CONVERSATIONS IN A CAR I
Ashok Niyogi
Early November.
After the first snow,
Except for the evergreens
Trees are deciduous,
Skeletons throwing shadows in pale sunlight.
Nights are luminous
Because of the reflections of halogens and strobes
Against low clouds
That promise more snow.
Blades of grass
Between cracks in the concrete on the tarmac
At Sheremetyevo Adin
Are already withered away.
Snowploughs are at work
Days are short and dark.
Life is stark naked.
Airplane landing lights are bright
As they come down through the cloud cover
In the arctic wind
That freezes your ears and drills your bones.
Moscow is magic;
The trees, like Hamlet, unclothed.
Life is stark naked.
From the airplane window
You see endless meadows of snow
Unploughed, virgin, fresh,
Polluted sometimes by a small dacha here or there;
Windows boarded, fences in need of repair.
And then the wheels land,
The exhausts of the jets throw up a storm of snow.
Airplane hostesses hand out overcoats,
Mufflers, mittens and caps:
Armour before you go to war.
A signalman in swathes of clothes
Waves signal lights to guide you
Into your parking lot.
Your suitcase when it comes out
Off the tractor on to the belt
Is frozen.
Maybe it is different now.
But when I was there
Sheremetyevo Adin was always choc-a-bloc.
Whole families in tracksuits and sneakers,
Businessmen in camel hair overcoats,
Babushkas with their golden and silver teeth,
Devushkas in short skirts with expectations
To keep in the body heat,
The taxi-driver Mafia
To catch the aware unawares,
With the flakes coming down outside
Mixed with the sleet and the arctic wind.
You hardly have a choice
Unless like me
You have a driver with a Volga,
A big wooden driver wishing you good evening
Dobre Vechar”.
You negotiate your way to the parking lot
Head down, turned against the wind.
You have to step through spittle and cigarette butts
In dirty snow
Until you reach your car.
And then you thump your boots
Because otherwise the car heater
Will generate puddles beneath your feet.
You have to uncap and unmitten yourself,
Take out the mobile and talk to Singapore
And to India and to the bank
And then the day is done.
You lie back in the warmth of the car
To the tunes of Anna someone or the other
From Sheremetyevo Adin to Leninsky or even Mytnaya
Is a long, long drive
Made longer because of pit-stops
For cigarettes, bottles of vodka and mineral water.
But the driver never complains.
And of course neither do I
Because the winter evening Moscow sky
Is something which words cannot explain
As lights are turned on and Tverskaya comes afire
Against the driven snow on your windshield.
It is all so fairy-tale, so unreal,
Made even more unreal
By the pit stops at which I imbibe.
An occasional pedestrian crouched against the wind
Walking into the nearest metro
May bring me back to reality.
But then I always look the other way,
To-morrow it will be another day
And in Moscow, you live for today.
Because days are constructed
With snow-flakes that melt
And time is absolutely impartial.
The days get shorter and the nights longer
And Moscow comes to life blanketed by snow.
There are no flowers on kerb-sides anymore.
Only snow, but the snow is so white
That it reminds you
Of the different primal colours of flowers
On the kerb-side, last summer.
But now it is winter
And it is snowing incessantly.
Now it is all in real time,
Time for words of truth,
For recluses and demons to come out of the woodwork
And dance on Tverskaya.
Now it is time for the Muscovite to live.
They will of course cease to shower:
Perfume will sell by the gallon.
In closed lifts
You will feel a little suffocated by body odours.
But then it is human bodies
Storing within them human souls
Strung with human emotions, aspirations
And morning smells of pepper vodka;
Variations on the same classical theme
Of intoxication used to cleanse a nation.
Always, always it is intimidation.
Idiocy is infectious; it puts you in your place.
I pray that it does not infect the nation
Because whole generations have been bred on routine.
You take a flower for your teacher on September
Ever since you were in kindergarten.
Even gestures are mass-produced.
Clothes and shoes and artifacts mass-produced in Shanghai,
They lose their element of spontaneity.
All women should not walk the same way
With the same sway of the same hips.
There must be variety in the ankles and the boots.
To protect yourself from the cold,
You have to wear stockings and tweed
But there are different checks in tweed.
Renoks are different; potatoes in Renoks are different.
Even politicians have different agendas.
In this context it is important to understand
What you are, where you stand.
It is important to know that potatoes and tomatoes
Grow in gardens other than yours.
It is important to feel
That sometimes it is sensuous to be uprooted.
Alien climes generate alien chimes,
Birds migrate from pole to pole.
We are but human souls.
Or whales spouting on our way to the pole
One most remember that I talk of only a few years
When the bouncers in Night Flight were tough.
Driving back in a Zhiguli2 was rough.
Things must have changed
Since whoring is now a major export.
But my memory is nailed to an emotion fixed in time.
I’m sure by now the roads have changed.
