The Suitcase
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…