East Berliner
A comparison between an East Berliner crossing the wall to Denzil leaving neo-Marxist Sri Lanka to prospering Dubai.
Recently I listened to a podcast by a brave soul who crossed the Berlin wall into the west side of the divided city. Listening to him, I realised the similarities between my experience of coming to Dubai with his.
Some millennial readers may not know before 1989; there were two Berlins — West Berlin, where there were freedom and consumer-driven choices. East Berlin had no freedom in East Germany, a communist country with scarcities and controls.
West Berliners had everything life offered, while East Berliners' lives were far from easy. East Berliners lived tough, queuing up for food and essential goods. They drove substandard cars. Everything was state-controlled for East Berliners.
Many East Berliners schemed to leave and cross the wall to the other side of West Berlin. But it was virtually impossible. Only the daring could do it, like the podcaster I listened to the other day.
When I arrived in Dubai, I moved from scarcity. I moved from limited choices to plenty of options. I came from Sri Lanka in the seventies when it was a neo-Marxist state.
Growing up as a teenager in Sri Lanka, everything was state-controlled. I had a government-issued ration book. A government-controlled cooperative shop issued the staple dry food. Every person was given two pounds of rice per person producing the ration book. The bread was scarce, and provided with food coupons; one had to queue to buy them. With no free market, the quality of products was substandard. With limited supply, food queues were everywhere. As the eldest child, I often had to queue up to get dry foods for the family at the cooperative store almost daily.
In Sri Lanka, not only food but other essential items like clothing were also rationed and price-controlled. All clothing materials were produced locally in government-owned textile factories. These substandard materials were also rationed and smelt of kerosene. No imported clothes were for sale, prompting me to buy smuggled t-shirts and pants from bootleg sellers. There was a massive grey market for all things western. I paid exorbitant prices for them, including my watch, which cost me a month’s pay.
You would not believe nobody was allowed to carry more than two pounds of chillies on them (yes, the hot ones). Who would want to choke on the fumes of red hot chillies in a hot country anyway? Transporting more than two pounds of rice was also banned, among many other bans. Police checkpoints were there to enforce these limits on town borders. Eateries were allowed to serve rice, the staple food of the masses, only four days a week.
With currency controls, one could not buy air passage out of Sri Lanka. Affluent families worked around this by arranging for their relatives in western countries to send prepaid air tickets for their children. That was how the fortunate young left Sri Lanka in the seventies.
Many lucky lads and a few girls left. A popular destination was England, the mother country to many Sri Lankans in a country with a colonial past. Others went to France and West Germany, countries in Europe aligned to the Western bloc that had market freedom.
They did any job in Europe and made as much money as possible. Then the lads bought a used car, a Mercedes, an Austin A40 Farina, or a Peugeot 304, filling it with as many electronics and clothes in empty seats and car to bring them home. These brave souls drove their cars brimming with goods from Europe to Sri Lanka. Through Europe, they crossed into Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. Finally, they took a ferry with their car from a southern port of India and landed in the northern port of Sri Lanka. These courageous boys did the whole land trip in two weeks, an astonishing distance of 9000 odd kilometres. Back in the day, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan were peaceful countries. It was also the era of open borders with virtual no-immigration controls.
Enterprising fearless youth always found innovative ways to create opportunities.
That was not the end of these boys. On return to Sri Lanka, they drove in their shiny imported cars with European number plates. They had all the money in Sri Lanka, selling off the clothes and electronics in their vehicles without the freight cost. They got the best girls back home. Friends flocked to them. It was as if they had returned from heaven. Once their money dried, they sold their cars and returned to Europe with their prepaid return tickets. Every Lankan lad fancied being like them, me included.
So, when a job offer came for me from Dubai with pre-paid air passage, you do not have to guess why I took it up immediately. I had schemed to leave Sri Lanka from the time I was in high school. This was my chance. I was a lucky lad, like the East Berliner who found a way to cross the wall to the bright side.
Many a loophole to cross before I could leave. I had to surrender my coveted ration book to get a passport. The ration book was important to your identity, like a ticket to the game. A financial backer had to provide a substantial financial guarantee on my behalf to exit the country.
Meanwhile, I was on a bond with the government to serve for five years. I quit two years into my job, breaking the government contract. There was a lot of bureaucratic work to get permission to leave. My father helped by generously paying off the bond, a whopping sum in Sri Lankan money, and one and half years of my then-pay. I felt it was my blood money.
