At the start of the pandemic, Arundhati Roy, the author who introduced much of my country to the Booker Prize, declared that “historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” After having lived four years inside this “next world” I wonder if we can say with certainty what kind of a portal 2020 was? Has whatever was supposed to have metamorphosed done so?

In the mid-1990s, I was in Berlin for the first time looking for the Berlin Wall. I remember walking around the Reichstag marveling how its façade was still gutted by artillery fire almost fifty years after the Second World War ended and only a few years after the momentous events of 1989. I remember learning how the Soviets had left post-war East Berlin in tatters as a humiliating reminder and punishment for the German people. What I remember most however was looking for the Wall and failing to find it where it had once stood. I had seen it in films and photos and heard stories about it. Like millions across the globe, I had watched ecstatic Germans of all sides gleefully ram sledgehammers into its graffitied sides and scale its exposed wires to reach the once perilous ledge that stood between two worlds. Stopping on the spot where I was told the Wall once stood, I was astounded to find not even the smallest marker. Meandering east and west, I came across biscotti-sized pieces of what was allegedly “the Wall” being sold for only a few marks in local tourist traps. I remember walking away feeling duped. Where had the Wall gone? What modern gang of tomb raiders had stolen it? The Wall was a part of me too, I thought, and I wanted a piece of it.