the goodbyes

today is the 19th of august, and I'm becoming very conscious about my timeline. the Russian internet is filled today with the memories of the 1991 coup, when the conservative wing of the communist party tried to oust Gorbachev, and Yeltsin emerged as the defender of the liberal freedoms. on august 19, 1996, Yeltsin had just stepped in to his second term. he had won the reelection just barely (and by means that we now know were far from honest), having lost positions as a result of Chechen war and the continued economic woes. the first Chechen war was drawing to its close, but it had become clear that conflict was simmering all around Russia and the former Soviet lands. my male friends all had gotten into the universities, but nevertheless, the danger of draft weighed heavily over their decision-making. by entering universities, my female friends and i received the tacit permission to fall in love for reals and to experiment sexually though we were as tacitly aware that our years were numbered and really what we needed to think about was marriage and children. careers too, but since so few of us were going to study the subjects we felt passionately about, careers felt very secondary. love came first.
on the 19th of august 1996 i did not yet have my passport back from the American consulate, but i had a ticket to Rochester for august 23rd, and i called a party, to be held on the 21st. after graduation that june, I had seen my friends only intermittently. this would be the last good-bye. my brother was at a math camp, and my cousins weren't around either, so i didn't get to say a proper good-bye to them. i did not invite the boy i'd been dating that summer, my first boyfriend. none of my other friends knew him, and it would be awkward. i don't remember how i said good-bye to my childhood friend from dacha. i have a feeling we played the last badminton game together and shook hands. during that last year we had gone on what i think now were a couple of dates, but things had been forever awkward between us. we'd known each other too well and loved each other deeply but the relationship between families was weird and we couldn't really handle it. that's how it seems now. there were too many people involved.
i was saying goodbyes that week as though i were leaving home forever, even though my father managed to buy me a ticket with an open return date. unlike Nabokov and Brodsky, and the people of their generations, who had been forced out of Russia without possibility of return, I was free to return. thinking about this now, i see that very freedom as a heavy burden of responsibility weighing on my shoulders. unlike the generations before me, i was supposedly making a free choice, so i better make the good one, the right one, the one that would lead me to everlasting happiness. if i did leave, I was not allowed to come back until i made a success out of my life -- no regrets allowed. i have not since admitted to having any regrets in life. frank sinatra can admit to having a few, but Olga will have her way without any. sorry for this silly reference, i'm drinking wine and trying to put myself in the mind of a seventeen-year old.
in a way, in 1996 I was saying good bye to the world that ceased to exist in 1991, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. i was saying good bye to the opportunity to build something new in its place. my friends and i had read enough realist novels to expect that we would all change and grow apart, and this was the first step toward that. though, talking about novels, I had also read more than enough socialist realist novels, and so i swore loyalty and collected everyone's mailing addresses and promised to never change and hey i did good i actually did hold back the change for a good number of years and hey i am still in touch with so many of my friends and am so much better able to express my feelings toward them due to improvements in emotional vocabulary but hey none of that changed the fact that i was leaving

Indian-Soviet friendship

in 1996, the vast majority of the international students at RIT came from the Indian subcontinent. there were some kids from China, Malaysia, Brazil, Turkey, but most people I met right away were from India. Also, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka.
the heyday of the Indian-Soviet friendship had long passed, and I had not met a single Indian person in St. Petersburg growing up, but I did inherit the slogan of that era. "Hindi Russi bhai-bhai," I said to the Hindi speakers, without actually knowing what this means. to my Sri Lankan friend, I must've surely mentioned Prosper Mérimée's novella Colomba that, despite the similarity of its title to the capital city of Sri Lanka, Colombo, is actually set in Corsica. I had been a voracious but not an attentive reader.
luckily, my Indian brothers saw that I was even more confused than they were about finding myself in Rochester, and so for a while took me under their wing. I was invited to join them for meals at the student cafeteria, where Indian kids sat around a long table and discussed the inedible American food, the upcoming winter and how to survive it, the importance of separating lights from darks when doing the laundry, sneaking into Canada without a Canadian visa, etc. for my sake, and for the sake of the other international students who occasionally joined, the Indians stuck to English for a while. eventually, the conversation switched to Hindi, and I was left to ponder all I'd heard so far.
most of my new friends described themselves as being "homesick," and asked me if I were, too. they could not eat, they had trouble sleeping, they missed their mothers, they struggled in their classes where their instructors frequently refused to understand their brand of English. I, on the other hand, couldn't stop eating. having spent much of my childhood growing food, standing in lines for food, cooking food, i was beyond thrilled at finding myself at an all-you-can-eat buffet three times a day. before Rochester, I couldn't have imagined such thing existed. I couldn't get enough of whatever was being served. people didn't understand my English either, but i wasn't complaining. it was a foreign language to me that I had to learn from scratch. my friends had grown up speaking English and now had to conform to the slight but significant differences in usage.
soon enough my friends started to figure out life in America. they found places to buy spices and learned to cook. they treated me to vegetarian dishes that turned each pore of my body into a tear duct (i'd had no experience whatsoever with hot spices). they found the one movie theatre near RIT that once every couple of weeks had showings of Bollywood movies. they joined the Indian student groups and started playing cricket. I went to a couple of Bollywood movies and cricket matches, and then stopped -- but that's another story.
one of my best friends from that era was a kid from Sri Lanka. N. was a few years older, and his thoughtful questions about my parents and friends at home helped to guide me through what I didn't know how to recognize as homesickness and a form of depression. though eventually I figured out that Sri Lanka wasn't Corsica, and that it wasn't India either, I refused to listen when N. tried to describe his background to me. his family was Buddhist, and, armed with the vague second-hand knowledge of scientific Marxism, I insisted that all religion was a complete and total superstition, and so he should stop believing anything and start eating meat. we maintained an uneasy friendship by going out to watch sci fi movies and talking only about hypothetical faraway worlds and planets.