The Vladivostok bus turned a corner. It was one of the sleek new ones, no doubt bought with money funneled into the Pacific port city for an APEC summit a few years earlier. I fumbled with my puffer coat, searching for a pocket in which to deposit my spare rubles as I found a seat in the back. Someone’s phone rang out. It took me a few minutes to place the melody: a Hindi film tune from the 1951 movie Awaara (The Vagabond) starring Raj Kapoor, a suave Chaplinesque figure. Growing up, Mom often played a cassette tape containing this song: in the Camry as we ran errands around the Hudson Valley, or while I jumped on a mini-trampoline in the basement. The soundtrack was ambient company, as comforting as it was uninspiring. Kids outside the diaspora had NPR; I had Raj Kapoor’s Golden Collection, Vol. 3. Needless to say, I didn’t expect to hear a jaunty Bollywood track about being far from home while I was living in the Russian Far East. My eyes lingered on the rows of seats, scanning for the other Indian on my route. In my months in Vladivostok, I’d heard of exactly one in a city a bit smaller than Boston: he owned a restaurant and had “business dealings” in Bombay, according to Dima. I didn’t go out of my way to meet him. As I searched the bus, I noticed a man pressed up against the glass, his off-color military fatigues visible from where I sat. He was screaming “LYOSHA, PRIVET!” into his cellphone, and I realized the song was his ringtone. The man gestured to his phone and flashed an eyebrow at me.
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