Ukraine…

The first time I registered Ukraine as a tactile memory that I could touch and smell, was when I walked across the border from The Northern Maramureš county of Romania, to the point on the bridge where Ukraine began – the mighty river Tisa, gushed forth, spitting her uncontained froth and volume.

It was a cold February night and the border patrol of Romania and Ukraine exchanged cigarettes and swapped stories of comings and goings on the bridge, where farmers of Romania strolled across the cross-country bridge to buy tomatoes or the latest fashion from Ukraine, because Ukraine was cheaper. People that lived in this part of the Maramureš County, had special cards that enabled this everyday sojourn to another country – they didn’t need passports, just simple cards like the nondescript, rectangular driving license, that could be folded and tucked away into the smallest nook of a piece of clothing. The border patrol, weren’t grim and stoic title holders of their job, but merry boys, young and old, sauntering into the countryside occasionally, chatting up with the locals, and doling out weather reports and other miscellaneous anecdotes.
I remember thinking how it was all very unlike what we had back home, sans the desolation and the acrimony from the neighbors – and how this could be possible, the congeniality between countries and the common folk.

My Romanian friends gave the border security the usual story of me – the solo traveler from India that wanted to touch Ukraine – simply touch, because it was all too exciting, and that they should help me in the grand story that I could regale my friends with, when I got back home. He made a pretense of ‘can’t do’ and relented eventually and said he’d walk with me, up and until the mid point, and he did.
He pointed and said – “this is where Ukraine begins”- in romanian, and we registered this fleeting moment of travel sovereignty, where kindness allowed such excesses and small transgressions, and we could all gather for ourselves the charm of flippant luck and chance encounters. We also clicked a picture for photographic evidence of my fleeting, tiptoe of a tryst with Ukraine.

Ukraine is a country.

It’s a small country, chances are you don’t know where it is, on the map.
And it doesn’t matter how much coal it exports or the uranium it contains that could fund an Elon Musk’s expedition to Mars – even if Ukraine didn’t have anything shiny and capitalistic and gainful about it, it should matter to us very very personally whether we are sitting in a Chennai or a Columbia, that any land with its people, its common folk and its rivers and its children and women – that deserve their right to remain sovereign and unanswerable to anyone and everyone – be it a vile dictator or a President in a tuxedo with sparkling table manners and fine wine, deciding the code of conduct in the middle east or anything east of him.

The colonial powers and the self proclaimed super powers – that don’t have paid maternity leave, that don’t give their women a safe access to abortions, that have a 300 year old history of slavery and racism, that have gunning incidents in kindergarten schools, that have the most abysmal healthcare in the world, where poor folks that live in trailers cannot afford to see the doctor for a toothcare – are christened “first world”- and call themselves the Leaders of the Free World, which essentially guarantees their own freedom and sovereignty for oppression,
and apparently we, the lesser countries – the brown, the aryan faced, the hijabed, the black, the recalcitrant, the paid maternity leaves, the one with the Women Prime Ministers and all and sundry – are supposed to believe that they know better.
And meanwhile in all this global battle for hegemony and Warner Brothers Movie rights on Evacuation and Courage – a small country like Ukraine, because of its woeful geography, is deemed to pay its devastating price of human lives and everyday existence.

I wonder if this boy in my picture lives – I wonder about him, and it becomes personal – it doesn’t become external, extraneous to my Sunday – i think of the village of Romania that must have welcomed hundreds of Ukrainians under their roof, all the humans that scrambled to keep their kids alive and all the humans that threw open their doors to ones fleeing their homeland.
And once again, the count of The homeless in Europe – the homeless not from the fate of their birth, but the fate of their geography – render themselves homeless with a new definition. What’s new? If you were to walk the street from the railway station of Munich in one straight stretch – you will find a line of beggars – this time, not old and feeble and lacking vitality – but twenty five and thirty year old women, with their green eyes, hauntingly beautiful and lucid, porcelain skin, their hopes sunken and cheeks gaunt – from a Romania, Syria or Afghanistan.
And now we will add Ukraine.
To the list of people.
That nobody wants.
That become another frivolous statistic.
That otherwise were just ordinary folk, like you and I – farmers, educators, musicians, grocers, moms, dads, sisters and brothers –
having toast and milk for their Sunday Breakfast – and bracing, for the Monday.