Kumar Vishwanathan

“We switched the lights off and the children broke into wails. The opera singer, who was in the hostel with us, gathered the children around and started singing. The older children joined in and sang with her. The little children carried on crying, hidden under the mummies’ skirts. Firecrackers banged outside, and some children giggled in hysterics. They saw their school teacher outside. Their friends.”

“The light is not just in the sky, but inside each of us. Light does not have to come from the sky to set fire to the souls on earth. There is light in each of us, and that light is good. Perhaps the flame is weak in some, stronger in others. Certainly. But we all have that light within us.”

“I used to visit Taganka Theatre. I would stand ten hours in the frost, twenty-five degrees below zero, for tickets to the Bolshoi Theatre. I could name all the Russian Impressionists in the galleries. Moscow was very free and open back then. It was imbued with perestroika, glasnost, and Gorbachev, Gorba. Forbidden literature began showing up. Say, The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov. Literary magazines were published. We printed books on computer printers at the university. Those were massive machines back then, and we used them to print Alexei Tolstoy on huge sheets of paper. We used the university computers to print his forbidden books.”