For the coming winter

India to Russia had been a long journey. Through Canada first, then Dubai, then Oman, and Qatar and then back home. Only then had he circled that job ad in a Hindi newspaper with the word 'Russia' written in bold and 'tough winter conditions' hidden somewhere in the periphery of that black rectangular printed box.

Canada didn't count much because he had been deported from the airport itself. "You look like an illiterate. That's your problem," the immigration agent had told him. "Can't you learn to look well? So many unpadh-ganvaars I have sent to Amrika, but you, you are a difficult case."

Of course he didn't know English. His Hindi itself was so laced with Haryanvi, he had a difficult time even at Indian airports. But a construction labourer didn't need much English to survive in foreign lands. Only an apathy to rotten food and filth and a constant self-reminder of the grinding poverty back home. After seven years of labouring in the Middle East, he had finally arrived to the unblemished whiteness of a Russian winter. Heat he knew well, but cold--this was a new and more ferocious monster. He wept salty tears that ran through the cracked skin on his cheeks like liquid blades. He shut himself inside and lay on his bed: foetal, embracing his own numbness, incapable of feeling his own fingers, toes, skin, bones. He felt more dead than alive for the first time in his life. Again and again the agent's voice came back to him with all its gruff clarity: "Only three years since Russia has opened. New market. Not hot like Middle East. Cold but clean." 'Clean' he remembered distinctly.

He hadn't heard of Solzhenitsyn. Or for that matter, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or Chekhov. Still something stirred in him when he saw the cover of Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" lying on the desk of his Indian manager. Unfamiliar with the script, he soaked in the black and white image on the cover. It had a fence running across snow. Only that. Barbed wire. Lonely wooden pole. White snow. And yet something stirred in him.

"Which book is that?" he finally asked.
The manager smiled and recited the whole title as if it were a short verse.
The only word that he heard clearly was "gulag".
"Gulag. Funny word. What does it mean?"
The manager looked away for a few minutes, then hurriedly dismissed him:
"Nothing. Nothing you need to know."

Nothing meant something. He knew that. But he had nobody to ask. For days that black and white image haunted him like some mysterious ill-omen.