letters
16/01, 23:04] Omar Urology: ((It was a winter's night, and the cold, dry wind that blew outside had kept our dear PeePeeDoc awake. Through a crack in the window blew the most cruel cold gusts, that almost extinguished the flame of the candle he had lit on the study table. He had sat down to write a letter when another howl of cold air blew the candle. He lit the candle again. He tore off whatever he was writing and stuffed the crack in the window with crumpled paper. It held the wind at bay.
We will never know the exact time PeePeeDoc started writing this letter to The Guest from Russia, who played the piano, but we know what he wrote since the letter was found in the attic of The Guest's Dacha by the Volga by a curious teenage couple who were looking for a quiet place for romp. The girl apparently found a chest full of letters and took a special liking to this one. We know it was written on this particular day, and that the wind was howling outside since PeePeeDoc talks about this letter in another letter he sends one week later. We will come to that later. I am sharing the exact text, losses in translation notwithstanding.
16 Jan Madame D,
As I write this, you may have returned from the symphony. What a pleasure these small things in life!
I am planning to visit Kashmir. The people of my Ruhr Village, Berne, want to set up a church and school in this famous Valley. I don't know if you have heard of it, but it's quite like Europe. The weather is cool, it snows in winter and there are umpteen meadows of flowers.
I want to set up a school there, and name it after our church, Burn Hall School, and maybe, who knows, one day a native may study in that school and travel to Germany to become a surgeon!
I thoroughly enjoy your critique of music. I can't wait for your essay on types of piano music, you promised you'll send it to me. Please do whenever you can.
I know there's little by way of companionship that I can offer you, these distances are immense, and we both have families to look after. Between the dreams of sails to Marakesh, and train rides to Seville, and carriages to Paris, I do hope some of that dream dust firms up into solid rock and we get to meet. But dust is what we are made of, and dust is what dreams become. Dust to dust.
As I write this, Beethoven, my cat, seems to have seen a mouse and is racing across the room to grab it. He tipped my water pitcher and is half wet. Have you seen a half-wet cat running after a mouse in a carpeted room? Can you imagine the dirty footprints the cat leaves behind?
My candle is about to finish, and Rosa says we don't have a lot of them in the store. So, I am going to have to cut this letter short to you.
I wish you and the boys the best!
Keep making music wherever you may be, and some day, our paths may cross and I would love for that to happen.
Until then, we have the ever reliable postal system to thank!
I pray our future generations do not have to go through the agony of writing and enclosing and posting and praying and longing for a reply. Maybe a day will come when whatever one writes is transmitted to the intended recipient almost immediately. Who knows!
My friend Morse is working on something, but he is a nutjob with a birthday on 9th July.
Ok, this is me signing off.
I shall see you soon.
Ciao ciao
.............
Why a German clergyman, who ended up teaching science in Kashmir, would write to a Russian woman in English and sign off in Italian, no one knows, but the letter was delivered to The Guest and stored in the attic long after The Guest was no longer a guest in this world.
If teen hormones hasn't gotten the better of them, the girl and boy who were looking for a place to romp, wouldn't have stumbled upon a chest of timeless treasures in the abandoned attic of a worn down country house in Russia.))
16/01, 23:20] Dhanwanti Rajwade:
My Dearest PeePeeDoc,
I came home to a cold Russian house, because the coal has run out, and my trusted maid Ashapovich has forgotten to light the fireplace. I hung up my coat and ran to the table to check for any mail from you. It warms my soul. Lo and behold! I found this one!
While my two sons finished off their porridge and washed their plates, I sat down and smoothened out the page. I can imagine you sitting down and writing this on a creeky wooden desk, with your handwriting curling perfectly from the Macmillans handwriting book used in Burn Hall School. You were a diligent student, holding onto your Wren and Martin and Oxford English Dictionary. But Maths was a sore spot? Your mom decided to hire a tutor for this particular chore. In my mind you were a sunny natured boy. Sensitive, cuddly, who rode a bike furiously down the mountains. But tell me more about that boy, Count Omar...does he have siblings? What are their names? What do they do? I want to know everything about you. I await your reply.
Ciao ciao as they say in your muddled tongue.....
madame D. [16/01, 23:34] Omar Urology: In reply to the brief but heartwarming letter from the illusive Madame D/The Guest, it is rumoured PeePeeDoc spent a few hours thinking about what to write and what to hide. What was there to hide?
