Tag: Aashish Kaul

Comrade Kibalchich

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by Aashish Kaul Marseilles. Late winter, 1941. Icy winds. A boat preparing to depart for Martinique in the Caribbean Sea, a boat with just two cabins and a total of seven bunks for the lucky few. For the rest, the hold with little light or air, with makeshift bunk beds hurriedly assembled. A very long and distressing voyage ahead for nearly four hundred men, women, and children escaping one or another persecution, now being herded into the steamer by armed gendarmes, free with their hands and insults, as if these hapless passengers were convicts in the process of deportation, or…

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The Novel

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by Aashish Kaul There is a line in Alberto Manguel’s With Borges where, reminiscing about his childhood, Borges reveals how in those days he would regularly accompany his father to the National Library in Buenos Aires and, too timid to ask for a book, would often simply pull out a volume of the Britannica and read at random. This is how he said he learned in one day about ‘the Druids, the Druzes and Dryden.’ The brief statement is delivered by the ageing writer in his typical casual manner, but its intent is clear: a reader can derive all of…

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A Fine Balance

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by Aashish Kaul Some months ago, while in India, I went up into the mountains. On a late afternoon, following a walk in the forest, with the day clear and the sun still strong, I came to a café and sat in the open. All around the pines were dark, and there was snow in them, you could see how light tussled to touch the snow that shone very white in the checkered shade. In front, at some distance, stretched from far north down into the east the glacial arc of the Himalayas separating me from Tibet, while to the…

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The Suitcase

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by Aashish Kaul Sergei Dovlatov’s comic masterpiece The Suitcase begins with the author’s brief, pathetic conversation with a clerk at the Russian Office of Visas and Registrations (the ‘bitch at OVIR’, he refers to her in anger), conducted in the course of pointless, exhausting formalities that were involved in emigrating from the erstwhile Soviet Union. Dovlatov describes this exchange with characteristic satirical flourish, an exchange essentially about the quota of suitcases allowed to an emigrant. ‘Only three suitcases? What am I suppose to do with all my things?’ But a week later, while packing, he finds that he needs just…

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