with fried egg”—a piece
of meat that looked pan-fried with a bright oozy egg on top, with hot mashed
potato on the side. I would pay for this dish and request the person behind the
food counter to give me “entrecote without meat.” It is a bit like saying “I’d
like a masala dosa without the dosa," but more bewildering because the choice meat is the point of this dish. Every
single time, by making this request, I slowed down the line behind me, because
none of the aproned and buxom ladies who filled the order could quite
understand what fool would pay for delectable and expensive meat only to discard it in favour of the garnish.
Sometimes the student dining hall would have carrot cutlets,
a dish that was Lenin’s metaphor to ridicule Tolstoy’s vegetarianism. And once
in a great while, they’d serve bliny with sour cream. What a joy it used to be
to tuck in on those lucky days.
I can’t remember exactly when, but one day in early spring
of my second year in Moscow, a monumental case of the blues descended on me,
overlaid by hunger. I was alone. I remember walking into the cafeteria in the basement of the
humanities building and ordering a main course of schnitzel,
a meat cutlet with a dodgy looking brownish sauce.
The meal was hot, it came with some buttered vegetables. I ate
it, and never stopped to wonder from what animal the meat had come. Once I got
past a core principle of being a vegetarian, I saw no reason to separate one
four-legged beast from another. Two-legged creatures were easier still. The finned ones
somehow didn’t appear palatable for whatever reason, and I have regretted that I
didn’t have someone like Mrs. Iyer to introduce me gently to include the right
sort of animal protein in my diet.
However rational I tried then to be about not differentiating between
types of meat, there are things I still can’t imagine eating. One was a typical
Viking dish offered to me by a most hospitable and loving elderly couple in
Norway, who had gone to a lot of trouble to make blood pudding with rice and
sugar, as they proudly described it. At which point I nearly gagged. Another
time, at a stylish French restaurant in Togo, Mohan, Kartik, and I went out to
dinner with friends who ordered frogs’ legs.
Nope, not for me… I saved the lettuce leaves from my salad to hide what
they lovingly placed on my plate.
I am by preference vegetarian, but for a variety of reasons, I am glad I was able to give up
my prejudice about eating meat—I say "prejudice" because my vegetarianism was not a matter of
belief but only upbringing—when doing so was good for my health.
I have never described this episode to anyone in my immediate family. Talking about
meat-eating in a direct way can offend people whose vegetarian tradition goes
back generations.
Big Brother Watched Me
I should have known that with excellent training in Russian
in the USSR followed by graduate school in the US, I would have a dossier in a
special agency here and there.
People kept a tab on me pretty early on, as I found out in
1968, when I went to visit my friend Nadya and her parents in Ryazan to spend
my winter break with them.
It wasn’t straightforward or easy to go anywhere in the
Soviet Union, as you needed an exit permit to leave Moscow. As it happened, I
had originally applied for a permit to go to Tambov, a historic city, where
Vera, another room-mate and her family lived. I was refused permission with a
bland statement delivered orally that Tambov was a “closed” city.
Nadya swiftly came to the rescue and offered to have me over
with her in Ryazan. I once again lined up in front of the small and mysterious
window of the Passport Desk in a basement of one of the many towers of the
Moscow State University building.
This time my permit came through quickly and it was fun to
travel by a warm and fast train to Ryazan, taking off from—if memory serves—Kazanskiy Vokzal, the platform of which was frosty and
dark, crystalline snow under my feet, the approaching train full of the promise
of adventure.
Passengers typically looked rustic in shubas and valenkis,
weighed down by capacious bags packed with things one could buy only in Moscow.
People came in droves from the provinces daily to fill their food cupboards
with farm and factory produce, so plentiful in Moscow shops.
How I enjoyed the break at Nadya’s is for another time of
story-telling. When I think about the winter nights there in quiet Ryazan, the
tender and overflowing hospitality of her family and friends, the beauty of the
warm and cozy homes in monotonous apartment blocks, I travel into a time of
unending magical sweetness. To live to
remember such times.
