A visit to Germany was nothing if not overdue, since I was born there and hadn’t been back for 37 years. This effectively meant that I knew nothing of the country, which had reportedly changed completely since I had my face ground in the schoolyard dust at age eight, by a blonde Aryan prototype called Torsten.
The way to go was obviously Economy Class. I mean, nobody was watching to see in what style I left India or arrived in Germany – Lufthansa could therefore take a wet hike. I picked FinnAir. The Mumbai-Berlin / Berlin-Mumbai ticket cost me 28,000 Indian rupees, and I was going to get to see Helsinki in Finland, too. That’s where I would be cooling my heels for six hours while I waited for my connecting flight to Berlin.
I was on my own, and not a little a scared… I was leaving Indian soil for the first time since I’d arrived almost four decades ago, and had a serious case of atavistic heebie-jeebies about it all. Icy xenophobia had filled my spine and made itself at home there, from the moment I arrived at Mumbai’s international airport. It was 11.30 p.m.
I had something like 300 Euros on me, and I wasn’t sure of my constitutional right about spending it ‘over there’. What if some pasty-faced ‘gora’ took one look at my Indian hands holding his country’s precious currency and called the cops, denouncing me as an infidel impostor? (I had yet to learn that money talks a universal language, and that people in Europe aren’t too choosy about whom they speak it with…)
I paid attention to the pre-takeoff drill as I’d never done before, expecting some drastically important additions to the usual ho-hum stuff because this was an international flight. I needn’t have bothered – same old drill, the performing Finnish stewardess looked as ready to chuck her job in mortification as any of the Indian ones I’d ever seen.
Once the flight took off, things became increasingly chilled out – many passengers stretched out over empty seat rows and went to sleep as though flying to another land was of no great import. It wasn’t, of course, but you’d have been telling that to the wrong guy, if you’d told it to me.
Maybe an hour and a half later, we were flying over Afghanistan. I work in real estate, and seeing those huge expanses of craggy land going waste made my bowels hitch and my heart ache. Afghanistan from the air looks like the skin of a weathered old crone in the last stages of dehydration. It went on for miles… and miles, and miles. Finally, I dropped off to sleep and awoke to the sight of an amazing green carpet of brown-tipped pine trees, with occasional specks of civilization scattered there like debris. We were about to land in Helsinki, Finland.
The air outside was cold, bracing and disconcertingly clean. Aren’t human beings supposed to spread the stink of technology as soon as they descend on any hapless location? The Finns don’t seem to have understood the true message of progress as yet. Vantaa Airport is amazingly modern, yet outrageously spotless. Pedestrian conveyor belts whisk in-transit passengers from point to point within this mind-blowing microcosm of steel, chrome and glass. The overall accent, of course, is on retail. There’s stuff on sale all over, including food with names that make the most merciless South Indian cuisine sound like amateur nursery rhymes.
Timidly, I took out my wallet and handed over a five-Euro note to buy coffee and a sandwich that may have contained elk meat, I’m not sure. I was ready to defend the fact that Indians are bonafide human beings and have the right to wield foreign exchange. The waitress handed me my change and didn’t call the cops. I was officially an accepted member of the international tourist sucker tribe! My heart swelled with pride and my gait assumed a cocky cant as I ambled over to the lounge near my departure gate.
The connecting flight to Berlin would arrive in four hours. Did I choose to sleep for the duration? Well, let me ask you this – you’re in a Sci Fi airport in a strange land. Nobody knows you, you know nobody. You have 300 Euros and a passport. You’re brown, everyone else is white and occasionally yellow.
Would you sleep? I took out a novel and kidded myself that I was reading.
x x x
The flight to Berlin was over before I knew it - of course, the different time zones screw with one’s mind. One shouldn’t harp on that fact too much, though. Jetlag is a very pretentious version of plain old disorientation, sort of like a migraine is a headache with attitude.
Flughafen (airport) Tegel glittered like a frosty diamond necklace in the night below. I was about to land in the country of my birth, but felt like a tawdry sightseer for all the difference it made deep in my guts, where it really matters…
The cold hit me like a runaway deep freezer. It suffused every pore and percolated down into my bones, proceeding to ice my marrow, and then my soul. It was August… an Indian should never have to be confronted by such cold, and definitely not in August. Jetlag? This was CLIMATE lag. My skin crawled but had nowhere to hide. And then, as I walked to the airport bus, something happened.
The Germanic barbarian (attuned to icy steppes, mammoths and opposing Hun factions) whose persona I’d shed thirty seven years before roused himself awake deep inside me and roared his defiance. He shed the impressions of thirty seven blazing Indian summers, kicked his long-somnolent metabolism into gear and laughed hoarsely at the cold. I was in Germany – and while my brain had been on a tropical vacation, my body suddenly bristled with inner resources of warmth and coping once more. By the time my mother hugged me at the luggage carousel, I was 100% home again.
Read the rest of Achtung Germany here..
