Legal aliens

When you arrive at the Ministy of Home Affairs in Delhi, the man in khaki in the road points you in a direction. It sounds like you’re supposed to get a card, but he points towards a tea stall. At the table beside the tea stall a man stands handing out cards with numbers on it. Good so far. Inside the reception room, they are on 70, as displayed by the electronic board on the wall. Very good sign. When I ask for a form, they tell me to wait for my number. I’d like to fill out the form while I’m waiting, I say. Sit down, they tell me. No one in the room rises to my defence, and I sit relatively out of the way. The man who was giving out number cards sits beside me, and drinks some tea. A distraught European lady comes in, and asks for a visa form. They point her back outside and tell her to get a number. No one rises to her defence either, so I try my luck again with the form. I had only found out about the Ministry of Home Affairs requirements and responsibilities by waiting in line one chilly morning at the Foreigners Regional Registration Office. The Tibetans monks were pleasant, the Afghans were very well behaved, and the Russians cut in front and passed up wads of cash. The staff yelled at the Tibetans and ignored the Pakistanis.

When my number comes up, I sign a book with my purpose, give my number card, and get a larger slip of paper. There is a photocopier in the ground floor of the building, underneath the hanging strips of chips bags. Truly superlative! The sign for the visa facilitation office points towards an open courtyard, where broken chairs are abandoned under dripping spigots. Two men drinking tea respond very slowly and point back out where I came from. I wondered if they had also broken my phone at the office, hung up on me, and cut the internet cable off Dubai to make it impossible to get any information over the past week. Upstairs in the visa office a man sitting under precarious piles of paper pointed me towards another desk, unoccupied, where I would get forms. The lady who showed up with the forms told me to go to counter 7, and pointed to the men and their leaning towers. Their desks were numbered 3, 4, 5, and 6. After a few hours of waiting, one man wrote something calmly on a new slip of paper and told me to come back at 5:30 for my letter. No local objection. Unbelievably good news. By this point my head was thrumming with anxiety. I was scared and dazed, paying attention to each passing task, short of temper and ready to be attacked. When 5:30 came and went, and a room full of people hadn’t received letters, I was ready to get deported.

The American states took the next chunk of my life, but in mocking detail. I gathered the next bouquet of papers and started on my taxes. Some are physical slips that were mailed to me in India, some are scans of papers that are hopefully in Toronto, some are my estimations of what may have been mailed to New York, if the dog hasn’t eaten it. Somehow New York State wants many, many rupees from me. Enough to hire someone for a year as a driver. Enough to buy 5600 bags of street popcorn, which would fill… something big. This could be less, they tell me online, if only I were eligible for the soybean oil fluid transformation credit. Or were a member of a registered New York State militia. It could also be more complicated; one customer in the FAQs started, ‘I met and married my husband in prison…’ It could also be not as serious as it seems. At the end of it all, a bureaucrat validated the newspaper eight or nine times before he got the stamp to work to let me remain in India. Battling for legal status is absurd sometimes.