We enter the Unter de Linde. We see parts of the old city which still remain left over from the bombings of the Second World War. There’s no East, no West any longer. No Wall. We see trams. Cars. Innumerable cars. Volkswagens. They remind me of home. The trams belong to East Germany. Police cars stop at the pedestrian crossing. There are little green men with hats in them. That again is part of East Germany. The green men without hats belong to the West. Berlin has known defeat. The defeat of two World Wars. It’s a city that seems to be seeking a new identity, one made up of many nationalities and races, not just pure Aryan alone. For us too it will provide a new identity. We see bulldozers flattening out the past; cranes, cement mixers. We also see the new synagogues like monuments to change. Do the Jews still face persecution, I wonder? No, they are strong now. No longer the victims of the holocaust. It is a past they will carry with them, but the new breed of Jews will be different. I am told that the survivors used to visit clinics in Israel to have the tattoos of the concentration camps removed. The numbers. They did not want that identity any longer. It was unacceptable to the new race of Jews who wanted to be identified with their blond, blue-eyed Aryan counterparts.

We pass huge apartment blocks with murals in brilliant colours on the walls. Graffiti too. I am reminded of the graffiti on facades of buildings and on walls in my own country during the revolution of 1989 and the 1990s. The bold, eye-stabbing red and black announcements, messages, statements of the subversives. The country was in flames. What graffiti will we discover about ourselves here in time to come? When will we be free to go undetected on these cobbled streets where no one will ask to see our identity cards? Can we find employment here? It will be difficult, I know. There’s an influx of East Berliners here and asylum seekers of all races. Not safe either, at anytime, with the neo-Nazis. Apartment houses, refugee centres set on fire; the exiles beaten up, killed.

Plenty of people like us on the streets. Africans, Turks, Sri Lankans, Indians, East Europeans. But we don’t talk. As soon as we spot a telephone booth, the Tamils go directly towards it. They have all their phone numbers in memory. Before long, taxis and cars arrive and one by one they are whisked away. Only the woman, the boy and myself are left behind. I have nowhere to go. No contacts either. She gestures to me, points to the two of them, as if to say, ‘Join us, be with us. You can come where we go.’