I was to leave Sri Lanka without money because carrying foreign currency was illegal. One of my friends secretly slid a $10 bill into my hand. I folded it many times and hid it in my old suitcase from my school boarding days. Fortunately for me, at the checkpoint at Colombo airport, officials did not detect the $10 hidden in the bottom of my suitcase.
When I finally landed in Dubai after all those dramas in Sri Lanka, I was excited and ecstatic, like the East Berliner lad who sought freedom in West Berlin. I was carried away, seeing my choices in this new land. It took me a few days to grasp what was around me. I was now in seventh heaven and free. Finally, my dreams had come true.
It was my moment of reckoning in Dubai at a young age. I was amazed to see the hi-fi equipment, LPs and television sets. All I had to do was work hard and smart. The first thing I wanted was a stereo cassette player. I needed at least ten months of pay to buy one in the bootleg market in Sri Lanka. I bought a National Panasonic stereo with just seven days of my pay. I felt ecstatic about this newfound purchase because I had lusted for it as a teenager. I felt accomplished now that I could buy that with a week’s pay in what could have been a lifetime of savings.
As a kid, I had only one dinky (die-cast) car. That’s all there was. So when I walked into a local supermarket in Rashidiya, where I lived in Dubai, I was gobsmacked seeing a vast range of Matchbox diecast toys. They were freely available at Dirhams 2.50 apiece. Here I was, now an adult making up for my lost childhood spent without dinky cars. I started buying them and making a collection of my own. I collected all the models I could get hands-on with.
Instead of queuing up at the government-owned cooperative store, I could walk into any supermarket and buy anything I wanted. The supermarket was way better than the cooperative store for the East Berliner in me.
I bought everything I wanted and lusted for in Sri Lanka, clothes and music cassettes. I purchased a Ronson lighter, spending 100 Dirhams, a significant sum back then. I bought twenty-five sarees and a Riccar sewing machine for my mother. I bought my father an electric shaver; he could listen to BBC news, his pet pastime. I bought a chopper bike for my kid brother, who was still in school. I purchased a Pioneer stereo setup that could rock my entire neighbourhood. The list goes on and on.
Within eight months of arriving in Dubai, I returned to Sri Lanka for Christmas that year and gifted all of these items to my family. It was my effort to make their life better. Because they deserved the very best from me. I was the East Berliner in West Berlin, the lucky one who did the best for those stuck in East Berlin.
I airfreighted the whole lot, paying a lot of Dirhams to the airline as accompanying baggage. The Sri Lankan customs had a field day with me on seeing such a range of goods imported into a country where foreign goods were banned. They could not believe a young lad could be so resourceful to import these ‘luxury’ items. So they taxed me heavily, and my loving father paid all those exorbitant taxes.
I did not forget my daredevil friends from Sri Lanka either. I brought bottles of whiskey and loads of cartons of cigarettes for them. I had all-night parties during those two weeks of jest in Sri Lanka in December 1977.
I gifted my collection of Matchbox toys to my kid brother to make up for the kid in me did not have.
This is my story of being like an East Berliner in the days of the Iron Curtain with my own experience in my final years in Sri Lanka.
My life in Sri Lanka was not as harsh as those who lived in East Berlin, under constant observation by Stasi, their secret police. I was not shot at trying to leave Sri Lanka. Yet, there was much in common with the economic lot and my East German pal, who crossed into West Berlin at great odds.
Irene Niedermier, my penpal from West Germany
There was another connection to Germany in my youth. I had a pen pal, Irene Niedermier, from Dusseldorf, West Germany, good Germany. We exchanged letters, photos and postcards regularly. She was 15, and I was 16. Letters were interesting, exchanging news about each other’s youth experiences from drastically different worlds.
Irene soon realised I had few resources compared to her, who lived in relative luxury. Without asking, she sent me shirts, t-shirts, socks and pants. I could not send her anything back. I could not even afford the postage for her letters on some days. She sent me Deutsche Marks in her letters which I sold on the grey market. That money kept me in the black when I was in school.
Our friendship slackened after about a year. I don't know what happened for us to lose contact. Was it that I went to university college and found another life of my own? Or did Irene find another pen pal or even a boyfriend in West Germany?
Now you know another reason why I felt like an East Berliner.
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