Summer kisses in Berlin

It was the summer of 1974. I had just turned 21 and I was headed to Europe for a holiday, all by myself. Actually it was a junket organised by a political organisation called the World Liberal Union in collaboration with … you know what? Never mind. The point is that I had been invited to spend 10 days in a resort area called Gummersbach, in Germany, along with a group of other under-30s from around the world. Once there, we would spend 10 days listening to lectures on “Centralisation versus Federalism”.

The topic of our discussions was so mind-numbingly boring that we listened slack-jawed and drooling during the day, then in the evenings we got drunk and happy. Seventeen guys, five gals: it was total delirium. One of us (not me) met the man she would ultimately marry. Another of us (me) had an encounter that led directly to the major transformative event of my later life. The strangest thing of all was that the Brit-German organisers were entirely cool with this situation. It was as if our little gang of international strangers had been brought together for no reason but to experience two weeks of random joy. We had all been selected as a result of writing an essay on the topic mentioned above. In those days, I used to draw cartoons and write occasional articles for a small, lively, semi-political journal called Freedom First . It was through FF that I’d been invited to write the essay. Ten pages of jargon-laden blather submitted in January resulted, five months later, in a West-bound flight.

Until this trip, I had always travelled within the cocoon of the Foreign Service because my father was a senior diplomat. I’d grown used to gliding through customs and immigration on that magic carpet of privilege that remains perfectly invisible until suddenly it’s not there anymore.

The Seventies was a time of strange calm in India. We had just joined the nuclear club but the turmoil of the Emergency and all that would follow were as-yet undreamt of. We were still naïvely confident of our country’s leaders, wrapped tight in our post-Independence dreamtime. We watched black-and-white TVs, drove around in the lumbering dinosaurs known as Ambassadors and the only way to watch a movie was in a cinema hall. Phones had rotary dials and Coca-Cola was sold exclusively in glass bottles. But alphonso mangoes were not yet being exported to West Asia so middle-class households like ours could easily afford to buy 12 dozen fragrant fruit. We stored them in the guest bedroom in layers of straw to ripen and ate them in great joyous bowlfuls of pre-cut, refrigerated chunks every day at lunch!

Looking back, the most startling difference between travel in the ’70s and now was the complete loss of communication immediately after being dropped off at the airport. Oh yes, there were telephones! But international calls were extremely expensive and only possible via operators. There were agonisingly long pauses between responses. Conversations were often limited to three minutes, to save money. So once I had all my visas, taken my inoculation shots and was sitting in the departure lounge at Santa Cruz, it was like going on a spacewalk, without a tether. I was floating free from everyone and everything I had known till then. I had been 16 at the time my father retired. The five years between then and 21 had provided me with many definitions of misery, all of them connected with the social restrictions of living in the Homeland. However nervous I was of travelling without the carpet of privilege, I was also wildly ready to break out on my own.

The meeting point for the whole group was Berlin — West Berlin that is. The Wall was still up. East Berlin glowered on the other side of it and all of East Germany surrounded the divided city in its gloomy embrace. The Indian contingent numbered four — three women and one silent young man who said nothing for the full duration of two weeks. We flew out from Bombay, meeting inside the aircraft. The other international flights converged on Berlin around the same time, from Australia, Israel, Argentina, Finland, France, Italy, Canada and, of course, our host country Germany. India was the only country represented by more than two people. There were a couple of organisers from the German side and also a British Liberal MP. He was an older man who reminded me so strongly of Richard Harrison as Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady that it was very difficult not to chuckle over his very propah British accent.

None of us participants had the slightest idea what to expect of our seminar. I got the impression that we were all equally surprised to have been selected. For our very first night in Berlin, we were plied with so much champagne that we were levitating within minutes. All five of us girls were danced off our feet and by the time we staggered back to the little pension where we each had separate rooms, the pattern for the next two weeks was firmly set: sober thoughtfulness and occasional sight-seeing during the day, alcohol-fuelled dancing at night. I had a steady boyfriend back in Bombay. However, right from the airport in Berlin, I locked eyes with the cute French-Canadian, with a second option on the equally cute Australian.