Years had passed since his childhood, and the actors from then were no longer around to refute or reiterate anything he would say, but he felt he owed it to the honest family and friends he spent his childhood with to write back a good, honest reply.
The letter goes
Madame D,
I gave the postman a Deutsche Mark. Our German currency lives long! I don't think there will ever be a time when Marks aren't used the world over!
I was so happy to read your letter.
I have only one brother
He became a doctor, then, a pathologist, then a physician in America, and then trained to be a a blood doctor and now does bone marrow transplants for a living!
My parents both are doctors.
We are a family of doctors. In the Indian city of Bombay, the fast developing port city of seven islands on the West Coast of India, the communities are known by the work they do, so it wouldn't be uncommon for my family to be called - Doctorwala or Beemariwala, or something like that!
You'll get the picture if you ever travel to Bombay and watch a piano concert with one of the oldest conductors in the world in the seat. Happy Birthday to Him!
There's much about me that I want to write about, bit it's not the place or time or occasion.
Maybe between piano sets and coffee cups and open windows through which sea breezes waft through, I can tell you more.
How is the weather there in VolgaGrad? Is it cold like here? Do you have trains? If I have to come to see you, do I come by train? Or boat?
Do tell me, who knows what the future holds.
Till then,
See you soon,
Ciao ciao.
............
And there it began, the first steps towards an attempt at meeting.
Whether they met, and what happened after they met, we will know as we keep reading their letters. It may seem voyeuristic to pry into a family's possessions, but it is important to understand how two humans, united in Nothing but their desire to understand life and one another, could forge a bond across a bloody continent at a time when languages and ethnicities held more sway than science and technology.
Read on, join us for another installment, same time, tomorrow.
[17/01, 07:06] Dhanwanti Rajwade:
((the Guest woke up from a sound sleep, the magic of Beethovens fifth piano concerto ringing in her ears. She fantasised about hearing a person of a different race playing it......maybe someone with a flat face and slit eyes? It nagged her that she could almost see his face, but couldn't. Anyway, in her narrow world she hadn't seen anything but winter after winter. She couldn't imagine another nation as vast as hers, with mountains and valleys and people so motivated that they seemed invincible, with food so yummy that it would dominate the world, and with names that involved a single syllable repeated twice or thrice: Lunglung, dingding? She brushed the sleep out of her eyes and ran her hands over PeePeeDoc's latest letter....... It jogged her own childhood memories. Growing up in an old port city, to a family also rooted to the soil for many generations. In aristocratic circles they were called "old families" or "old money", in actual facts, she missed wryly, now they had money;) well none would be an exaggeration, because they had security in terms of land and property, but never enough to buy an extra horse and carriage or a grand piano. She remembered years of schooling at a Church school called Cathedral, attending with her older sister who seemed to be good at just about everything. She remembers enjoying her academics, but being deeply in love with her piano, preferring to be lost in the notes as compared to attending balls and dancing to mazurkas with her friends. It was a lovely time. Her mother was a house wife, with a heart full of love but a volatile temper. Her father worked in the family business where they produced pharmaceuticals, till his position got usurped in family politics and drama, and he finally worked for an overseas drug company from a distant land called The Netherlands. The parents were ill suited for each other ......it was what they called an "arranged marriage". What does that even mean? How do you arrange a marriage? On a shelf? With the bottles of vinegar and wine? They were poorly arranged, and the girls grew up with love interspersed with fights and loud voices and adult emotions muddling the minds of little children. Anyway, she missed what she has started out to do....
Dear PeePeeDoc,
My sister is currently divorced and lives with my parents in our family home. It was a source of great scandal in society that she sent her month old daughter home to my mother to raise, because she couldn't manage it and her husband left her for America, while they were in Singapore. Fortunately I had a newborn of my own and i was blessed to be able to breast feed both babies! So essentially, she is as much baby as she is hers. My perfect niece Gayatri (unusual Russian name;)) and my Antu are in the same school, same class. My parents and old Granny live in our family home, which stands where my Granny's old bungalow used to stand. Today it is an odd construction with many flats piled up like boxes, and the bungalow long torn down.