Morning for Mrs. Anne Syke is always the same, 5 O’clock. The bedtime is also fixed, 9 pm. At nine in Berlin you can talk to shiny sun or can start planning for evening out, children are still in parks. However, shops like Aldi, Kaiser down their shutters, but if you need something, still you have 1 hour buffer time at Turkish shops. However, for Frau Syke, nine is the time to tell everybody gutten nacht.

This Anglo-German good looking, octogenarian is nice to talk to. Discipline apart, she lives in a tiny little garden of African music, childhood nostalgia of London, feeble memory of Hitler, Indian Yoga, Chinese Tai chi, Japanese Kido and herbs in the balcony.

I liked her. Because, I usually like to talk to elderly people, they allow you, always, to read all yellowish pages of diaries. They talk about what they could have done, sense and sensible experiences of them are usually streams of flow, and they try to show the world they saw through their hazy glasses. The world they have gone through is the different world of history books.
However, I believe that there is no such thing exists called “real history”, all depend on the glass you wear. The told history is personal account and stories of personal time.

I never forget the real story of my grandma, Asharani Devi. She told me how she suffered political torment, it was one rainy night of August 1947 India got freedom and India divided. The great partition of Bengal uprooted her. Some days before the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, she was cooking in the kitchen. News came. Muslim rioters attacked Bikrampur, houses and temples are set on fire, Dhaka, Noakhali and several other places were burning, rioters were killing Hindu men, and raping women on the streets. By force they were snatching money, jewelry, lands, religion even women and forced people to leave the newborn country called Pakistan.
So she fled, with her 5 children and esoteric husband. However, they did not know where to go, only they had few clues, like addresses in hand, all the jewelry, cash, money, golden mohar left behind. They thrown out destitute, refugee in own land.My father was the youngest son, and just a baby of few months. Due to malnutrition and poverty he lost his vision, one of my uncle lost right hand due to vitamin deficiency. Thank god! Elder daughter of my Grandma was already married to a Government employee in India, so she initiated to bring them to her place, and they survived.

Story of Frau Syke has no connection with my granny’s; except her story of migration. Except her story of struggle, and struggle for survival, she said, that she is a migratory bird. She likes to describe herself a bird who twittered for love and flown from England to Germany, Germany to Africa and to Japan, few years in China. Some time to try luck, to live descent enterprising life; she traveled places like Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Nigeria. Unfortunately her white British skin did not let her gel up with the natives of those countries.
Syke said that the first time when she left London it was love and war behind the story.
The day she murmured good bye to London Bridge, she was a lady of twenties. Just the news came, that her fiancé Henry was killed and buried in Berlin. Henry was killed by German intelligence agents. Utterly clueless Syke flown to Berlin, but she did not know where in Berlin, her fiancé’s grave was, somebody said that Henry’s grave is lying in Düsseldorf, or in Essen. Still she does not know where it is actually. As she does not know how and why he was killed.
When she came to Berlin, the town was rumbling, groaning with trauma and living in debris of ruins, whole city was dismantled, humiliated. She assimilated herself with Berlin. She said that she saw Hitler just once, but when, where, she can not remember. She only remembers that after seeing the man, she spitted with hatred.
In the later half of her life she married a German guy, and divorced, however she has two children, both of them are living abroad, and for 30 years she is left lonely in a flat of Bruessler Strasse. This eye witness of Second World War and the Third Reich, believes in nonviolence, live on vegetarian diet, utterly disciplined, silent, little feeble but always happy. Because she knows mornings in her garden are charming than dark nights of despair and trauma.
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