An Encounter With an Old Lady!

Stories from Berlin!

January 10, 2018

It was my second day in Germany. It was late at night, maybe around 8, was pitch black and the temperature was flirting around zero degrees.  I was alone and walking towards U6 metro from my MBA college, ESMT Berlin, when a couple of hundred meters from the Bundesminister des Ausw?rtigen (Ministry of Foreign Affairs), an old lady looked at me and said, “Entschuldigung!”.

She must be over 75 I thought. She was wearing a grey trouser and a dark purple coat. Her white hair was neatly tucked to the back of her head. The way she maintained her hair, quickly reminded me of Queen Elizabeth II of England. With a walking stick on left hand and a purse on the right hand, she looked at me thru her aged looking glass frames. Her eyes were moist and she looked tired.

“Entschuldigung!…..xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx”, she said, adjusting the side of her glass frames looking at me.

I didn’t know any German and couldn’t understand anything that she was saying. I couldn’t use my mobile phone for translation either as it was my second day and I hadn’t been able to take the mobile connection. I quickly scanned for a public wifi but there was none.

“Sprechen Sie English”?, I asked, the only sentence that I knew in German

She looked at me and nodded her head. She was mumbling something, but I couldn’t understand anything. She looked at me and pointed here stick to the two different sides of the road. She must mean to ask which way she should take. I felt ashamed that I couldn’t help. I looked around and there was absolutely no one in the street.

I remembered seeing two police offers standing outside the Bundesminister des Ausw?rtigen (BA) so with my hands I signalled her to follow me. I held her hands and with very small paces, it took us 15 minutes to cover the distance to BA that I would have covered in 3 minutes. The Police helped her. I couldn’t understand their conversation.

She smiled at me before I left, I smiled back. Her smile was beautiful!

On the way back, the feeling of guilt wouldn’t leave me. Here was an old lady asking for help in the cold dark Berlin winter and I was asking her if she spoke any English. What a shame on me, I thought. I felt ashamed that I could not help an old lady with very simple directions in the street. I realised the extent to which I was depending on technology for running my life. I relied on Google Translate, maps, calendars etc to run the very basics of my life.

On the entire way home, I could only think of an old Nepali Proverb, “What matters, despite all your education and achievements, is whether you are able to help people”

In this case, I wasn’t able to. And Somewhere deep down, I still feel that guilt within me!

ASHOK PAUDEL

Berlin, Germany