A JOURNEY TO KASMU

A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY TO KASMU

By Ajit Chaudhuri – August 2013

Introduction: This note is about a visit to Kasmu, Estonia, on 27^th April 2013.

I will begin with events in the early 1930s, when a young lady in a coastal village in the country of Estonia was the object of attraction for the village adventurer. Her parents, obviously not enamoured of the prospects of this relationship, decided to circumvent things by sending her to London to learn English. The law of unintended consequences duly applied, she met an Indian medical student while in London, and they fell in love and subsequently married in 1935. They returned to India in 1938, the young medical student (by then a doctor) joined the Indian Army Medical Corps and rose to become a General, and they had four children – the youngest of whom is my mother. They retired in the town of Dehradun, and he died in 1985, a little after their 50^th wedding anniversary. She lived on till 1996, never visiting her village or her country (which in 1940 became part of the Soviet Union) again.

I was close to my maternal grandparents and spent a lot of time with them (and later with my grandmother). They were typical grandparents, I suppose – I was always sure of my welcome, and there was always something good to eat in the house. My grandfather was a typical military patriarch, and the only thing distinguishing my grandmother from a fairly typical Bengali housewife was her light hair and blue eyes. The eldest of my sisters, who was also close to them, said that she also had a certain northern coldness – my grandfather was always delighted at my unannounced visits, but like all Bengali men did nothing in the house; my grandmother was never so overtly happy at them, but did all the work, the additional cooking, cleaning and bed making, that made me comfortable. It was only when she took out her photo albums and showed us pictures from her childhood that we actually saw her animated.

She loved showing these old black and white photos of her family and friends, and talking about her childhood in the village Kasmu, her school and the various cultural performances she took part in, and the times spent playing on the rocks along the shores of the Baltic Sea with her friends Sigrid and Jus. She talked about the Sea School in Kasmu, where her father and most men in her family had trained to become ship captains. She talked about her visits to Tallinn, the country’s capital city, usually done in an overnight sleigh ride, with all the wonderment of a village child seeing the big city lights. She also saved up, to my grandfather’s amusement, a Reader’s Digest article about Ahto Walter, her adventurer admirer, who went on to set records in Atlantic crossings. Estonia, in her descriptions, was a land of milk and honey.

The entrance to the Sea School (now Museum) at Kasmu 

But there was sadness in her tone as well. She could never go back – the independent Estonia she had grown up in did not exist – it was a corner outpost of the Soviet Empire. Her mother, father (who died early) and stepfather were all dead. Those of her relatives who could not escape to Finland or Sweden (both countries across the Baltic from Kasmu) and become refugees in foreign lands were systematically rounded up and shipped off to Siberia, where they died. There was nothing to go back to!

My maternal grandparents (large photo), the brothers Jakob and Alexander Kaskni (right) and Nadezhda

We, the elder grandchildren, did not think too much of it – Estonia was always some faraway place that our grandmother talked about, and nothing more. It was only when we saw her happiness at Estonia regaining independence in 1991 – we were delighted that it happened in her lifetime – that we realized that there was a side to her that we did not know at all. It was after her death that I decided that the journey to Kasmu was one pilgrimage I had to make.

The author in Tallinn

Visiting Estonia became a real possibility once it became a part of the Schengen Agreement (this enables visa-free travel within member states), and I used the opportunity provided by a visa to visit Germany (and present a paper at an academic conference at Heidelberg University) to take a few days out for this. I tried to take my mother along (she has never been), but she demurred – she did the next best thing, however, and financed my trip (thanks Mum). I am not the first in the family to have been – my wife, two sisters, a niece and two nephews have preceded me there over the years. I arrived in Tallinn and spent a day acclimatizing to the late northern winter before making a day trip to Kasmu to see the house where she grew up in and the shores in which she played as a little girl, and to say a short prayer at her family graveyard (where her father, mother and relatives are buried) in the village. I was assisted in this endeavour by my cousins by marriage, Helve and Arvo Saat from Tallinn, who drove me there, took me around, translated for me, and then treated me to a damn good lunch before bringing me back to Tallinn. Many thanks to them! All photos are by Arvo, and, for the curious among you on these matters, the glamorous lady by my side in some of them is Helve.

