On Senses and Nostalgia

It’s the 11th of May. It’s a cloudy Monday afternoon, the last day of the Victory Day weekend in Russia. Yesterday, I watched individuals and entire families march on the Tverskaya Ulitsa holding placards with the pictures of the ones they lost in the Second World War. It was a sight to behold, more majestic and stirring than even the sight of an Armata T-14 rolling down the wide road. The march went on for several hours, without the slightest sign of commotion or chaos. But that too is over, as is the weekend. Tomorrow, everyone will be back to their daily grind, cursing the traffic and smiling at their bosses.

To me, today has been a relatively less hectic day, with the President of India having departed this morning. After a week, I’m at home in the afternoon, with utter disregard to the clock. I do what I always do when the clock is irrelevant. I look at my singular source of envy, the moving clouds. Moving around, without a care or ambition to worry about, or a target to follow, simply letting the wind take them everywhere, and if things got too serious, just pour it all down and be free again. It looks like it would rain soon.

I’m reminded of December Sundays at home. Tamil Nadu gets its share of rainfall when the rest of India has replaced its raincoats with sweaters. Even then, the rain cloud is a powerful middleman. Conscious of its power, it dangles the tantalising promise of rain and yet, threatening to take it away if the wind blew too strong. It takes a different level of Nirvana to console yourself that if it isn’t you, someone else would get the rain. But until you attain that, you satisfy yourself with the cosy warmth of impending rain announced by air pockets of petrichor, reaching your nostrils.

We often talk about the five senses, as if they were five separate entities, working independently of one another. But a recollection from our memory isn’t stored that way, is it? When the smell of petrichor reaches my nostrils, I’m reminded not only of rains at home, but also of the staccato sounds of my father’s hammer as he sent the last nail into the stool or writing table that he was making, or the glare of sunlight reflected off the freshly painted stool, the wavy vapours of paint that acquire almost a corporeal shape to penetrate your nostrils, bringing with them, the smell of cut onions, potatoes and chilli, dipped in Bajji Maavu. But before the vapors tingle the olfactory nerves and take the information of impending rain and Bajji (the latter has more certainty) to your brain, the ears are busy gathering the particle noises of spitter-spatter, of oil being heated.

All this intertwined with the anxious wait for the Sunday evening movie on DD-5, the Tamil telecast of Doordarshan. The antenna and the old Crown TV agreed among themselves to arrange channels according to the name of the stations. So DD-5 was set on number 5 on a TV that could show a sum total of twelve channels. Not that there were that many out there either. This was before Sun TV and the Satellite TV age. Anyway, we thanked DD-5 for the only movie of the week back then, unless you went to theatres, which not many of us did. In fact, I lived a hundred meters from a theatre and restricted myself to enjoying several Oli Chithirams or Audio-only movies from the comfort of the moonlit terrace.

DD-5 had a peculiar choice of movies. Rarely would there be a movie that got released after I was born. You can’t telecast a movie within five years of its release, I was told, though I’m yet to verify the administrative position on that.

It was always movies that were released when my father was in his teens. So, most of the movies I watched back then, be it Thiruvarutchelvar, Thirumal Perumai or Manaalane Mangaiyin Baaiyam, it was always on DD-5. When the AVM logo appeared in the distance and the camera slowly closed in until all you could see were the letters “AVM” and the word “Productions”, or when the semi-clad Gemini twins came in trumpeting, the sputtering oil on the kitchen stove would receive its first stock of onions dipped in batter.

By the time the credits came, to show the Music Director and Lyricists, the first plate would find its way to me. I often blame my inability to recall the name of Music Directors, on an inherent urge to pick the least hot Bajji and taste it. By the time my tongue began to water, half out of taste and half to suppress the heat, the movie would have started with a flute playing in the distance.

The Bajjis would become the moving commodity on the conveyor belt that connected the plate to my mouth. Before onion was over and potatoes started to fry in the oil, the Gods would have tormented Sivaji or Gemini Ganesan would have acquired a new curse for an unintentional misdemeanour. So, the smell of frying potatoes is often connected in my head with a lament of a song in TMS’ voice. A bored look out of the window would show raindrops falling from the toothed edges of the Hibiscus leaves, almost as if the leaves themselves were shedding tears at the current anguish of the protagonist.

