Maseh Hadaf``s Reflection- The Canary in the Metro

Written by Maseh Hadaf- JPC from UNDP Ukraine 

I have had many teachers here in Kyiv. Teachers of all ages and backgrounds, some whose lessons flew by me and others that to this day, are locked away.

My teachers are not all alive I’m afraid, some don’t even speak. Others are more articulate, some even tween, but the lesson is nested in what they don’t say. There is one teacher who shrieks every 3 minutes at rush hour, but no one really hears her.

I have lessons at 9 AM and 6 PM five days a week with the metro. The morning lesson is rather flexible, but I make up for it with an impressive punctuality in the evenings. For the equivalent of 40 Canadian cents, I get an economics lesson for all six senses. Like all keen students, impressing my teacher takes precedence over learning; economics is just another a bird course.

But elegant models of supply and demand don’t quite fly underground, and pigeons come down for some scraps only if they have to. Quite a few have to.

Some birds can’t leave, they’re caged underground. For freedom, some escape one cage to enter another, and others sing.

Two veterans, one with his amputated knee raised on a crutch holding a guitar, channel the rhythms of the phantom east. Under a sign that google-translates to ‘no commerce here’, an officer reprimands a balalaika-maestro for unlawfully profiting off his performance. Is there not a bigger, invisible commerce that caged him here?

My professors never told me how bad the economy smells. Or that GDP growth compresses bodies like a pack of sardines, except that we push and shove each other to get in the tin. Smiles are scarce, some are paying interest on sleep debts, rarely does anyone speak. Candy crush is the drug of choice, the colours and quick rewards, the curved lines and cheery sounds offer relief from the grinding Soviet machine; the irony is that they are equally ersatz. A younger me stopped playing when the colourful patterns played themselves in my dreams.

Every lesson starts and ends with shawarma and a sucker punch, a shawarma sucker-punch. Bracing is useless, the bleeding is internal. The tunnels leading to the metro are lined with booths, knick-knacks, an assortment of clothes on hangers nailed into cracks on the walls. At the end of the tunnel opposite the staircase I descend from, is one booth I must always pass by to get to and from the metro. There’s a young man there, he looks like me. I don’t speak Russian, he doesn’t speak English, but we both speak Persian. He starts before my lesson begins and leaves after my lesson is over. The sons of Termez and Kabul, in the darkness under Kyiv, one’s cage bigger than the other.

The metro is a cruel teacher. I have walked past a pregnant woman on her knees, I have denied the Roma child’s plea for a few pennies, I have refused almost everyday to buy the last batch of flowers that would send one babushka home early.

But it is the man in the shawarma booth that hurts me most. Did the flap of a butterfly separate our destinies? It is the vertigo of seeing in my brother’s eyes what my cage could have been that haunts me.