I was 11 when the Wall fell. In school in Bombay, we played Russian versus American. (The Russian planes invariably lost, developing horrific internal flaws, until some unhealthily-obsessed prodigy pointed out that the Indian air force flew them, and the Pakistanis flew American planes. The introduction of the nuances of Cold War alliances did put a bit of a crimp in simple childhood games.) In Delhi, we learned German from teachers from the GDR — stranded and confused after the Wall fell, like a consular representative from a Latin American country in which someone has pulled off a successful coup. And in Calcutta, surrounded by the imagery of Stalinism, reminded regularly that Lenin once — perhaps — said “the road to world revolution lies through Peking, Shanghai and Calcutta,” a ten-year old could slip into an easy internationalism, a sympathy with the plucky underdog Eastern bloc — something that has coloured Bengali thinking since, but more on that later.

And perhaps kids understood non-alignment best: if one parent was mean to you, there was always another.

The funny thing was, of course, that 1980s India shared something of the socialist shabbiness of the Eastern bloc. And that so often the spots of colour that relieved that drabness were actually provided by the Russians: ballet, bears on bicycles, and, of course, books. Cheap, colourful, hardbound books from Raduga and Progress, children’s stories and classics translated amateurishly from the Russian, shaped thousands of bookish childhoods. The Wall fell, and the Soviet Union soon thereafter, and now you see none, not even any in second-hand shops, because nobody wants to sell the ones they have. (They live on in at least one way: Indians born in the 1970s and 1980s can startle Russians anywhere by knowing the names of their favourite children’s authors.)

... contd.