But the anecdote that stands at the center of my Ryazan
journal defines the strange ways of soviet surveillance.
A couple of days into my stay in Ryazan, one morning Nadya
and I were awakened by the local militia knocking on the door. Nadya’s parents
were at work and we were having a lazy morning in bed. Two officials, a male
and a female wanted me to go to the local militia station immediately. Nadya
was outraged but I don’t recall imagining Siberia. I was quite ready to be
hauled off, the ignorant person I was.
It all worked out in the end, but marching in the company of
uniform-clad officials through the wide streets of Ryazan to the magnificent
building where Big Brother--of the three letter fame -- interrogated little people invited comments from
passers-by. To at least one local white Russian, my long dark braid and tanned
skin suggested a wayward gypsy girl who surely belonged under the wings of the
law.
Nadya had to remain outside the building, at the foot of the
imposing wide steps that led to a tall and wide closed door of solid wood,
through which you entered to face another door. In through that to a magnificent
lobby with a staircase circling to an upper floor.
A woman officer checked through my papers and told me that I
should have reported to her upon arrival. No one told me I had to, I said,
truthfully. She knew that, she said because “they” wanted to see if I was going
to sneak off to Tambov on my Ryazan permit. “Oh, I didn’t know I could have
done that,” I said instinctively, and the officer wagged her finger and made a
mock chiding face.
Then followed a chatty few minutes with pleasantries, hearty
compliments on my spoken Russian, and – maybe I am making this up – a question about
why we didn’t eat cows in India. Dossier tied with string, smiles and
handshakes done, I left.
The young militia man in khaki with trousers tucked into
tall boots walked me to the double door at the entrance. He shuffled hesitantly
as I said goodbye, and asked if I had any Indian postage stamps for his
collection. This I am not making up.
Across the Atlantic, another agency, also known by three letters,
sought me out when I was a student at Brown, and made me an offer…
Education as Einstein Said...
Our
first day of lessons in Moscow consisted of a Placement Test, as I now
recognize it. A familiar and gentle face greeted us at the hallowed old
high-ceilinged rooms of the old university building in Manezhnaya Ploschad'. I
hadn't expected to see Galina Ivanaovna Rozhkova on that day--I knew her from
Delhi at our Institute, when she used to teach Group No. 1.
Galina
Ivanovna was a small woman, who wore her long hair in a braid that she wound
into a teacherly but not severe chignon at the nape of her neck. Like Andrei
Bolkonsky's wife in Tolstoy's description, Galina Ivanova also had a noticeable
dainty light-coloured fuzz on her upper lip, an endearing individual marker I
can never forget. In fact, when I read Princess Liza's description, it was
Galina Ivanova's face that would come into my mind's eye, like a portrait seen
on a gallery wall of a woman of another age, of exquisite poise. She wore long
skirts and very sensible shoes. She wore a quiet small smile at all times and
spoke in the gentlest of measured Leningrad tones. She grew up in the spirit of the Bolshevik Revolution,
having survived the siege of Leningrad, a time when she had to learn her
writing lessons on old newspaper sheets for writing paper.
When
I completed my writing assignment, she told me that long sentences with
subordinate clauses connecting branching
thoughts were a hindrance; that even Tolstoy had fallen prey to the occasional
incomplete sentence or a construction that didn't meet the grammarian's
rigour. It has taken me ages to write uncluttered sentences. I guess I didn't pay heed to what she said as I did my writing
exercises then, but what she said hasn't faded.
I
was assigned to Natalya Semyonovna Filimonova's group. We were a small group in
her class. We read a variety of Russian stories and poems in the original for
her lessons. Paustovsky was a huge favourite of hers. We read Pushkin's
"Queen of Spades", all of Lermontov's "A hero of our
Times", and the odd Soviet work by Sholokhov, and Chingiz Aitmatov in
translation. We memorized verses, and I recall whole poems and sometimes just
stanzas, the words now shining with regal splendor like the stars in the
distant sky, each in its own fixed place for eternity.
