This week, through a very circuitous route, I found myself being chosen as a Konkani-English-Konkani translator in a legal case. A few weeks ago, I had written a column about a tarvotti, Francisco Carlo Godinho, who was charged with the murder of an Alice Emily Brewster, in 1911. He had been tried in an English court, but was unable to fully participate in his defence because the evidence against him had been translated into Hindi while he only understood Konkani. So when a similar circumstance presented itself, I felt my conscience prodding me to offer my assistance.

Making my way to the Probation Office itself proved to be an adventure. People visibly shrank from me when I asked them where the office was. I felt like protesting, making my case, assuring them that I wasn't some heinous creature, that I'd led a life of the straight and narrow and that I was only going there as the interpreter. But my own mind had been sullied by prejudice. The streets leading to the office seemed mean. The clouds above were darker, heavier with threatening rain. The moustaches on the men twitched menacingly, their swagger exaggerated, their common, brazen bravado heightened. In my own mind, I'd condemned the entire area as alien, a place of crime and misdemeanour. Such is our fear of lives that are different from us.

As I sat in the reception room, my head buried in a book, trying to avoid eye-contact with the others, I couldn't help over-hearing nonchalant conversations about judges who were soft and those who weren't or about being caught the second time and expecting a more severe punishment. Seated on the black plastic chairs in the small sterile room of white paint and ugly fluorescent light were Arabs, Africans, White British and Asians. Evidently, crime at least was an equal opportunity employer. This world was clearly set apart by fortressing authority on one side while the life of the nefarious lay on the other side of the bullet-proof glass.

My downcast eyes discreetly searched the room for "my offender." At a certain level did I already know who it was? Did I not want to know? In my perpetual search for identity, a clue appeared before me. Perhaps it's the uncontrollable, unmitigated and indescribable urge we feel to protect those that look like us and speak like us, the need to plead on their behalf, to shelter them and if need be to make excuses for them. And even as I felt this gush of emotion, there was another one accompanying it; the feeling of shame, that one of my own had shown us in a poor light. This mass of emotion was surely proof that group identity is not entirely an abstract or nebulous concept.

As the offender, the officer and I sat in a secured room and proceeded with the interrogation, I couldn't help feeling how divided and distanced people are in this world. Two people in the room, distanced by lack of communication, and I in the middle a human bridge that could bring some understanding between them. And yet, even as we sat with a gulf in-between,I realised human beings are capable of understanding each other with their eyes, their bodies and their hearts. Their knowledge of each other can grow without words, without explanations, without cultural references, for all our human stories are essentially the same. They just have different names and places. And this in the end is what gives the human race some hope.