Rationalizing revisiting
The first time you visit a place, you know it by sensory perception – it feels like concrete, smells like grass, tastes like fermented fruit. The second time is like eating the entire fruit, pips and all; the hard skin, the bitter seeds, the juicy bits that disappear so quickly. Then it seems miraculous that your initial contact could have been so light, getting just the tasting notes. This time around your nose is buried in the ground, and you go home with dirt in your nails and a sense of bewildered submission.
The third time, on the other hand, is open to multiple interpretations. The journey itself doesn’t hold that sense of flinging caution to the winds. You might even compromise, have a back-up plan, consider issues of finance and security – all an insult to the high-flown efforts of your first time.
Definitions
Balkanize|ˈbôlkəˌnīz|
verb [ trans. ]
divide (a region or body) into smaller mutually hostile states or groups.
The famous hostility of the Balkan states makes life especially hard for the aimless Indian traveler. Every state in the former Yugoslavia is now a separate and formerly or currently hostile state or group, and there seem to be many more within, ready to break out and form territories smaller than the Vatican. Though with a crude dissimilarity of power quotient in comparison to the land where the Popemobile runs. What you should actually do, someone told me once, is eat kebabs in Sarajevo, drink the deliciously light-headed Macedonian wine, meander through grim mountains, stolid plains and insouciant coastlines.
The peculiarity of these hostile groups or states is that while they grimly nod at each other for visa-free travel, the neutral Indian traveler must cross every new formation of border, every new redefining of boundaries that recreated the former Yugoslavia. Here’s an ironic thought – even as the Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Montenegrins etc chew the cud of their wars and drink the bitter cup of memory-drenched rakija, it’s the Indian traveler who experiences in all its entirety the fragmentation of the Balkans. Borders seem to pop up even as we set out on a small walk to stretch our legs. We are obliged to acknowledge the Balkan estrangement from the rest of Europe, which is in a state of happy unification in the same way that families go on vacation together – in distress and carrying vast amounts of first aid.
So, visiting Serbia, a large part of what I feel is incompleteness. I would like to see Bosnia, Macedonia, Slovenia, Croatia, in one long stretch of isolated endeavor. I would like to cross the land borders as naturally as my warring associates, but instead I’m trapped into restricted travel on this unrestrained, boisterous landscape.
The overwhelmingly flat plains of Vojvodina
Which land in the world is most conducive to the wearing of high heels? In Novi Sad, which is sometimes called the ‘capital’ of Vojvodina, the streets are eminently decorated with short skirts and shoes that could strike through your heart. Stilettos, pumps, boots, wedges, click through pavements that are shaded by bountiful leafy trees, and straining calf muscles call your attention in every café where you beach yourself against the growing summer heat.
The women of Novi Sad are famed for their numbers and their statistics (1:3, man is to woman). Their ratio and proportion. Their inches and degrees. In that sense, when you enter Novi Sad without a penis, you become a disruption, a further anomaly in the statistics, a dangerous offender by number. Be armed with a cold heart and a happy capacity for voyeurism.
Night is the main attraction of Novi Sad. Night to stalk, night to crawl, night to explore intimately, through drunken roadside regaling and lonely walks of 2 am sulking. If night in India is a net and every step forward is further entrapment, night in Novi Sad is for restless wandering, for physical contact with invitingly open streets, pavements, bushes and tree trunks.
The cycle of club-hopping that you can engage with – from outdoor-seated staring at the High Heels of Vojvodina to thumping disco balls to quavering folk-singer-laden traditional drunkenness – has only one point for me, and that’s to find more and more ways of doing exactly what your mama warned you not to do – stay out too late. Walk back home in the night, in an inebriated state. It might seem juvenile to do something just because you can, but the great longing that so many years of can’t brings about in you… Every other night, I insist on a midnight walk, a pointless visit to the all-night store, like in other times immigrants visited hypermarkets to stare at the sheer availability of produce.
The village where Kusturica wasn’t
Kusturica’s village is in Mokra Gora, which translates to Wet Hill. Every time I hear this name I think of Vattakanal, close to Kodaikanal, where the hills are literally drenched with almost eight months of rain, if the weather is working like it should. Wet grass, wet trees, wet feet and that heavy dark green of rainy forest.