Our
Russian language lessons were in the nature of foundation courses, designed for
international students with varying degrees of language skills. Alongside
these classes which were most comfortable and where our teacher gave us
enviable individual attention, we also attended general lectures on disciplines
that made up the curriculum. Over the five-year program, there was a series of courses on the History of
Russian Literature that began with Russian Folklore and ended with Contemporary
Soviet Literature; there was Linguistics, presented not historically but by
component—phonetics, morphology, lexicology, and syntax; in addition we
attended lectures on the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,
Historical and Dialectical Materialism, Logic, and Scientific Atheism. If
memory serves, we managed to get exemption from Logic and Scientific Atheism,
both of which were challenging to absorb through lectures delivered by very
senior professors in halls that could seat over a hundred. These lectures were meant for students who had been probably at the top of their classes in every region of the Soviet Union, gifted in intelligence and diligent to boot.
Russian students busily wrote down notes—these notes were the result of skills
they had acquired through systematic training at high school. I, on the other
hand, had no such training, and what I jotted down were scribbles that
degenerated into doodles.
Digression...
I keep returning to my first days in Moscow.
The Foreign Students’ Department of the university organized
a day to equip all new arrivals with winter supplies. Off we went to GUM (gosudarstvenniy universalniy magazin—state-owned, needless to say), the three-storey department
store where the milling crowds were thicker than at Dadar Station in Mumbai.
We
were given instructions with a sheet of paper sanctioning the purchase of a set
of winter garments to be paid for by the university. I bought winter boots—black,
calf-length, and unfortunately with raised heels (not easy or safe for someone
who had never walked on snow before), a heavy, ugly, padded, brown and dark
yellow coat with a fake brown fur collar, an equally ugly white fake fur cap
(which I had the good sense never to wear), a
much-beloved and well-used blue and red polo neck sweater (it survives
to this day—I saw it recently in my niece’s house in Vermont: good place for it
to retire), a real wool yellow scarf (I think I have kept this one thing for myself
in a case full of woolens seldom used in India), and mittens.
Entering the right stalls and trying on things for size made
my head spin, I remember. Everybody shouts in those stores: the sales-persons
as well as the customers. A huge percentage of the people shopping those days
were day-visitors in Moscow, on their pilgrimage to GUM and then on to line up
to buy fresh fruit on the pavements, where large women in well-padded jackets,
swathed in soft grey woolen scarves sat on crates with their day’s sales guaranteed.
Even the mangled runty orange at the bottom of the heap would be bought, when
one was lucky enough to see that fruit from heaven in wintry Moscow.
One day I remember
lining up to buy bananas—bananas!—and looking on with my jaw down to my knees
as the saleswoman cut up one fruit and add it to the lot in her weighing tray to
make up a kilo that I was going to buy. You never sold a cut a banana where I
came from, you just didn’t. Odd memories of inconsequential events.
The university provided more. Every three years we got a
small allowance to go out and refresh our wardrobe. By the third year, I was
savvy enough to buy exactly what I wanted, and one of those cherished things
was a men’s Russian fur hat (real fur this time), which it was a fashion for young
women with chutzpah to perch on their heads. If I ever get around to adding
photos to this blog, I shall include what I have remaining of these Moscow
goodies.
Oh, and I have to this day managed to keep a bath towel from my 1967
purchases in preparation for my Moscow trip: my dad bought me two DCM Turkish towels,
same motif, subtly different colours. One has survived, now doing service as a
handy mopping cloth.
We were also directed to go to a textbook library to collect
our course books. I had no idea that such a system existed anywhere in the
world. I returned to the dorm from the textbook library with a stack of books
that I couldn’t have read in ten years, with the level of preparation I had in
Russian then. If memory serves, beyond
the first year, I didn’t bother with the textbook library, having discovered
that the regular university library had plenty of copies of newer editions of
books.
