A Lithuanian Diary

THE HEART OF Vilnius is as quiet as a heartbeat. The streets do not scream, which can be disquieting for someone who has taken a flight from Delhi. Cars adopt the demeanour of their drivers. No one is in a hurry except the tweens who race their electric bicycles against themselves, heading nowhere. Vilnius has the touch of a weekend all week. Delhi would find the capital of Lithuania incongruous, indecipherable, mysterious, and possibly indigestible, until of course Indians hit the cake shops. Once sugar in its infinite variety finds its way to the palate all else is forgiven.

If the capital is quiet, the villages are silent. The soft silence is a gentle metaphor for a nation that believes in calm after having suffered the various forms of hell that a small nation suffered in the oppressive age of European feudalism followed by subjugation in the last vast empire of world history, the Soviet Union, touched by the icy shivers of the Cold War. Like all empires the Soviet disguised their domination in the garb of benevolence. If Comrade Vladimir Lenin had paid half the attention to the Bible as he paid to Das Kapital, he would have discovered that Lithuania does not live by bread alone.

Rusnė is a seaside city borrowed from fiction in summer and burdened with fact in the long winter. July is high summer. Nature imitates art. The sun rises long before people and refuses to leave the party in the skies even after a slow seventeen-hour swim across the light blue sky-ocean, eventually sinking with a glowing red reluctance in a salubrious twilight.

The same sun limps like an injured grandfather blanketed by snow and driven by wind when the year has aged into winter, but who thinks of age in the embrace of youth? The summer breeze is a zephyr talking to leaves who answer in a swaying whisper. Daisies speckle the green and glowing land, white roses sit atop their bush in the garden, a river flows with quiet dignity below the grassy slope, the restaurant is alive with the happy chatter of holidays. Just in case I felt nostalgic, a few flies tested the fragility of my face, and then invited themselves to lunch. The coffee was safe. Rusnė’s flies do not like coffee.

We are here at the invitation of my friend Laimonas Kelpsa, who is celebrating a unique episode in the complex annals of great men, the unique friendship between the Indian in a dhoti that never crossed his knees and a Lithuanian architect in a suit that wandered up to the ankles. Mohandas Gandhi reached South Africa in the last decade of the 19th century in search of a career; Hermann Kallenbach, from Rusnė, went to that distant land in search of refuge from the pogroms against Jews. Both challenged the evil of racism, not least through their extraordinary friendship. Kallenbach might have come with Gandhi to India after 1915 but was prevented from doing so because of the strictures of World War I since his birthplace was East Prussia and hence German at the time. He died in 1945 at the age of 74 in Johannesburg, two years before Gandhi destroyed the era of European colonialism by leading the liberation of India.

The evening programme begins at the village hall after the skies have cleared their throat with uproarious thunder. A mayor beams with local pride and national generosity. Foreign policy mandarins give speeches to a warm audience and awards to each other, joyous MCs chase protocol out of the hall with enthusiastic élan, and a splendid local quartet ends formal proceedings with mellifluous buoyancy, even as they startle me with two Hindi film song hits, one from 2017 which I had never heard of, and another from 1960 which I will never forget. Lata Mangeshkar would have been pleased to be in Rusnė in July 2025 to hear the fast beat and Lithuanian accents in the European recreation of her immortal lament from the film Dil Apna aur Preet Parai:

Ajeeb dastan hai yeh, kahan shuru kahan khatam,/ Yeh manzilen hain kaun si, na tum samajh sakey na hum.

I am reluctant to mix politics with music, but there is a simile somewhere in the lines that could address the uncertainty enveloping the region as war devastates Ukraine and hovers over the Baltics. Go on the wrong side of the lapping waters around Rusne and reach Russia. History is a strange story in which light and shadows chase each other. Yeh roshni ke saath kyon dhuan utha chiraagh sey…Why did this smoke arise out of the flame?

I was suddenly reminded, from some unconscious layer of memory wrapped in vague context, of that whimsical old poem learnt once upon a time:

Yesterday upon the stair I met a man who wasn’t there/ He wasn’t there again today. I wish I wish he’d go away./ When I came home last night at three,/ The man was waiting there for me./ But when I looked around the hall/ I couldn’t see him there at all.

Russia is the man upon the stair, flitting through every hall in the consciousness of Eastern Europe.

There are some memories in which the 20th century is a mere modern blip. Some 16 kilometres from Vilnius is the village of Forty Tatars, born in the late 14th century when the Tatar Tokhtamysh Khan (Khan means leader of a tribe or clan), a warrior of the Golden Horde, took refuge here with his remaining followers after being defeated. This is where the advance of the Mongol Golden Horde into Europe ended. The Grand Dukes had only one demand: military service. They knew the core skill of the nomadic conquerors who once ruled the land from the coast of the Pacific to Central Europe. The word horde and Urdu/Ordu, the Indian language, come from the same root: ord, meaning camp and denoting people who live in tents. When the Mongol advance terrified the Europeans, the cry would go up from their watchtowers: The ord are coming! The Mongols became the dreaded hordes.

Legend is the popular version of the past, and legend tells us that the then ruler of Lithuania gifted land to the Muslim Tatars and encouraged them to increase their numbers. One Tatar had 10 sons each from his four wives, and they settled down in the village of Forty Tatars on a small hill, built in the manner of steppe settlements with irregular streets and sporadic homes, all of them destroyed by Soviet uniformity

in the communist definition of progress. The original name of the village was Kyrk, or forty. In 1939, it became Keturiasdesimt Totriy.

Our hosts were Fatima Buinovska, Zita Milkamanovic and Adas Jakubauskas, who are the doyens of the village. They showed us the mosque, on the site of the first one built in 1430; Napoleon’s army destroyed the mosque on its way to Moscow, where the Russians destroyed the French in their usual strategic sequence of defeat, retreat, replenishment, resurgence, and eventual victory. Communists shut down the place of worship since Karl Marx was their preferred god. It was reopened in October 1993. It is the only mosque in Lithuania with a mihrab or niche showing the direction of Mecca. The Tatars are Sunni Muslims but respect their Shia brethren by extending the list of first Imams to Hasan and Hussain, the children of Hazrat Ali.

Fatima and Zita are guardians of tradition in Tatar robes, hats and purveyors of ancestral food. Zita is also a great rider on a motorbike, entering competitions and events. Adas gently suggests that we must finish the delicious repast of samosas and pastries that they have prepared before 1.30, when Friday prayers begin.

European feudalismHermann KallenbachLithuaniaMohandas GandhiRusnėVilnius