The last Tamil in Budapest

The last time I was in Budapest I was arrested. It was early in 1990, a few months after the Berlin wall had come down. Hungary had already had its uprising and I watched the red star being taken down from above the parliament building, a slow, painstaking business undertaken by workmen, not the result of a surge of popular sentiment. I wasn’t arrested because I was associated with the fight for freedom. I was arrested coming out of church after mass on a Sunday morning. The church was a rococo spectacular of gold cherubim and seraphim and the mass, though Roman Catholic, had many touches of the Eastern orthodox: incense, chanting and old ladies in black bowing repeatedly.

Outside in the bright sunlight in the square in front of the church were many Tamil young men, presumably having escaped from war-torn Sri Lanka. I was assumed, I guess, to be one of them. I am indeed of Tamil origin, so in a way the two burly policemen in grey and navy blue were right. I was taken firmly by the upper arm, a policeman at either side, put in the back of a police car and taken to a police station in a dingy suburb. There they put me against the wall and demanded my passport, which I didn’t have with me. It was in the hotel. I explained this in my best schoolboy German, which only served to incense them further. In their minds there was clearly something frustrating and unacceptable about the difficulties of locating who I was and where I came from. They laughed at the suggestion I was British. They searched my wallet, examining each credit card and looking particularly derisively at the BMW rescue card. They made me remove my shoes and pulled the inner soles of them out. I was baffled by it all and they were increasingly irritated. Then they left me on my own in a grey, windowless corridor for twenty minutes or so. After that a more senior, but smaller, police officer appeared in civvies and told them to release me. He had confirmed my identity with the hotel and had clearly angrily denounced the hotel staff for not registering all foreigners with the police station. The old Soviet practices were not yet extinguished.

Budapest is still the same beautiful Austro-Hungarian city it was then, now much cleaned up and restored. If Berlin is a miracle, Budapest is a fantasy. It is a city of castles and palaces; of dogs hunting outside the classical museum, angels poised to fly down from the Pest hillside across the city and lions guarding access to the bridge. The city that looked to Austria, but also to Transylvania is once more evident and points the mind to the fairy tale and fantasy traditions, of magical castles and terrifying wolves, that emanates from central Europe.

The churches are brightly lit at nights, their illuminated tracery like filigree. And through it all runs the broad, curving, river Danube, looking almost organic as it sways through the city. The metro is something like the New York subway and something like the Paris Metro. It is older than both. The wood panelled funicular still climbs the hill to Pest. Hungarian wine is much improved and Zara and H&M have replaced the old shops selling Austrian hunting jackets and pipes made from deer horn. Amazingly the Luxus department store, though re-located, remains and still has a certain drab GDR-chic. It doesn’t look like the window dressers have been made redundant.

No sign yet of Gucci and the other top end brands. Hungary is the least successful of the accession economies. Unlike the Czech Republic, the growth rate is pathetic and the Government unpopular. Nor have a million people left to seek their fortunes elsewhere, as in Poland. The old Magyar aristocracy have returned from Vienna and other European cities and reclaimed their place in Hungarian society, arranging congenial jobs for their children in the Brussels bureaucracy. They are, according to more ordinary middle class Hungarians, staggeringly sentimental, becoming dewy-eyed at the mere utterance of the word Mozart or Sachertorte. They are also un-self-critical and incompetent. The Budapest Sun says Ferenc Gyursany, the Hungarian Prime Minister, has ‘become synonymous with lies and disliked reforms in Hungary…He is, without doubt, more popular everywhere else than at home…the majority of a non-Hungarian audience (at the London School of Economics) is simply more optimistic, gullible or just not affected nor interested’. Freedom of the press, in Hungary as elsewhere, has evidently been worth fighting for. Irony and sarcasm are the beneficiaries.

There is nothing here for Tamils now. I am the only Tamil in Budapest now.

See the photos of Budapest at www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets