Our dependence on the guide is total. This is unknown country to us. We are not human beings to them. With names. Personal lives. Habits. Feelings or emotions. When we are handed over at the border for the next stage of the journey to the next guide or agent, we are ‘dollars’. We bear with the irony. We’re not people, we’re money to them. We provide employment to them. They take risks too. We understand that. Dollars. Money. What do they care about the politics of our individual countries? About war and violence. Conflict. Ethnicity. Massacres and assassinations. Revolutions. Human rights violations. Disappearances, torture, death. Though it’s nothing new to anyone, really. The soldier justifies his rape of women in war. He asserts the triumph of the victor. He has to let off the tensions and the horrors of the battlefield, has to have his booty. The map of Europe has been changed often enough and is still changing. People are reclaiming the territory that once belonged to them before the invasions and conquests of historical eras and epochs. The changing of borders and frontiers leads to extensions of power. And now, ethnic cleansing, so that the reclaimed territory rests on a foundation of skeletal remains: bones that branch out like a subterranean forest, the flesh nourishing the soil yet its poisons creeping through the still veins to create a monstrous foliage. We know the histories of all these worlds. They haven’t had time to learn ours. Our wars, our revolutions, our conflicts, our displacements, are important only to ourselves. We become refugees, asylum seekers. Their laws restrict our entry into their countries. Yet there are people who help us to bend these laws. They’ve got to eat too, haven’t they? We serve their purpose. They serve ours. When we reach a destination, the desired one, we can’t expect a friendly welcome. Although looking back on our own history, didn’t we open our doors to the invader? Didn’t we even adopt the colonizers’ way of life? Change our language, our religion, our culture? Didn’t Kuveni herself take Vijaya for a lover?

To reach Europe we had to pay thousands of dollars. Somehow we made it. To Russia. We reached there by Aeroflot. Not as tourists, of course! No one questioned our identities. We had passports and visas we had purchased at a price. And hard currency in our pockets. That would help us through part of the journey. In Moscow we were all put in one room. It was winter. There was no heating. We were grateful for the warmth of each other’s bodies. The comfort of each others breath. Our being together. We had glimpsed streets white with snow piled high, snow crisp like mounds of freshly laundered linen. We still did not have the freedom to tread those streets.