The semi darkness of the house, accompanied by the fear over a possible power cut if the rain was heavy, often pushed me to cheer Sivaji and Gemini, to quickly find solutions to their problems, so that if the power went off, or if DD-5 decided to entertain us with its “Thadangalukku Varundhugirom”(We regret this interruption)slides, we’d at least be assured that the protagonist was alive and well.

But then, when these unintended interruptions happened, they were well synchronised with the gaps between two plates of Bajji. Until recent re-watchings, thanks to YouTube, I had never really known how most of these movies ended, though the trend in those days was to always end the movie on a happy note. But how can you be sure unless you watched? Either a power cut, or the drenched matchsticks of the antenna catching a cold would play truant, or I’d have dozed off after the Bajji.

When mother eventually woke me up for dinner, I’d be too sleepy to ask her how the story ended. And the next day was Monday, with school looming ahead too ominously to worry about the movie that got over one way or the other. Eventually, I would forget about the movie. Or so I thought. Apparently not.

A cloudy afternoon at the end of the weekend in Moscow, conjures not just the smell of petrichor, but also of rainwater dripping from Hibiscus leaves, the aroma of fried Bajis, the songs of TMS And the stories they told, the pain of the nail heads as Father’s hammer struck them into yielding wood, and even the anxiety associated with periodically looking up at the ceiling to see if the fan was slowing down due to “Voltage drops”.

Like the slimy trail of a snail, life leaves an imprint as it drags on. The snail does not look back or use the trail to return home for the night. But when we look back at the imprint we left behind, the memories are no longer a dull beige trail. They are a bright rainbow, each colour a memory acquired by a different sense, portraying a deceptive illusion of being distinct. The smell is separate from the sound, and the sound from the sight, and the sight from the sizzling taste on the tongue.

Yet, when you look closer, the lines blur, the borders fade, the colours merge with one another, forming one whole memory, that would be incomplete without any of them. As the rainbow of recollection passes through the prism of nostalgia, its blurring lines blend into yellow-white sunlight. Sunlight that falls on you like a dried dhoti that was carried off by the wind and abandoned to the earth. The lingering scent of the detergent it was washed with is oddly comforting. The arms and legs move inwards to the comfort of its warmth.

The blanket of nostalgia is, to us, a mirror to the moments when the limelight was on us. Rarely do we remember moments from our past when we were not the heroes or absolute horrors on the scene. We continue to live in the reflected recollection of this mirror, so we may not be lost to the darkness of the present that surrounds us. A light that penetrates the darkness, a light away from the unspeaking walls and the flameless stove, a light that takes us back to hammer sounds, hibiscus leaves, DD-5 movies and Bajji-filled evenings.

Moscow Kremlin - A fortress, a national identity.

Dimitry Troubetskoy stood on the watchtower on the southern wall of the Kremlin. He took a deep breath and let the chilly October air enter his lungs. The sun had set early today, but Dimitry could see the full moon reflected off the empty bottle of Vodka next to the soldier on the Eastern Wall. Moskva river flowed joyously below him. The river resonated with his feelings. Tonight, Dimitry Troubetskoy was a happy man. Moskva was now a free city. He had played a decisive role in defeating the Polish forces who had occupied the Kremlin. The siege had lasted long, and it seemed like it would never end. But, Dimitry had managed to capture the provisions the Poles had, resulting in a famine and surrender.

He looked at the sky and bowed his head. His eyelids drew together and listened to the gentle rhythm of the river. It comforted him to know that the river played with her children and was not trampled upon by outsiders. 

Four hundred years later, as I entered the Kremlin complex, I thought I felt Dimitry Troubetskoy’s presence. His watchful eyes lingered over, examined and deemed me harmless. I was allowed to enter the hallowed grounds which Dimitry Troubetskoy and Dimitry Pozharsky had wrested back from the occupying Polish forces.

The Moscow Kremlin is a fort and as the root of the word (Latin “fortis” meaning strong”) indicates, was built to strongly defend the people and territory it represented. Although artifacts and historical records indicate that fortifications in the region existed in some form as early as the 11th century, the cornerstone of the Kremlin, as a stone fortress, was laid by Dimitry Donskoi. The fortress was completed in 1367 and Moscow withstood two sieges by Algirdas of Lithuania and a siege by Khan Tokhtamysh. These successes, among others, helped Donskoi double the territory of the Principality of Moscow. He also challenged the domination of the Mongols and retook most of Russia from them.