Close to Mokra Gora is a town called Uzice. Here, they say the economy is in a depressing state, even in comparison to the crumbling liberalization of the rest of Serbia. Which means the prices are low, the air is crisp and the energy is buoyant. Janis Joplin’s band played at the cultural center here, and we take the stage they once occupied to begin a parade and end a show, before we settle down to tourism.
We stay in a hotel that should have been in a movie. We are on the 12thfloor, but the lift door spontaneously opens many times along the way – sometimes to complete darkness, sometimes to abandoned construction, sometimes to ghostly still hotel floors, sometimes to a blank wall. The bathroom has a large hole in the wall, punched in by something big and green, probably. All the corridors seemed to turn treacherously into blind alleys where we expected to see our feet disappearing into another dimension. This is the kind of hotel that tempts you to hold hands and keep close together.
Kusturica’s village, on Mokra Gora, is very close to Uzice. I’m tired of my tiresome hardcore traveling. I want to do something outrageously kitsch, and going to Kusturica’s village was all that. Emir Kusturica, film director, two-time winner of the Palme d’Or, is one of the former Yugoslavia’s most famous personalities. Of course, I watched Underground before I went to Serbia the first time. Yet, his Mokra Gora enterprise wasn’t the filmy kitsch I imagined. It was more a sort of passive rendition of Kusturica’s vague interests (Maradona on one wall), his work (Johnny Depp on another wall) and principles (the search for the authentic Serbia, the caricature of the Balkan sentiment, a ‘prison’ with George Bush peering out of the bars).
There are log houses, log bars, a little log windmill and a tiny log church where you can buy souvenirs. Kusturica, we decided, was in another village, drinking free rakija and eating some of that famous Serbian roast pork. Having created a purely artificial authentic Serbian experience, he was off having a real authentic Serbian experience. I insisted on buying souvenirs, drinking in the log bar and looking for the sheep, which were mentioned on the map, which, regrettably, we didn’t find.
In another authentic Balkan experience, much more ironic in the light of all the past processes of Balkanization, Kristian, who I am traveling with, left his phone on the bus, which had reached Bosnia by the time we figured it out. So, after spending a couple of hours in Kusturica’s village, we walked to Bosnia. One and a half hours along the highway. Motorcycle gangs went past waving cheerily. Cars sped by, but we didn’t see a single bus along the way – something we noted with weary depression, because that meant the same walk back. The hills are like the pictures in my copy of Heidi, but there is an overpowering echo, which is so prompt that you start expecting it to come before the noise. I realize that even in Novi Sad, the echo from traffic on the roads is almost unbearable. Why are echoes so loud in the Balkans? I wonder if it has something to do with the rock. My question is written off as a peculiar question, and I haven’t found an answer yet.
The light-heartedness of kitsch flowerpots
When you are in India, there are two ways to go into a bar. One is to go into some overly-decorated, overpriced, offensively noisy place where you drink like a Cosmopolitan. The other is to be a man. The middle access is the best thing about bars in Serbia, where there is no such thing as a café. And the best thing about Serbia is wayside bars, charmed by flowerpots dangling from the roof and lining the entrance, and the flowers are so bright, the colours are so kitsch, purple and white and red and blue but what outrageous contrasts. They fill you with good humour, they lighten up your alcoholic intake and they invite you to linger into the evening in summer when the pollen rises.
Coming back from the Bosnian borderline, we heard gunshots in the air. We stopped at a sweet little flower-embellished bar on the highway and heard that the owner was shooting on the hills, as his wife had just given birth to a child. Drinks on the house. Kusturica should have included this experience in his authentic village.
The everlasting evening and the interminable night of Serbia
Days are longer in summer, and in Serbia summer days are so much longer than back home. Like a sloth moving across the forest floor, like a great humpback whale doing a slow turn in the ocean, the sun makes a three-hour-long, leisurely journey to the horizon. At around 5 pm the shadows fall, and then they grow, and then they stretch across the landscape. At around 9 pm the last speck of sunlight fades out and the Serbs slowly wake up to face the day/night.
