A visit to Heidelberg

As the aircraft circled around the high-rise building in the centre of Frankfurt am Main before landing, the lights on the ground appeared blindingly bright. I was on my way to visit a friend in Heidelberg, Germany. The friend I was visiting, Jehangir, had come to pick me up. A section of the motorway was being resurfaced with new concrete and my friend proudly declared: “This is Germany—they don’t use tarmac here.”

Jehangir was a friend from my old neighbourhood in Srinagar, capital of Kashmir. He had moved to Germany in the mid-1980s after marrying a German woman who was visiting Kashmir for a few weeks. He had worked his way up in a fast food restaurant chain, joining the ranks of its higher management, and set up his own business in Heidelberg a few years ago. It was a long journey, though, from his arrival in Germany as a newlywed having to learn a new language and a new culture. He now spoke Kashmiri interspersed with German words, with the result that some of his relatives in Kashmir mistakenly believed that he spoke a higher form of the Kashmiri language. Jehangir’s own family members in Srinagar had become familiar with odd German words and sometimes confounded others with their usage.

When I had last met Jehangir in Srinagar, we went to Cafe de Linz for tea. There was a group of men sitting at a table next to ours and one of them remarked to the others that Asians living in London were despised by their neighbours for hanging their washing from windows. Jehangir got up and asked this person if he had ever been to London. The man said no. Jehangir had himself visited London recently and told the man that he disagreed with him. There was a chat-show host among the group who, aware they were being challenged, asked Jehangir to sit with them and tell him more about his trip to London. I was taken aback by Jehangir’s outpouring. I thought it impolite of him to pose such a direct question to a stranger in a coffee-shop. He told me later that he had learnt from his German friends to ask direct questions rather than going through a courteous rigmarole.

Jehangir had been accepted into the Heidelberg milieu by virtue of his marriage to a woman from a small town in the state of Baden-Württemberg. His mother had once advised me against two things—taking up a job in Europe or America and marrying a foreign woman. She knew very well that the sons of our Kashmiri soil would never return if they settled down with a spouse and employment overseas.

We drove up a hill in the evening to visit the home of a friend of Jehangir for dinner. Dorothy was an amiable lady whose son acted as a commercial lawyer for Jehangir. He parked his car on a steep slope and we walked up a garden path to reach the house on the hill, which turned out to be an idyllic-looking cottage. Dorothy had invited a few other people for dinner that evening. Conversation mostly revolved around local issues. Jehangir had once told me that his German friends usually confided in him because they didn’t consider him to be an outsider. I thought it was more likely due to his friendliness, which was reciprocated by his friends and wife’s relatives in Germany.

Jehangir had worked in the tourist industry in Kashmir and one of his uncles had taught him the rules of hospitality. The home of his uncle was an open house and he usually invited a lot of people to his home, from policemen to clergymen. He told his nephew that to know one person is like knowing the whole world and acquaintances were necessary if someone was working in the tourist trade in Kashmir because you never knew whose help you were going to need to survive in a very seasonal business. The habits of his uncle had rubbed off on Jehangir and he often invited his lawyer, accountant and other such people to his home in Germany.

Dorothy was a fine cook and had prepared a lot of food for her guests. The other people at the dinner party were from Heidelberg and were related to her. But they all seemed to know Jehangir and talked to him about his business and other matters.

Jehangir was friends with a mayor of one of the towns in Baden Wurttemberg. He had invited him once on a vacation to London and I had met him at the hotel where they stayed. When a receptionist at the hotel asked Jehangir to show an ID at the check-in, he told her jokingly that he should be exempted from showing an ID because he was accompanied by a VIP. Jehangir wanted me to meet his friend again in Heidelberg and rang his office. He spoke to his secretary and after some small talk left a message for her boss inviting him to meet us for dinner in a restaurant in town.

