Subhash Jaireth

And I used to feel it would be lovely to see how it all happens in Punjab.

real time, real place.

So perhaps this urge to go to Russia came after reading this wonderful book.

Like Dr. Zhivago, I first read Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, though I had heard about him in so-called samizdat, that is, in the university those days, typed copies of the manuscript were passed around.

So one of my friends gave me

the typed copy which I read and I was bowled over by the sheer imagination in that book.

Yes, some is that some, the Russian words mean self, is that means published.

So self-published in the sense lots of books which were banned were not easily available.

The lovers of those books would somehow type the whole manuscript, a few copies, and they will be passed around.

And if you had access to a typing machine and if you could help,

It was your duty, once you read it, to type a few pages so that other people can add to it, so that a new copy is generated.

So each reader or a couple of readers used to multiply the number of copies in circulation.

And it's a very strange system.

When I now think about it, that in that very controlled system where even owning a typing machine was looked at with suspicion, people did manage to get photocopies.

Those days we call it Xerox.

copies done somehow, and such copies used to multiply and go around in the cities, in the whole city, and you used to have contacts and you could get access to those copies.

Yeah, there are two strands in this novel.

There are two stories.

See, Bulgakov, Mikhail Bulgakov, was born in Kyiv.

So he was by birth Ukrainian, not by ethnicity, but by birth he was Ukrainian.