The time German Border police stopped me

I was young and stupid

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One night in 2013 (it was 2 a.m., so technically, ‘one morning’), I stood on a highway between Germany and Austria, shivering in the cold. It was 12 degrees Celsius, which, to my warm Indian blood, might as well have been zero.

I had nothing on except a thin T-shirt and jeans. My jacket was tucked away in my backpack. The backpack was tucked away inside the bus next to me.

Standing next to me were two fine officers from the German border control. When border police accost you from your bus, the last thing on your mind is picking up your jacket.

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My memories of that moment are fuzzy. Was I praying not to get jailed?

Or perhaps I’d once again relinquished the job of figuring out a way for me to The Universe. I’ve often lived with the notion that our universe, this ever-expanding soup of energy, takes time out of its busy schedule of managing the cosmos to resolve all the little kinks and dents in my life.

I remember shivering, though. I blamed the cold, but perhaps there was a little fear in the mix.

Let’s unwind the clock a little bit.

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Munich

In the summer of 2013, I was still an Am-Bot, a living, thriving human battery squeezed by the big cyber-retail machine. Doors were desks, fulfilment operatives peed in cans, and people quoted the commandments of leadership principles everywhere I looked.

‘Working’ is a bit rich because, technically, I’d joined the team in Amazon India a few months before they’d eventually launch officially in the country. We were fiddling our thumbs and engaged in analysis paralysis. The lawyers were the truly busy ones, trying to wrangle a business model Frankenstein that could confound and please the regulatory monarchs in India.

Fearing jailbreak to other companies, the overlords decided that some of us were to be distracted so we wouldn’t bounce, and thus, I found myself on a plane to Germany. I would embed myself in an actual working Amazon team in Germany to see what real life felt like.

“Learn the ways of our cult,” said our leaders.

My first trip to Deutschland. Anyway, I never say nein to a free trip.

This turned out to be a fantastic couple of summer months drinking beer in big mugs, sipping Radlers, walking by the banks of Isar, admiring the cars in the BMW museum, and taking a million-and-a-half photographs of the shiny bubble arena in Olympiastadion. I may have learned a thing or two at work, too.

I fell in love with Munich even though the total oxymoronic weight of the phrase Bavarian Food hit me in the gut. My nourishment remained largely liquid.

Working in Amazon Germany with German colleagues was equally strange and refreshing. It took me at least a couple of weeks to earn trust, after which things started looking up. People hardly ever smiled, but I, at one point, found myself in a colleague's house, meeting his mom and pet parrot and eating cake. The contrast between German warmth in action and words is almost reaffirming (in a world filled with fake pleasantries).

In any case, this is how I came to travel all around Bavaria. And then, one fateful weekend, a couple of friends and I decided to visit Vienna.

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Vienna

The three of us took an overnight bus on a Friday.

The weekend went great.

Vienna is full of grand buildings, which people spent a lot of time building in the past, presumably before TikTok arrived. We ate Sachertorte (which I thought was overrated then) and drank Viennese coffee (which I then liked, but my soul has since turned dark, and I no longer like cream in my coffee).

The sky was blue, and the clouds were cotton puff balls. We took photos of each other standing awkwardly in front of statues of marble people standing elegantly.   

Everything went swimmingly until we took the bus back to Munich on Sunday night. After all, our German handlers were waiting for us to return to work on Monday.

I was out cold pretty much once the bus started. A weekend with friends in a new city meant I’d slept barely a wink, was very drunk and extremely tired. I was jarringly awoken in the middle of the night when the driver announced on the speakers, “Border Control. Border Control. Please keep your passports for verification”.

The words had barely gone through my ears when those sleepy neurons in my head began crackling like a nasty Indian electric transformer. I got enough cortisol dump to power me through an Olympic speed walking contest. I was awake. And panicking.

I knew that I did not have my passport.

