What we bring with us when we leave

Being Indian in Germany

Namaste from India everyone,

I arrived in New Delhi having jumped through all the testing, vaccination, and other Covid-related hoops, to find my bags had never left Madrid! I spent the next 36 hours sitting in my mother’s pajamas before being reunited with my belongings, but it’s been worth all the hassle to be back “home” after almost two years.

This week I am bringing you the Global Jigsaw’s first guest post. It’s by my friend, Avtar Singh. Avtar, a novelist and editor, is currently based in Germany with his American wife and son, having moved there from China.

He’s written a sketch of some of the Indian immigrants he’s met in Germany, deftly capturing the complexities of being “Indian in the World.”

I hope you enjoy his piece, as much as I did!

************

As many will know, the USA finally “opened” to non-residents in November this year. Which is to say, it opened to non-essential, non-emergency arrivals travelling on non-immigrant visas, and started issuing visas in those categories for the first time since COVID first began its global rampage.

I am from India but live in Germany currently, having moved here from Beijing. I have no special wish to visit the US. Its particular anxieties give me a headache. But my wife is American and so is my son. I have family there. I was an undergraduate in that fine country. I have always had a US visa in my passport.

We all hope that this fraught moment will eventually pass and so I queued, dutifully, outside the US consulate in Munich a week or so ago. The man ahead me in the queue, stared at me intently from behind his mask. I wear a turban; I stand out: I’m used to it and so I ignored the attention. Until I heard him say in Punjabi, ‘Sat Sri Akaal’.

I looked closer. His eyes were smiling.

It turns out his village in Punjab, in north India, was in the same region as mine. His wife was queuing with him. Their son lives in California. They hadn’t seen him since this plague began.

They were wracked with anxiety, even though they’d never been denied an American visa before. Even though they were German citizens now. But they were, despite their EU passports, working-class Indians. And their histories had conditioned them to dread precisely these sorts of interviews. Revenue officials, election officers, the police: it made no difference. To stand in front of an official was to expect failure; the rejection of your appeal; humiliation.

My experience of officialdom is different. An irritant; occasionally gripe-worthy, but seldom ulcerous. The privilege I had been born to protected me from even the most mean-spirited bureaucrat. There was always someone higher up the chain of pain whom I could approach directly, who would make the problem disappear.

I consoled the couple in the queue as we waited. Things are different here in Germany, I told them. Not even the Americans expect you to be lying.

The lady smiled, I think; but her brows remained furrowed over her mask. Her learned expectation of failure in a situation like this continued to cloud her life in a way it never had mine[PA1] .

That the traveler takes her country with her when she leaves is a banality. What she actually has in her luggage is her own experience of it.

Her own India, as it were. And what a shadow it casts.

****

I spent 2020 in what the Germans call an “Integrationskurs”: learning the language, getting to know the country. All permanent residents are steered towards these courses. In my prosperous corner of Germany, built upon the bedrock of the auto industry and its ancillaries, layered now with tech and the digital economy, there are many professional Indians. My class of 15 had seven. I was the only male in that group of seven, and one of only two without a professional degree.

The author, Avtar Singh, at the Oktoberfest

I thought I knew the young women around me, these confident products of a new India. But there were surprises. Such as the young woman from small-town Maharashtra in western India, her German already miles better than mine. Long hours next to her revealed that she had married her boyfriend from engineering college and that he was Muslim. Her last name made her Hindu antecedents clear.

In time, we gathered that our politics were similar, and different, perhaps, from those of the others in our group. The Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has run India for almost a decade now, and its reach among the Indian diaspora is well-documented. Educated, assertive Indians abroad, like the ones around us, have been leaning in to its divisive message for years now. Our other Indian classmates may or may not have been BJP supporters. But it isn’t the sort of conversation you start if you don’t already know the answer.

I asked my new friend one day what her ambitions were. Did she plan to go back to India?

“Go back to what?” she said quietly. Either both she and her Muslim husband were welcome in their “home” country, or neither one was. They had made the decision to leave a nation that continues to lurch to the right, where religious fractures are kept alive and a politics of grievance and hate against minorities ruthlessly propagated. Going back was, and remains, a distant prospect.

*****

Perhaps she will stay in Germany long term, like another friend of mine here has. He immigrated in the 1970s from Punjab. He roomed with other young men: Indian migrants like himself; worked with his hands, learnt German. In time, he married a local woman, had children; in a sense, became German. His grandchildren call him Opa.

We speak Punjabi to each other. He has no English, while his German carries the flavour of his north Indian roots (you haven’t lived till you’ve heard the combination). His German wife speaks Punjabi as well, and she delights in trying it on me. They run the local Indian store, selling stuff like daal (lentils) and incense to assorted Indian immigrants, yogis, vegans and the like. He is a pillar of the local community, a landlord of some consequence, a port of call for newly arrived Indians of every sort.

He is all these things because he is a wonderful, warm-hearted man, eager to help, happy to share. We laugh at the same things. He told me of the local gurdwara (Sikh temple), set up by an enterprising man of conspicuous faith who was caught literally hoovering money out of the golak (the receptacle into which the congregation places money before the holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib). What happened to him? Apparently, he started another gurdwara!

My friend has an adult son, who helps out occasionally at the store. The boy speaks fluent Punjabi, because his father only spoke to him in that language. I asked the older man what happened to his friends, those young men he’d shared this new world with, a lifetime ago. Was he still in touch with them?

“We all did well. Some went to the US. Some stayed here.”

How hard was it? What would they eat?

“I would cook for us all. I was the only one who knew how.”

The moment stretched between us, his eyes far away. A customer walked in then. He hailed us familiarly, asking for help. Back in the present, my friend, at home in his shop in this corner of Germany, smiled.

We reckon with the weight of our inheritances in different ways. 

*****

I hope you enjoyed Avtar’s guest post. As usual, please do share The Global Jigsaw with your friends and if possible, subscribe, so that I can keep bringing you great writing on making sense of how we all fit together in this wonderful world of ours.

---