It was a German restaurant and almost empty when we arrived early that evening. The mayor arrived at the agreed time and the restaurant began to fill slowly. He was happy to see us both and said that I shouldn’t expect the same quick service in a Heidelberg restaurant as the one where we’d eaten in London. The mayor belonged to the opposition party. As we were leaving the restaurant, I saw a few police cars parked outside and some of the officers were on the point of entering the restaurant. I asked the mayor what the police were doing there since it was perfectly peaceful inside the restaurant. He explained that the police wanted to check if there was anyone working in the restaurant kitchen who had overstayed in Germany. He hoped not. It would be embarrassing for him, he said, if they arrested some errant dish-washer since he, the mayor, was one of the patrons of this restaurant.

Jehangir was living in Leimen, a small town lying a few miles south of Heidelberg. He liked to affiliate his hometown with one of its notable citizens if someone hadn’t heard its name. It was, he stated, the birthplace of the famous tennis player, Boris Becker. Jehangir also mentioned that Steffi Graff hailed from another small town in his home-state of Baden Wurttemberg. I remembered once meeting Jehangir at a wedding reception in London when he told the guests there that he ran a business in a big town in Germany. It made me smile because Heidelberg has a population of only 150,000 people.

Three days after arriving in Heidelberg, Jehangir drove me to Leimen. Jehangir had lived in the same town ever since he arrived in Germany 25 years ago. As he drove through the town, he stopped at a few places for small talk with his neighbours and told me that he enjoyed the same bond with people living in Leimen as he had with the residents of his old neighbourhood in Srinagar.

One of his elderly neighbours was fixing a car in a garage opposite his house. Jehangir asked him if he needed help and asked him to pop into his home. He poured a drink for him and wished him good health. He told me later that he considered it his duty to look after the elderly people in his street. In fact, Jehangir’s mother-in-law was living on her own a few doors down the road and he went to see her every day.

He took me around to see her. “Mamma,” as he was fond of calling her, was sitting in an armchair when he opened the door of her flat, to which he had a key. She could only see partially and needed help with household chores. Jehangir liked to take her dog for a walk in the evening. I wanted to stretch my legs and was happy to join him on this daily walk.

We passed a few rows of houses until we reached a desolate open area. A few minutes later, I saw a figure at a distance, walking towards us with a dog trailing behind. When he reached us I heard him muttering “Ausländer Raus”—Foreigners Out. Jehangir told me that I shouldn’t pay any attention because he must be crazy to talk to himself. But I could see Jehangir was a little embarrassed by this incident.

The life of every German resident is regulated by bureaucracy. Although Jehangir disliked this bureaucracy, he followed all the regulations applied to running a business in Baden Wurttemberg. He reminisced about the fly-by-night nature of many tourist businesses in Kashmir in the 1980s, admitting that he couldn’t forgive himself for having working as a tout during that time. He couldn’t tell a lie even in jest, he said, since he had moved to Leimen. Jehangir didn’t like to cut corners either when it came to running his own business in Heidelberg. Efficiency was important. This reminded me of the occasion when a German guest signed a document at our hotel desk in London using his fountain pen. He flipped the pen round and it became a rubber stamp. I told him it was a clever design. “What do you expect?” he replied. “I am a bloody German.”

Jehangir liked his coffee ritual in the morning and took me to his favourite cafe in Heidelberg which was opposite his own office in the centre of town. Since he also owned a Schnellimbiss-type restaurant next door to the coffee-shop they offered him a coffee at a special price. He could watch people relishing a Currywurst outside his fast food restaurant while having his Americano. Jehangir was very particular about keeping the forecourt of his restaurant tidy and there were instructions displayed on the wall in the restaurant kitchen for the staff about how to separate the waste for recycling. He had delegated all day-to-day tasks to his staff. He said that he wouldn’t have time for other business if he got involved in ordering supplies for his restaurant and making the timetable for his staff. He had entrusted those responsibilities to someone who managed the restaurant for him. She was working under Jehangir when he was the area manager of a fast food chain and chose to work for him when he opened his own restaurant.

