The dancing driver of Dushanbe

Many in India may not have heard of Tajikistan and yet fewer know that its Capital is a place called Dushanbe. This, even though Dushanbe is much closer to Delhi than say Cochin where I live. The distance from Cochin to Delhi for a crow would be about 2,700 Kilometers, whereas the distance from Delhi to Dushanbe is half that, about 1330 Kilometres.

But I am not a crow and if I have to fly from Delhi to Dushanbe I have to first get a visa – which is the easy part I got in 48 hours online – and then fly from Delhi to Almaty, which is another 300 Kilometres north of Dushanbe, and double back that 300 Kilometres south to Dushanbe. Or travel to Tashkent, the Capital of Uzbekistan which is 250 Kilometres north-west of Dushanbe and then fly that extra distance back to Dushanbe.

I had chosen the Tashkent route.

Tashkent has a special fascination for me. It was in Tashkent that our PM Lal Bahadur Shastri – who had decisively won the 1965 war with Pakistan for us – had died. The 1965 war was, like others of its genre, a Pakistani misadventure that its then Prime Minister General Ayub Khan had started through invading our Rann of Kutch.

After winning the war, Lal Bahadur Shastri had, at the invitation of the then USSR, gone to Tashkent to secure the peace. A day after signing a peace deal with Pakistan in Tashkent, an agreement that came to be known as the Tashkent Peace Accord, Lal Bahadur Shastri died of a heart attack. I do not generally believe in conspiracy theories but it always seemed such a strange coincidence that our Prime Minister should have died just like that, so suddenly after having signed the peace deal. Leaves me wondering if there was more to his death.

With that fascination for Tashkent, I had chosen the Tashkent route to reach Dushanbe. The flight, a sparse Uzbekistan Airlines Jet, landed in Dushanbe past midnight. The airport was small but well kept. Even at that midnight hour, it was crowded many times beyond capacity, not with passengers but with their relatives and friends and well-wishers and a whole lot of others who had come to receive or see them off. As in India, there were warm home-coming hugs and kisses and tearful goodbyes. Equally familiarly, taxi drivers accosted me for my custom. I could have been in any of the airports in the smaller towns of India. Or in Delhi, before Terminal 3 was built.

The first surprise had come at the emigration. The officer looked at my passport and looked up at me and asked 'Name, es te?'. I thought he was asking me my name, no doubt to make sure that I was not a smuggler impersonating me. I said as politely as I could that my name was Joseph. He shook his head and repeated, 'Name es te'. Having slept through the flight, groggy and tired, it took me more than a few seconds to realise what he was saying. He was wishing me 'Namaste'.

They love India, Indians even more. But most of all, they love Indian movies. If there was another superlative I could come up with, I would say they love old Bollywood songs the most. And they sing it so well too, certainly much better than I can.

Dushanbe sits on the river Varzob, and there is a town by the same name some 40 Kilometres upriver from Dushanbe, that has developed into a tourist spot. The river which is quite small by Indian standards, is however very full and quick flowing, with very strong currents. It cuts through rocks, hills and mountains on its way down from the upper heights. There is a quickly developing picnic spot beyond Varzob town where the 15-room hotel I stayed in Dushanbe arranged a day trip for me. The manager of the hotel arranged the car with a driver and a hamper with lunch. And he insisted on coming along with me as my guide.

The driver turned out to be a young woman in her early 30s! When she realised that I was from India, she took out a cache of old Bollywood songs and blared them out one after the other like a Disc Jockey, from one of the most powerful car stereos that I have ever listened to. Then, with the glass window on the driver's side pulled down – they drive on the wrong side of the road there, the right side – she stretched her left hand out of the window and let the onrushing wind caress her arm and palms, which was okay, but when those hit numbers from DDLJ came up, she turned 180 degrees around to face me – I was sitting right behind – and began to act and dance out the song sequence, taking off even that one right hand on the steering. She had a very expressive face and could have easily found a role in a Bollywood movie. And I would have loved to watch her. But the car was moving at a good 110 Kilometres/hour along a winding uphill road. My heart sank, and my eyes were fixed on the road ahead watching the oncoming traffic. I could not show her my anxiety, for here she was, showing off her love for India and its songs, putting on her best dancing driver's moves for me. Torn between not wanting to dampen her enthusiasm for Bollywood, and my fear of oncoming death, I tightened my seat belt and squirmed in my seat. That was a wrong move, for she thought I was dancing in my seat too, and redoubled her dance moves with her face turned towards me, with dangerous enthusiasm.