There are new shops in the neighbourhood
Which sell Gucci underwear.
But the destiny of a nation and a people don’t change.
And therefore I will talk of a conversation
We had in a car,
Just the two passengers and the driver.
It was half-light, twilight if you will
And I told you that I would tell you a story
Written in a book that never got written.
You blushed
Because you knew what the story was.
You see, the book belonged to you and me.
I got out of my skin and told the story
As I had never told a story before.
Because I had to win,
I had to tell the story to you.
Once upon a time long ago
There was a pauper
Who had this compulsion
To let his arms and legs flow.
But he could not sing,
So there was just this spate of words
That flowed in fury like rivers in flood.
Innuendoes, analogies and metaphors
Stumbled on each other.
But somehow this prince felt
That in the snow it is easier to hear,
The words flow clear through the ether.
So he told you a story that was true.
What time and life would allow he did not know.
But he was sincere,
He told you a story that was true.
Because he extemporized from his heart,
Perhaps because of the fading light,
Perhaps because of the purity of the snow-flakes,
Perhaps because of the angle of the nape of your neck.
Because as he told you the story
You did not look at him even once
Knowing all the while that the story would turn your life.
You did not look at the pauper even once.
He told you of a white horse with wings.
Charmed princes have stables of these,
So do paupers.
He told you that together you and he would learn to fly.
He told you of lives in heaven.
He spoke to you of destiny.
He did say that for most of ones’ lives
We were actors in a play.
As an objective observer I found spontaneity
In the verbosity.
I found loose blades of grass
Subject to wind-direction.
I found spontaneity
Because the prince wanted to win your love.
He was apologetic about stars
He could not bring down from the sky.
He was furious about the years gone by.
He never asked for a future.
He asked for days and years.
You never held his hand even once as he spoke.
But sometimes you blushed,
Sometimes you were pale,
Sometimes almost there was a tear-drop
Balanced on your bottom eyelid.
You said beauty would fade,
Paper would crumble
Dated, they would even remove you from the Internet,
What after all does it matter, this book of yours,
Who will read of middle - aged agonies?
The world is young,
The world has acquired new shackles of destiny.
No one has written a book on me before.
(She was flustered, you see.)
So let me hear how it goes until the end.
I said this book has no content,
It rhymes desire with fear.
But if we make a sum-total
Of what you have seen and what I have seen
And what I were to imagine,
Which volcano would have erupted
If we were eighteen,
You a girl in pigtails with braces on your teeth,
Me a boy with gangly crooked legs,
How would it have then been?
What have we lost?
What has destiny deprived us of?
Years and nothing else!
Because we are still tentative
In the holding of the hands
And the touching of our lips
As we shall always be strangers
Exploring each others’ mysteries,
Feeling the texture of the strain
In the holding of each other's hands,
With tongues that delve deep in desperation
Searching forgotten moments in times lost
With cheeks that mingle perfume and after-shave lotions,
With sweat on your upper lip
And a morsel of rice on my moustache.
We shall dream dreams.
We are now old enough to compromise,
To buy whole flower-shops
That will say what we should have said years ago,
Had we met.
But it is always the morning-light and the waking up
That tells the truth,
The weather forecast on television.
But to-morrow’s weather will come to-morrow
Just as tears do.
I have promised myself that like children
We shall gambol in the snow
Ride our sleds downhill in shrieks of ecstasy.
I have promised myself that there will be
This passing car and traffic lights
Throwing shades of orange and green
On your profile.
There will be these street lamps
Catching the drift of the snow
As it catches flies in their last throe,
And, sometimes, lust.
Sometimes there will be glowworms in the dark
To light up our nights.
On park benches
We will eat our sandwiches and drink our beer.
You will make me walk up four floors of the Univermag
Because of some trinket that you thought was dear.
Sunday mornings will be lazy
With last night’s TV recordings,
Breakfast from dinner leftovers.
You remember that I had said
That I would not be naughty first.
So you were naughty,
And we ended up with no breath
And realized it wouldn’t do.
It just wouldn’t do.
That is when we packed our bags.
This coming together was quite uneventful
Only a few volcanoes erupted,
Only a few tectonic plates clashed.
Your combination of wallpaper in gold and green,
Your kitchen with the sun streaming in,
Your chintz curtains,
And the cold when you aired the rooms
Every time I smoked a cigarette
All this would happen so.
I told you that in my book.
In words, in looks, in anguish, in want,
All of this I told you in my book.
The fantasy when we were new,
That fantasy was in my book.
You normally never weep a tear.
I thought you are so “Russian” heartless.
Then one morning before I took a journey,
While walking back from the Renok
You wept and wept and wept copiously.
It is good to weep even if you don’t know why.
Bonds are not even threads.
It is just that I still needed my hair ruffled
And you needed my smell.
But apprehension was a part of my book.
I told you so before we began
Our conversation in the car.
Ganechka, ami tomake chai