Helve and I at the door of the Sea School

Kasmu Itself: The journey to Kasmu is a beautiful and pleasant one – northeast along the highway to St. Petersburg, and then a turn westward just before Rakvere to the Baltic coast – traversing temperate forests and the Lahemaa National Park area before hitting the coastline and the two adjacent villages of Vosu and Kasmu. Visiting the region was forbidden during Soviet rule for its proximity to Finland. In April, it was a sleepy little village with no restaurant, but I am told that things liven up in the summer months, when it becomes a tourist hotspot and also the venue of an annual music festival.

The Sea School: It is here that I met my cousin Arne Viik, who runs the Kasmu Museum that was the Sea School in my grandmother’s times. Her father, Alexander Kaskni, was both a graduate of the school and later its principal, and it is here that she was born. During the Soviet years, the building was taken over by the Soviet border guards and used as a barrack.

Cousin Arne showing me photos of our common ancestors

The museum itself is a fascinating place that records Kasmu’s relationship with the sea with dedication and commitment. Cousin Arne was in the process of writing a history of the Sea School and a record of the many sea captains who had studied here, and he mentioned that one of the few of whom he had no photos was Justin Lyschak or my grandmother’s cousin and childhood playmate Jus. I was delighted to arrange for a photo, available with my Aunt Niila in England, so that Uncle Jus was appropriately recorded in the book.

Captain Justin Lyschak or Uncle Jus, who lived a life less ordinary

I also discovered that my grandfather had visited here with my grandmother in the 1930s, and had introduced himself to his family-by-marriage. He was the first dark skinned person to visit the village, and there was much curiosity about him at the time. Great-grandmother Nadezhda had already died by then, but she was famously quoted as saying "If I knew that Ira (my grandmother), who I sent to England to get away from the rascal Ahto Walter, would fall in love with an Indian, I would have let her marry Ahto!" before doing so.

My grandparents, photographed when they visited Kasmu in the mid-1930s

My grandmother had kept in touch with her friends, most of whom had settled in the USA, Canada and Sweden, over the years, and had shared photographs that eventually found their way into the Kasmu museum. It was especially touching to see photos of my own childhood, photos that I had thought were long lost , stored carefully here.

Looking out at the sea on one of the rocks I knew so well

From the Sea School, looking out into the Kasmu Harbour was a weird experience – I knew all the rocks from my grandmother’s photos and vivid descriptions, and I could almost see a young girl and her two friends jumping around on them. I went around the beach, climbed some of the rocks, and even wiggled my toes in the freezing Baltic waters.

A view of Kasmu Harbour from a window in the Sea School

The Kristenbrunn Residence: Alexander Kaskni died early, and his wife, my great-grandmother Nadezhda, subsequently married Eduard Kristenbrunn. My grandmother and her cousin Jus (Nadezhda’s sister and her husband both contracted TB early and gave Jus over to Nadezhda to bring up before they died) also moved to the Kristenbrunn residence. It is here that my grandparents stayed when they visited Estonia in the 1930s, which was to be my grandmother’s last visit to her watan. The residence is now a writers’ home, or a place that writers come to for prolonged periods of peace and quiet so that they can concentrate on their writing. When my sister, niece and nephews visited, cousin Aarne, who was taking them around, jokingly announced to the writers in residence that they would have to leave, the original owners of the building had come to reclaim the property. My wife, who travelled here with a friend while on an official visit to Sweden, even stayed the night here – she visited in mid-winter when nothing was open.

The Kristenbrunn residence

I was shown around by one of the writers in residence, who also asked me to write something in Hindi in the visitors’ book that they maintained.

Sitting at the table where my grandmother used to eat, with the writer in residence

The Family Graveyard: One of the things my grandmother had done, once it was possible to do (i.e. after the Russians had buggered off), was to have a proper gravestone put on her father’s and uncle’s graves. The graveyard is beside a Lutheran Church, reminding one of a time when Estonia was not the most non-religious country in the world (it is now). I did a round around the yard and spent some time reflecting by the graves of my ancestors.

A moment of reflection at Aleksander Kaskni's grave

The stone mentions Ira Kaskni-Roy on the right hand corner

Conclusions: The visit concluded with a wonderful lunch in the neighbouring village of Vosu, washed down with Estonian beer, and a drive on that beautiful road back to Tallinn. But I left wanting to do this again, with my children, and with the nephews who have yet to make the journey, so that they too recognize the part of themselves that is from this strange and faraway land, and so that they too are acquainted with that wonderful lady, my grandmother, and do not relegate her to just another name on a listing of ancestors. I hope that all her Indian descendants get to make this journey once in their lifetimes.