Thoughts on Estonia - Encounter with the grey storm

Notes are ready, set and proper. Supper got cold. Again.

I was going to write on business Estonia, its booming startup ecosystem, things I saw on the events I visited, people I got to know.

But in the middle of it, my pen took a different turn. Thinking turned into feeling.

It has been 3 months since my arrival in Estonia. But the call came much earlier. In fact as early as my last 6 months in India. Something happened. Something snapped. I felt as if I was being kicked. Kicked out of India. As if India doesn’t want me anymore. I felt a call, an unusual urge. dubbed the feeling – A call from the North. A call from the lands of stillness.

The North is waiting.

I came to Estonia right before New Year. A true north unveiled. Baltic Sea on the verge of freezing. And with it, the colors I used to feel. The colors of India. A whole new spectrum of feelings welcomed me, as grey as the sky. Marvelous. Unique. Heavy, oh goodness, so heavy.

I think I chose the proper North. In the northern corner of Europe, pretty much away from the main trajectories of commerce and people. Estonia is scarcely populated, there is barely traffic jam even in Tallinn. I marveled at the space. I breathed deeply, the air was great. Old Town was my own only. Every cobble on Vanallinn was mine to invent.

Soon the storms arrived.

Cold Winter storms. They weren’t that violent. They were persistent. They just wouldn’t go away. You go to sleep hoping to sleep them over and here they are the next morning. You lock yourself in a basement bar in an old town, mug after mug, you go out with sleepy eyes and the storm… the storm is still there.

There is only this much you can resist. Eventually, you succumb. You surrender. You allow the storm in. This slow persistent storm of greyness neither white, neither black, definitely not of a rainbow. What on earth is this?

And then I felt fear.

Do you know what scared me? Something popularly dubbed as “drifting snow” when strong winds carry the snow horizontally. Why? I don’t know. Or perhaps I do. There is snow down south too. But it falls vertically from the sky to earth. You know where it comes from, you know where it goes. But that is not the case with drifting snow. It blows horizontally. It comes from nowhere and it goes nowhere. There is nothing poetic about it. It doesn’t come from abodes of gods and beauty; it doesn’t fall into the bosom of a new birth. It just goes from nowhere to nowhere. It has no beginning and no end. How can there be no beginning and no end? You there!? Have you ever felt that? Have you seen it how it looks with bare eyes? Imagine no beginning and no end.

Can you?

Nothing helped. Not the occasional hangouts with new friends. Not the beer bars. The hollow kept growing. There was no point resisting. This had to be let in completely.

I pulled back into silence and greyness. This was the North. This wasn’t the land of eternal dance and Leela. There is no dance here. Only stillness. The gods are different here. The truth is different. There are no reflections or shadows dragging after forms. Just the shadow itself. One big shadow. Everything belongs to that shadow. Everything is a shadow.

I too became a shadow.

Hollow. A bottomless pit. I spent late-night hours staring through the window at that horizontally flowing snow, that abomination. It enchanted me. It took my sleep away. The things I felt. Oh lord, the things I felt. A foray into a grey depth that was neither suffering nor joy. My body felt heavier with every next day. Should I visit a doctor?

I call myself a writer.

On that behalf, I started writing. Not to heal. But to comprehend – the tunnels that got unlocked. My fingers were shivering; the page was empty and I gasped for breath. Please take your grip off from me, lady shadow, just for a moment.

Somehow the words started flowing. I am fortunate. I can galvanize what wounds me into art. The more I wrote the more I cried.

And the people? Oh, the people! Icy and beautiful. Thick and chilling. Solid. Shadowy. Ghostly. Poetic. White. Dead-eyed Baltic stare. I’ve found Estonians…. So different. Here is the thing about them. You want to raise your hands from them. Give upon them. Stop trying. Leave. But you can’t.

I can’t……

Do you know why? Imagine a frozen lake. Then imagine frozen methane beneath the surface. Do you know how that looks like? The methane looks like translucent spheres suspended eternally. They turn the world below into a canvas. Subterranean heaven. An artwork. Something beautiful, differently beautiful.

That’s how I found Estonians so far. Like frozen methane lake. Thick iced on the outside, hiding suspended, translucent beauty on the inside. Beauty that is innocent, unstirred, dormant.

Ancient……

And that makes you want to persist until you reach there until you break that thick Baltic ice of theirs and crawl yourself there until your fingers bleed because something tells you there is a Promised land there. The fire must meet ice. One day water will reconcile them both.

I am finally reminded of a poem by Konstantin Miladinov one of Macedonia’s greatest poets of all time. In his youth, he goes to Moscow to study Slavic philology. The cruel winter of the North overwhelms Konstantin with nostalgia and he longs for Struga, in Western Macedonia, his birth town of outstanding beauty, romance and Mediterranean vibe.

Those were the days when he wrote one of his masterpiece poems “Longings for the South.” The structure is majestic, the words misty, rolling like pearls. But full of pain too. Now I understand what made him write that poem. I think I understand what he felt. And why he felt it.

But I am damned.

Unlike him, I felt no longing for any south, for any birthplace. I have no home. I know not where my escape lies so I can’t offer a prayer to it. I am here in the grey and somehow I feel there is no other place I ought to be.

Spring is breaking.

The winter that felt so long suddenly feels short. The great shadow that makes everything else ghastly pulls back and I can see forms. And the earth. The opaque side of the heart longs for lady shadow already. I miss her and I call for her, beg for her to show me the rest. If not her, who else? No one else goes there, no human or form.

But the time of the Sun has come once more and I must rejoice. I must wait.