Book stores were great, too. And the best was to walk by a temporary
stall on a busy street and find stacks of hard-bound copies of, say,
Introduction to Russian Phonology and
Phonetics, or
Russian Folklore—An Anthology
with commentary. These highly erudite books in Russianwith their own detailed
introduction, index, bibliography, and perfectly ordered chapters, written by
scholars and published by reputable academic publishers were entirely affordable.
Escape routes
When I was about 7, and we moved to Delhi, our parents hired
Mr. Oberoi to get my two siblings and me up to speed in Hindi before the school
session began. We had evening lessons,
after Oberoi masterji’s work day was done at his government job. He nicknamed
me “kamchor”— a modest play on my name (meaning "truant") based in fact, as I seldom did my homework for him. Pretty early in life, I figured out ways to
get out of doing school-related things that I didn’t like, and unlike the
handsome and soft-spoken but clever Oberoi masterji, not many people caught me out.
Had I remained at Osmania University and attempted to
complete the degree in Maths, Physics and Statistics, I would have been on top
of our family’s hall of shame list—that’s how much I neglected my studies in
the main subjects I had chosen. My escape came in the form of Russian, of
course, which I loved.
At Moscow the curriculum included Phys Ed (fizcultura). Swimming, skating, and
other skill-based activities followed in a structured routine—or so I heard—enough to summon my inner Houdini. I found a way to fall through
the cracks of the system and completed 4 years of university without ever
actually passing a Phys Ed test.
I also managed never to complete the list of medical exams
required by the Polyclinic at the university. In the first week of our arrival,
we were herded for our medicals. A female nurse took me into the consulting room, where I had to wait, wearing pretty close
to nothing as per regulations. Embarrassing and weird. After that first time, I returned may be once
to see a doctor, for a throat congestion, and that time also I had to strip down. As he was writing a
prescription (purple ink, coarse brownish paper), he looked up and observed the
heavy acne on my cheeks, forehead, and perhaps chin, too. “Ah,” he said in a kindly
manner, “we have spoiled our skin
somewhat, haven’t we?” Then he looked through my records and drew my attention
to something I had failed to do. “You need to bring in your stool and urine
samples,” he said. “Your records aren’t complete from your first visit.” He
pulled out another piece of coarse brownish paper and scratched out a note in purple ink for the lab.
I never went back to the polyclinic.
So, while I have a fine degree from Moscow State University,
my records there aren’t complete. My Phys Ed never took off, because I chose to
simply skip the lessons. In my final year, I remember, someone in the Dean’s
office woke up to my truancy, but it was too late, I guess, for the system to
recover lost ground.
Yet, paradoxically, I learned the joys of morning exercises
and jogging in Moscow. How it began I couldn’t tell, but when I was living in
the main building, I used to be the only person on my floor to go out at 6
a.m. for a brisk walk or a jog to the railings from where you could see
the Moscow River and the top of Lenin Stadium. Winter mornings particularly
attracted me. I didn’t have proper shoes or other accessories and
clothing people deem essential these days for exercising, but that didn’t stop
my enthusiasm for the open air on frosty mornings with the promise of bright
sunshine for the day ahead.
Returning after the jog was even more fun. I remember that I
used to be among the very first in line at the cafeteria to pick up a steaming
cup of cocoa. The dining hall with its high ceiling and large tables would be
empty, the clatter of pots in the distant recesses of the kitchen signaling breakfast
preparations. The serving staff at the counter would be lively and fresh in
their crisp white uniforms, the men large and jowly, the women round-cheeked
with curls escaping from under their caps.
That ritual of stepping out into the open space of Lenin
Hills got me comfortably accustomed to Moscow winters by the time was into my
third year of studies there. So much so, that when I went to Rhode Island
for my graduate studies, I might have been one of the few Indians there to
welcome the onset of the cold weather.