In those days, a prepaid ticket of the sort I had meant that I could get a round trip of further flights around Europe. So from Germany, I flew to the UK. I had persuaded my Canadian friend to join me for a few days. Though he roomed at a guest house while I stayed with my uncle and aunt, I experienced London in a rose-tinted blur. There was a bomb-blast at Westminster Abbey on the day we were supposed to see it. But we had chosen to spend the morning canoodling indoors, so for once romance actually saved our lives.

Saw Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar , live, on stage. Caught a grand performance by Maggie Smith in a hilarious farce called Snap . It was about venereal disease in those innocent pre-AIDS days, when the worst thing to fear about VD was social disapproval!

Then I parted company with the Canadian, to go to France, Italy, Switzerland and back to Germany, all on that same round-trip ticket. Saw the Louvre, the Sistine Chapel and from Geneva, I had a day-trip to Chamonix in France, thanks to my multiple-entry visa. At each border, there was the elaborate ritual of changing money — no Euro, no credit cards! I can remember Italy’s wildly inflated currency, where a cup of espresso or a single-ride bus fare cost thousands of lire; France’s weirdly lightweight aluminium francs; Germany’s colour-coded deutschemarks. Britain’s giant pennies and newly minted seven-sided 10p coins, that had been made specifically to work in the telephone booths, were heavy to haul around but at least they felt like real money.

I used to wear hard contact lenses in those days. I remember how the cold weather caused them to dry out so that I spent my first couple of weeks constantly wiping my eyes and washing the lenses, fretting about mascara running down my cheeks. I wore fishnet stockings, miniskirts, twinkly eye-shadow and I ate like an escaped convict. Oysters in vinegar on the street in London, croissants for breakfast in France, silky-thin wisps of prosciutto ham with chilled honeydew melon balls in Italy, every kind of wurst (sausage) in Germany and mountains of cheese everywhere. In Switzerland, the family friends who hosted me made the best mango ice cream I have ever eaten, before or since. It was garnished with tiny wild strawberries, slender and spear-shaped, each one a flavour-bomb of intense, deep-pink sweetness.

On my return to Germany, I spent 10 days with a friend from my boarding school days. She and I had studied German together but she went on to major in it in college and later emigrated to Germany. When I went to meet her, she was teaching English in a small rural school, south of Münich. It was quite an adventure getting to her but I had a wonderful time. On the way back I had a scary transit at the train station in Kassel. I arrived there at midnight and my connection left at two in the morning. Three cheery prostitutes and some slurring drunken types shared the waiting room with me at that hour, while the station hibernated for the night. The atmosphere turned surreal, like a black-and-white art-movie, with minimal lighting, Industrial-era clocks and cast-iron angle-frame construction.

But nothing went wrong. During the Gummersbach session we participants had often wondered whether some Dark Powers were manipulating our thoughts and dreams, extracting a price for our participation. So far as I know, however, there weren’t any repercussions whatsoever either from that part of the trip or its aftermath.

Well. Unless you count this one thing …

Remember the Australian? I had chosen the French-Canadian over him in Germany, but I didn’t forget him. He had been the oldest of the group, a divorcee and a lawyer, very witty to talk to. My connection with him was the only one that endured in postcards and occasional letters. Twenty years later, in 1994, when another junket took me to Melbourne, Australia, I wrote to ask if I could visit him in Sydney. He readily agreed. So I spent a cheerful 10 days in his apartment, getting to know his young daughter and very pretty, smart lawyer girlfriend.

In his apartment, I read a few copies of a 16-page journal aimed at Australian and South Asian playwrights. It seemed interesting, so I asked my friend if he would pay a tiny sum on my behalf, for a year’s quarterly subscription. Which he did. I received the copies at my address in New Delhi where I now lived. One year later, in the fourth and final edition of that journal, I saw a tiny advertisement for an international play-writing competition, sponsored by something called the Onassis Foundation, in Greece. I’d never heard of it, but of course, like everyone else of my generation, I associated that name with Jacqueline Kennedy, widow of US President John F Kennedy, assassinated in 1963. Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping tycoon had, for a brief time, acquired Jackie as his wife.

The prize money, mentioned in bold letters, was $250,000. “It would be nice,” I thought to myself, “to win that.” Two years later and 23 years after that fateful summer holiday in Germany, I did.

Manjula Padmanabhan is a writer, artist and playwright

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