Sidenote: For anyone to do this is a stupid thing. But for me, a brown guy from India this was just asking for it. It’s like Seth Rogan not only participating in a boxing contest but forgetting to bring gloves, mouthguard and protective head gear.

The level of nonchalance and entitlement I had displayed here surely deserves a salute. Is this what it must feel like to be an average white person?

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Border Police

As the two border police boarded the bus, my brain was AK-47ing worse and worse scenarios with every passing second. How are German jails? Would I be ignominiously deported? Will Amazon fire me?

I was also worried about the tongue-lashings I would inevitably receive from N, who was back in India. How could I have been so stupid?

The big question hung over my head: Was the universe finally fucking me over for all that arrogance?  

One of the policemen moved row by row, checking passports, and then he came to me. He saw my impassive face hiding a hummingbird heartbeat. Fake calm and carry on, right?

The power of the global lingua franca was put to the test. My Indian mouth slowly explained the status to the German cop: I have no passport. I mean, I didn’t bring it. Of course, I had it back in my hotel in Munich. Of course, I have a visa. I am a good Indian man. I work at Amazon. I am stupid, yes.

It’s safe to say he wasn’t impressed. Having failed persuasion-101, he asked me to do the logical thing — get off the bus.   

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At this point, the commotion was making the heads turn. I was embarrassed (duh!) but more so because I was somehow perpetuating a stereotype. The brown guy? No passport? Tch Tch.

It was all in my head, of course.

The police guy indicated something, and the bus driver put on larger lights, bathing the entire bus in bright lights. I was on stage. Forty-plus pairs of sleepy-annoyed-gleeful for disaster eyeballs tracked me as I was escorted out.

I’m a warm-blooded Indian who has been fed on a diet of rice and veggies all his life. This fact is crucial because as soon as I stepped off the bus, I realized that things were quite frigid. I’d see later it was 14 degrees C, and an average German might consider it balmy but damn it, there was a stiff breeze and everything.

My jaws, held stiff for poise, begin to involuntarily rattle. Worse, my voice quivered answering questions.

Where am I from? Who do I work for? Where am I staying in Munich? Where am I coming from?

More than a decade ago, when I was in the last leg of my teenage years, I visited the road transport office to get my driving license. There, in a room with bad lighting and peeling walls, a bored government employee pointed a shitty webcam which in turn was a decade older (think 90s) at my face to take a photo that got printed on my license.

In 2013, standing next to two German border police I handed over this license. Was the 10-pixel image of a dark face in a little postage-size image seen under a flashlight, me? Who’d believe it? We stood next to their cruiser with its blinking lights. It all felt a bit too official for my liking.

One of the cops returned to the bus to verify the story with my colleague.

At this point, the police's only lead was the number of the Marriott Courtyard where I was put up, and he was trying to call it. But neither Ansel nor Mathilda was picking up the phone on the other end! 

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Light at the end of the tunnel

Hearing the policemen converse to themselves, I was desperately trying to separate the Germanness of it from the anger. I could sense that they cannot just let me go at the word of a single colleague, that too, another young brown man with a temp visa.

I was on the verge of putting up my hands so they’d cuff me and take me into the cruiser so I’d be out of the damn cold. That was a better outcome than leaving me stranded here.  

But then, finally, the hotel desk picked up.

How many Germans does it take to pronounce the name Tyagarajan Sundaresan? It took another minute (or five) for the two Germans to agree on pronouncing the syllables in my name and confirming that someone was staying there by that name. They then continued to check another system for my visa status. 

Eventually, I saw them relax. There was light at the end of the tunnel.  

"Thank you", says the police finally, handing back my Indian driving license. 

I am so grateful that I’d have shot someone if he’d asked me to.

And then he says,

“Happy birthday!” 

Oh, wait. It was 2 am on May 6th.

He’d spotted that on my license. It was my birthday!

I head back into the bus, relieved and slink into my seat. The lights go off, and soon the bus starts rolling. I breathe a huge sigh of relief.

This was some way to turn 30 years old!

Could be Worse,

Tyag

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