Visa Woes

          I spent weeks filling up online forms. Each time I waited to check a date/spelling, the site would time-out and I had to re-do the exercise.  In the pre-dawn visa queue outside a Developed Country’s consulate, there were others before me, equipped with tiffin to last the day, umbrellas to provide shade, water-bottles, thin cotton panchas to wipe the nervous sweat with and newspapers to spread on the ground to sit on. Precious files with true-copies and originals of necessary documents were clutched to bosoms.

Thanks to Sri Husband’s training, I carried an entire briefcase of yellow, fragile papers and their multiple photo-copies.

“Take your parents’ marriage certificate,” was one advice. “It will include your mother’s maiden and married names.”

 “And passport-sized photos of yourself.”

 I even carried my primary-school report cards. My teachers (may they RIP) had detected no spark, inferring that no Developed Country would want me close to their shores at any future time. Which meant there was no harm in granting me a visa. Bad report cards are useful, see?

My salary slips were included: giggle-inducers, they put the counter-staff in a good mood.

I carried many proofs: of birth, use of electricity, water, banks, gas (uh, the cooking-fuel kind). A letter from a kind neighbour to say he believed I wasn’t a criminal, that I would definitely return and from a boss who secretly wished I wouldn’t. The woman at the counter handed me back my Housing Society Rangoli Competition Award saying it wasn’t required. I’d taken it along ‘… just in case.’ Like I carried my son’s photograph. If I had taken Sri Husband’s they might have, in sympathy, offered me citizenship.  Not that I would have taken it, I love my desh. I just wanted a three-week visit permit. 

Something worked. Like the others, I yelled, ‘I got my visa’, accompanied by a hoop of delight and two fingers held up indicating ‘victory’. My passport was no longer blank.

Next experience, an Eastern-European consulate housed in a large flat in a crowded, up-market Mumbai neighbourhood. The door opened automatically when I pressed the bell and silently closed after I stepped in. There wasn’t anyone inside. I discovered a face in an internal window. The jaw moved purposefully when I greeted it. “Pazzport plizz,” it said. The face-owner took the passport and refused to give me an acknowledgment/ receipt for it because, he claimed, he had “never made a mistake in his life”. I couldn’t snatch it back through that tiny hole-in-the-wall and escape through that remote-controlled door. I used my Goan takli to counter his argument and won. I refused to leave the premises. Just sat there. Got my visa, too, after making some phone calls.

For visas on arrival, the host country has to be informed in advance of one’s entry, exit and stay details. Friend M spent a weekend at an airport because of no visa-on-arrival. Quarrelling and crying didn’t help. She returned forlorn.

Whilst getting the eyes clicked for identification, I worry. What if the machine mixes up my iris image with someone else’s and I’m stopped? “Doesn’t happen,” Sri Husband says. “Always a first time,” I figure.

A fellow-traveller was stranded at an American airport because he didn’t have a transit visa. “Aisaa bhi hota hai?” I thought. I’d heard of student/ business/ diplomatic visas, but to have one to spend time watching people through droopy eyelids between flights was a bit much.

A colleague said he was once stranded for hours because the printers weren’t working or the server was down. Manual record-keeping is extinct. Equipment failure, no visa.  

Here’s a recent experience. We were on a travel-agent-planned Istanbul-Athens trip. At Mumbai airport, waiting to collect the boarding-passes, discussing which coffee would keep us awake, our friends were told their printout-visa was invalid.

“Say again?” said the friend, wondering which nightmare he’d wandered into.

The printout said ‘subject to a valid shengen visa’. The entry into Istanbul was on the 3^rd, the entry into Europe was on the 7^th. The visa should have said ‘from 3^rd onwards’. It said from 7^th onwards. Of ten, two had this problem, although the documents had been submitted together. Travel agent’s fault? The European government’s for not have read the submitted documents correctly? Reasoning, explaining didn’t help. We were consolingly told that on a previous day, thirty passengers had been sent back.

“The Devil,” Sri Husband’s refrain echoes in my head. “Lies in the details.” Visa vie visas, that’s true.

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