They don’t sleep at night here. First the streets start to crawl with pub-goers. Then they start to hop between pubs. Then the gangs of teenage boys move through the streets, looking for mean trash cans to overturn and lamp posts to beat up. Then the neighborly interactions begin, hours of chatting through open windows. Then the Hollywood blockbusters, pirated and screened by the neighbour with the big screen TV, followed by shifty-eyed porn-viewing. Many hours of this long night are spent online – why did the web trap so many Serbs in its twisting unrelenting skeins?
I remember when the internet first came to India; download speeds were so low that I immediately dismissed it as a waste of time. While I was sleeping, however, the speed shot up – to a slight increase – and my brother spent hours turning himself into the first generation of web daysleepers. This was a divided time, before grandmothers were skyping new additions to the family. The world was splitting into those who stayed awake to stay online and those who gave it up as a bad job and went to sleep.
These surfing nightcrawlers had a glazed look about their eyes, as those who had seen something the rest of us hadn’t. We nightsleepers had a shuttered look in our eyes, like we didn’t believe whatever it was they were seeing was worth the effort. Even as we succumbed to getting email ids, skype ids, and whatever else, this resistance created an economy in us. We used the internet in a business-like fashion. Outside, screens were lighting up with much more than a news article that might be of use. They were glowing with a self-justifying presence. They were radiating a life that didn’t need to be contextualized off the screen, to be given meaning.
Somehow, Serbia skipped the debate and dived straight into daysleeping. Why? I found myself looking up post-war post-traumatic stress disorder and insomnia (online) to get inside the heads of my restless neighbours. Yes, it could be one of the possible answers, another could be the lack of physical mobility i.e. ‘real’ travel, another could be the nightly bombings courtesy NATO that the youngsters added to their techno rhythms in clubs and the elders and wisers rushed into the countryside to avoid. For whatever reason, Serbia never sleeps, except when the sun is shining. All-night supermarkets, clerked by tired young people with a jaded freshness, are visited on the hour, every hour. Sleep comes on the other side of the earth’s axis.
Rakija and the art of identity formation
Rakija is perhaps one of the most definitive smells of Serbia. Before that first trip, in a dorm room in Lucknow, I caught a whiff of it and you might say I followed it halfway across the world. Of course, very few things can be as bewitching as that introductory note, but she has since only revealed layers of charms. Made from subtle yet eloquent fruits – peaches, pears, plums, quince – rakija is the subject of a heady competition in establishment of identity.
What are the wares you peddle when you sell yourself? Serbia, Croatia and Montenegro have a lot in common, which means they compete fiercely over similar identities. Since none of them can deny that the other makes and drinks rakija, the competition is in the strength of the affection, the alcohol capacity, the wildness of the intake.
For example – at a photography workshop I conducted, a bunch of twenty-somethings met across their war-torn borders – Albanians, Croatians, British, French and a mostly MIA Serbian group. Every group makes a ‘country’ night – with a PPT of hastily-downloaded Wikipedia basics and a taste of the local liquor or food. True to type, the British group generated the conflict. They started a competition on who could yell loudest. The only two groups which really competed were the Serbs and the Croats. For some inexplicable reason, perhaps an unavoidable British instinct for manipulation of warring identities, they insisted on a replay, and the Croats won, and there was some genuine bad feeling and muttering among the Serbs. Of course, Serbian night and Croat night were identically charmingly ingenuous, unabashedly casual and all about rakija. It’s easy to see why they don’t make friends and make up, even if they do make love once in awhile.
In Montenegro, my landlord who is a Serb refugee from Croatia, makes what his wife calls the best domaci rakija– and it is. Made from grape, which is normally not my favourite, it maintains a deceptive snake-like smoothness all the way down your throat and then slowly warms your chest and belly. The bottle from which it is poured also houses a wooden cross. You cannot help but add a mystical connection, though this is a local tradition that I haven’t seen elsewhere. I notice the glorious pride Mira takes in Drago’s rakija-making. In other worlds, women would be mentioning their husbands’ recent job promotions in such voices. It was a perfect moment when we communally appreciated his grape rakija, home-made, poured from a bottle with a wooden cross.
The wild nature of Montenegrins
They say that Montenegrins are among the tallest people in the world. Their lanky legs have to cover what look like the most inhospitable mountains in the world. Habitation is clustered in valleys and along the coastline, but when you cross over the border from Serbia to Montenegro you see the terrifying black mountains in all their craggy, lonely glory. There doesn’t seem to be an inch of space to settle down, take a breather, build a hamlet or cluster a village. Every spot is both a rock and a hard place. Like many crooked fingers; witches’ noses, the mountains glare down at you, crawling along in your little bus or train.
Out on the coastline the human spirit rules in gay defiance. Tourists stretch out on towels like they never went through the existential crisis of traveling through those mountains. The Montenegrins tower among them in grim humour – six-inch heels accompany six-feet-tall women, their legs scissoring along the coastline with stiletto sharpness.
Night in Montenegro has a mad spark you won’t find in Serbia. Something untamed and unexpected lurks in the corners of your pleasant seaside holiday. You develop a sort of apologetic sense of tourism, as you approach waiters and supermarket owners and implore them to permit your custom. It’s a fallacy, though, to be a tourist in Montenegro. This is not a seascape, it’s a lake of ominous stillness trapped in the tail of a serpent of mountains. The deep Boka Bay is a place for adventurous sailors to lose their past and get washed up on the quintessential port of Kotor, where the cobbles look like they grew out of the sea and were incorporated by humans into their complex machinations.
The unpredictability of the Montenegrin temperament lends itself to odd occurrences – a reiki massage from a passing healer on the street (free) and a policeman who tells a street entertainer that he can work if he just stops wearing offensively coloured costumes. It makes you wonder just how much adaptation tourism can generate. I remember the hybrid language of tour guides in Nepal, with a casual note of Aussie thrown in to reassure and bemuse the unsuspecting traveler, the multilingual ten-year-old touts of Hampi, the Jamaican-edged Rastafarians of Gokarna, the polite, withdrawn notes of Tibetan refugee café-owners in Mcloedganj. What seething undercurrents pass over these open waters of language? Montenegrins, mainly, struggle with their English. Perhaps this brings them closer to the surface, unwashed by those inconstant waves of cultural openness.
Exit and the division of society
Every year, Exit, a music festival, takes over the city of Novi Sad. Every road is an arrow leading to the fortress, the citizens brush up on their English vocabulary, and bars open their sociable arms to the music-festival-trippers. All of Europe stumbles down to the back end of the Balkans to listen to EDM, metal, ethnic and the rock of the MTV era. By a strange, unimaginable quirk of life, I have a performer’s pass, as an enterprising Kristian proposes human statues for free, in the moribund ‘fun zone.’ We are barcoded for four days. Our wrist bands cannot be removed, not even in the shower. Is it an experiment on the limits of human tolerance? But something else is buzzing in the air, as we discover after the acquisition of our dog-tags.
The land is divided. There are those with wristbands and those without. A month before it all began, most conversations started with ‘are you going for Exit?’ But you must understand, this is not a conversational question. It’s a statement of the self, of the societal space, of the capacity to earn and to spend, of the willingness to save and to lose, of the desire to maintain a face in the face of such massive expenditure as would bring Axl Rose to Novi Sad. There are Exit-goers, Exit-watchers from outside the gates, Exit-haters crowding the bars, Exit-hopers on the sidelines… The wristband that you cannot remove establishes your monetary status much sooner than the phone you pull out of your pocket. Of course, in providing free entertainment, and therefore getting in free, we slip between those lines. We sneak in through the cracks. This is a happy thought, and I watch Duran Duran, New Order, Erykah Badu and the new/old era of Guns n Roses aka Axl in wicked glee. And remember the days when MTV came to India.
A time when I waited for weeks for Frente’s version of Bizarre Love Triangle to play. Watched Ordinary World and felt a sense of longing like a great vacuum in the sky. Dreamt of leather and long hair, boots and scarves, the paraphernalia of childhood fancies.
For those three days, safe in the fortress of Exit, among the chilly rocks, watching the river below, all those songs filled the air again, like ghosts from the past that had suddenly become real.