The Kremlin sits in Moscow, an irregular triangle 2235 meters long, somewhat like a gigantic brick-red set square out of a school-going kid’s geometry box. But the walls weren’t always red. The first stone Kremlin, which replaced the wooden fortress, was built of white limestone in 1366-68. It was so iconic that even after the fortress was reconstructed in 1495, the walls continued to be painted white until as late as the 19th Century. Moscow itself was called “белокаменной” or “white stoned”.

Throughout its lifetime, the Kremlin has been a microcosm of Russia, in the sense that what happened to the Kremlin indicated to what was happening in Russian politics.

With the construction of cathedrals and palaces, the Kremlin began to serve as the residence of the Tsars. When the last Tsar of the Rurik dynasty, Feodor Ivanovitch died in 1598, he left a vacuum on the throne and the beginning of a phase that in Russian history is known as the Time of Troubles (Смутное время). This period reached a climax with the occupation of the Kremlin by the Polish forces from 1610-12. It was only with the liberation of the Kremlin by Dimitry Pozharsky and Dimitry Troubetskoy that the troubled times ended and the rule of the Romanov dynasty started.

If you were a time-traveler fascinated about Russian history and went back 300 years in time to Moscow, to meet the greatest Tsar of Russia, Peter the Great, you would be disappointed. Because, by this time, the Kremlin and Moscow had lost their importance as the seat of power to the newly built city of St.Petersburg.

The Kremlin would still be used for coronation ceremonies, but that would be the limit of its political importance. Like most things in history, Peter the Great has an Indian connection, but that’s a separate post for another day. 

When Napoleon invaded Russia, he moved in to capture Moscow, which had already been abandoned by the Russian population on the orders of the Governor Rostopchin. Napoleon and his forces occupied the Kremlin. Towards the end of his largely fruitless siege, Napoleon ordered the Kremlin blown up. But as luck would have it, most of the fuses were damaged by rain and a large portion of the Kremlin survived the damage. 

During his reign, Nicholas I had some of the Italian designed churches and palaces torn down and rebuilt by the architect Konstantin Thon. The demolished Kremlin Armoury was also rebuilt in 1851.

After the Russian Revolution, the Kremlin once again became the seat of power, as Lenin made it his residence. Stalin removed all the relics of the Tsarist regime and so, the two headed eagles on the top of the towers were replaced with pentagonal ruby stars.

During the Second World War, Moscow faced heavy bombing, but the Kremlin was barely affected. The walls had been painted (Russians prefer to say “masked”) with doors and windows to resemble houses. The green towers were painted over and there were temporary wooden structures to resemble roofs of houses. The iconic Kremlin stars (each weighing a ton) were covered and crosses over the domes of churches were removed. All of Kremlin was made to resemble a civilian settlement and thus, escaped the bombing.

After the war, the Kremlin continued to be closed to foreign tourists. It took Nikita Khruschev’s efforts to de-Stalinize most of Russia’s internal and external policies. Along with that, the Kremlin was also opened to foreign visitors in 1955. The Thaw, (Оттепель) as it was called, took its name from a sensational Ilya Ehrenburg novel.

This trend of de-Stalinization continued to the extent that, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union the letters “CCCR”, meaning “USSR” that adorned the façade of the Grand Kremlin Palace were replaced with the two-headed eagle that appears on the Russian coat-of-arms.

The Kremlin has continued to be the seat of the government of Russia. Its walls have played host to successive Presidents, being more hospitable to some, than to others. The Kremlin is an inalienable part of Russian identity now, in that it is used as an umbrella term to refer to the highest offices of the country. In fact, even the official website of the President of Russia is kremlin.ru.

As I entered the Kremlin for the first time, I felt all this history wash over me. I felt that I was invited to see the last one thousand years of Russian political life as the net of history had captured it.

Hopefully, this is just the first in a short series of posts on the Kremlin. In subsequent posts, I intend to talk about the individual monuments inside the Kremlin. Stay tuned.