I toured the town with Jehangir while he was checking the menus of similar restaurants to gauge his competition. He told me that the rent he paid for his restaurant was very high but it was a profitable business for him because of its location. He had received a thorough training in gastronomy while working for a restaurant chain that was well known for the training of its staff. He was also fond of eating out and always looked for ideas to improve his fast food business. “To be successful in business,” he said, “you have to like what you do.”

Jehangir met a few other owners of businesses in Heidelberg for lunch in an Italian restaurant five days a week. We were greeted by Giovanni, who owned the restaurant. Giovanni was like a confidant and knew much about the members of this group. Sometimes they left messages with him for each other. It was an informal meeting place and the members of the group benefited by exchanging their ideas.

It was two decades since Jehangir’s arrival in Germany. He had prospered through hard graft and now he took it easy and enjoyed being the owner of two or three businesses. He had his own private office in the centre of town, which he used for a short period during the course of his day. One of the rooms on his office floor was used by his German business partner.

Heidelberg is a student town and Jehangir employed quite a few students in his fast food restaurants. One of his restaurants was managed by a student called Hashmat, who was from Sialkot in Pakistan. He had lived in Frankfurt for a few years before moving to Heidelberg. He ran his own business in Frankfurt but had lost money and incurred debts. He sighed as he showed me pictures of his warehouse brimming with leather goods like biker trousers, jackets and handbags. Hashmat’s family produced the leather goods in Sialkot and he had opened a branch in Frankfurt for their own products to have direct access to the EU market.

Jehangir told me that it was tough for Hashmat to pay off his debts even though he was working as a restaurant manager and received a fair wage. He had sympathy with Hashmat because he had known adversity himself while living in Kashmir. Jehangir had met him in Frankfurt and asked him to manage one of his restaurants in Heidelberg. Hashmat told me that his sister and her husband lived in Whitechapel in London and owned a few shops there. He gave me the name of one of their shops and asked me to look in if I was visiting East London.

It’s a cold world out there for immigrants in Europe in the second decade of the third millennium. Jehangir realised that migration had become a defining issue at the beginning of the 21st century. He considered Leiman to be his hometown. I asked him about his ancestral home in Srinagar. Jehangir said it was now his zweite heimat—his second home. However, he understood the predicaments of people who have arrived recently in Germany and knew how indifferent natives could be to outsiders. They were men without women and it is a surreal experience to find one surrounded by beautiful women and yet be all alone. He told me that Hashmat had never had a relationship with a woman since he came to live in Germany ten years ago and wasn’t sure if he was ever going to find love in the romantic city of Heidelberg. But Hashmat was bearing his sorrows lightly and seemed more concerned about paying off his debts than finding a soul mate.

Jehangir was grateful that his wife had helped him to learn a new language and new culture when he moved to Germany. He had started a family soon, when he was in his early twenties. His wife didn’t work after giving birth and proved to be an anchor for his life in Baden Wurttemberg. He thought highly of Swabian women and said his wife was a real homemaker.

I asked Jehangir whether he knew anyone from Srinagar in Heidelberg but he wasn’t sure if there was anyone else from Kashmir currently living there. He had known just one person from Lake Dal in Kashmir, who lived with his German wife in Frankfurt. One day he heard that the man had been arrested for beating his wife. Since then Jehangir didn’t want to know him and couldn’t understand how a man could beat up his other half. He had once met some men from Srinagar in Heidelberg who were travelling to Baden Baden to play in a casino and thought it outrageous that someone from Kashmir would travel to Germany to gamble in a casino.

On my last day in Heidelberg, I asked Jehangir to park his car somewhere and join me for a stroll through Heidelberg’s Old Town. We drifted into the alleyways of the Old Town and came upon an empty space with a sign stating that a synagogue stood at that site until 10th November 1938. I recognised the date of Kristallnacht, when the Nazis torched synagogues in Germany. There were twelve sandstone cubes built on the site to represent the twelve Jewish tribes. It is a stark and poignant reminder of what could happen if there is a surge of nationalism again in our world.