Dear Mikhail,
This letter has remained unwritten long in my mind. It was fun to write to you. With bated breath waited at your door first flowers and later went all on fours to give the Nobel peace prize. You released snow white pigeons in the Kremlin square. You journeyed to places far and near to sign documents with hardened opponents. That dismantled eaten the instantly weapons of global destruction. You had the courage to strip naked the Generals who would have rather the world destroyed than they would surrender their entrenched position. Thus you became the bet noire of death merchants selling armaments. Also the diplomats who feuded to carve areas of influence and dominance for their sickly bosses.
GORBACHEV
I know well you are still facing the problems that Pandora.s box released in the Greek legend. No one can today say that Pandora acted wrong or for that matter mother Eve went wrong to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. You have now eaten the fruit of tree of knowledge and proved that ignorance is not always bliss.
Remember you became the child who shouted before the emperor that he was naked because he wore no clothes. The truth tumbled down like a ton of bricks on the conscience of the faithful in Kremlin. You could continue to wear the crown of total power over the faithful millions. But you did not like to say that your proletarian brothers and sisters stood in the cold in long queues to buy bread, eggs, milk and soap in the paradise that Lenin hoped to build and Stalin built for them.
The other day I told my friends that Gorbachev’s are already born in India and specially West Bengal and Kerala. Because without your likes no part of the world can survive.
I was a boy in India when Stalin and Hitler were building their paradises or hells incorporated – in Russia and Germany. I was beguiled by my friends to hate Hitler and love Stalin. I then hardly realized that both Stalin and Hitler were builders of hell incorporated. I wrote a poem to Mayakovsky. I hold your hands for the nth time/In Odessa tried your trousers and savored the crunchy nuts in your pockets/But where do we go after the tea and the tete’a’ ete / to a world of heart ulcers.- I told you I dint like Hitler. I wrote to fellow poet Ezra Pound: You Ezra Pound The mad mutterror Of prose. Don�t think you are cleverer than us. Your obscurity, erudition is a gilt mask for an unfeeling mind. I will peel you from head to foot and scratch till I reach the marrow of your poetry bone and shout to the world you are a depraved follower of Hitler. We don’t have time to decipher your hieroglyph.
Later I wrote the Russian Story: I am Dimitri waiting for the knock on the door at half past four.I who have done no wrong and sung with them their songs. I whose Dad who laid his life in the anti Nazi strife. The winter here is hard, the cold is on the road, but over there where they send me to, the air is more harsh and mean. There I will miss Tanya and her lips, parted in lament, in her tiny tenement. They will still call me Comrade Dimitri as they take me to the ice cemetery.
I wrote another poem on the girl Comrade poet who was imprisoned for her poems and she had written in Siberian cell poems on soap, washing each line and draining the content into her memory. She wrote two hundred and fifty poems on soap.
Later when the wind of freedom blew through over I wrote: The red states of Europe are in different states of dress or undress. Karl Marx correct your steps, for once be clean shaven. For a change visit a pub with Gandhi. He will not drink but shall be glad to keep you company. Stalin put away your pose Go underground and hide in a box, the world has changed.
Vladimir common out to taste freedom with Deng And another piece on Herr Herman a Hitler guy: Under the Fuerer he worked. He would go to the camp clean with washed hands and sterilized hankies after kissing his lovely Austrian wife. He will salute the figure on glazed paper with the brush mustache which was in every room in the camp. He would call up his handsome adolescent clerks and opening the file call out the names as the sun glowed in the Dachau woods. The clerks would line up the men, women and children whose names were called. Some women will have a bloated belly showing they are pregnant with babies. They will strip as the music played for a nourishing bath in the common bath. Down would come trouser and frock showing off nipples and belly and coruscated male zone and the female bone. In the bath first water then the oozing poison steam and all will in minutes fall down lifeless. The guards will come in and explore the jigsaw flesh including the open mouth to look for trinkets of gold and gold in tooth.
Herr Herman would see the dead and with an inner glee of doing his duty well on day and start tabulating the hoard. The gold, trinkets, wrist watches and dis-infected clothing will go to the central registry. He was very honest and duty bound, no thought of grabbing part of the gold for himself will cross his mind.
After washing his face and sipping his sherry he will get into his black beetle car and go home. At his doorstep his wife and kids would be waiting for him. His wife would welcome him home with a kiss He would hug his kids and go to bed calling it a day as routine as any day.
(Dear Gorbachev, I had visited the Dachau camp. And listened to the stories. There is no sign of the massacre carried out at the order of the Nazi government by ordinary kind men who thought they were doing their duty. The trees have grown big in the camp and the birds fly over the area as if everything is well with the world and God is in heaven.)