How could I tell her that driving and dancing don't mix?

Thankfully, I remembered the ruse that I had often used as a kid on our annual summer drive from Madras to Kerala. My mother who had just got her license would insist on driving part of the way. My father would have to give up his driver's seat for her (pun intended) and sit on the pillion seat beside her. But he would be incessantly jittery about her driving and incessantly keep telling her what to do and what not. Side-seat driving, if ever there was one! A holy row would soon ensue between the two of them. Peace would prevail when over their duel I would shout that I was hungry. My mother would then soon stop the car under the nearest tree and open the lunch hamper she had brought along. After the feed, my father would be back in the driver's seat and peace would prevail.

The ruse worked with my dancing driver too. I said I was hungry and could we stop and have our lunch? The manager who was sitting in the front seat and was more scared than I was, immediately asked her to stop at the next rest area on the road. Like my mother, after lunch, she did not insist on dancing while driving.

Tajikis love India. And every Tajiki knows Amitabh Bachhan, Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan. Their love for Bollywood is gender-neutral. They love Sridevi, Karishma, Madhuri, and Deepika just as much as they love Amitabh Bachhan.

I had landed in Dushanbe on a Saturday morning. The following day I decided to attend a Sunday Mass. I searched for a church on google and realised that in a population of about 800,000, Dushanbe has less than 3,000 Christians, of which Catholics like me would be about a hundred. And that there was only one Catholic Church in the city, the St. Joseph's church.

The Sunday morning mass in that Church was in Russian, as most of the Christians in Dushanbe, as well as in Tajikistan, are descendants of Russians whom the former Communist USSR – of which Tajikistan was a 'Soviet Socialist Republic' – deported to this place, far off from Moscow, for being religiously inclined. With that previous Communist background and being an overwhelmingly Muslim country, it is no surprise that the Christian population here is tiny.

I counted. There were just 43 persons for the Mass that Sunday morning. And yet the Mass was celebrated by the Russian speaking Argentinian Priest with great solemnity and majesty as if he had a congregation of thousands in front of him.

What was most amazing to me was to see in the Church that Sunday morning, the Indian Sari, white and blue in colour, worn the traditional Bengali way, by two nuns of the Missionaries of Charity. Neither of them were Indians, one was a Rwandan and the other was from Madagascar.

It was heart-warming that Mother Teresa had brought the Indian sari and her Indian sense of service to the poor, to a landlocked, far away land like Tajikistan, and that too, through distant Rwanda and Madagascar.

India in Tajikistan did not end there.

Visiting the Hisor Fort, 30 Kms west of Dushanbe, which my manager-cum-guide explained was 3,000 years old, was another experience altogether. What absorbed me was not the Fort itself – majestic though it was – but what seemed like a wedding baaraat with girls, boys and uncles and aunts, all-dancing on the road to Bollywood music and leading the bride and groom up to the ramparts of the Fort. Though the groom was not on a horse and the bride also joined in the procession, otherwise, it could have been straight out of a Delhi baaraat. Seeing an Indian face taking photos, they insisted I join in the dance. I did. I felt I was in Delhi.

What is most ubiquitously Indian in Tajikistan is the way the Tajiki women dress. They wear what seems like salwar kameez, except that the salwar does not come down to the ankles, but comes only up to 6 to 12 Centimetres above the ankle.

Dushanbe could be mistaken for Delhi. Even the temperature there was a hot Delhi-like 40 degrees Celsius.

India also has a very strong diplomatic, cultural and political presence in Tajikistan. We even have an Air Base at Farkhor, some 130 Kilometres south-east of Dushanbe, India's first airbase outside the country.

There is much more India in Tajikistan than perhaps in India itself.

(The author is a former Indian and UN Civil Servant. He belongs to the 1978 batch of the IAS and worked with the ILO in India and abroad for 20 years. The views expressed are strictly personal)