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.

Feedback: sheelajaywant@yahoo.co.in

           

Painting Panaji Purple.

19 April 2009.

            It’s the time of the year when we visit Goa to pay bills, pay taxes, and with each passing visit, I find the state getting more colourful than in times gone by. That Goans love colour, that we’ve always worn striking designs on our saris and ‘tops’ is well known, specially via Bollywood. Of course, the sari blouse and the skirt/pant is almost always black, but the directors missed that.

This time, we were looking for a ground floor flat to take on rent for my mother who finds it difficult to climb to our second floor flat now. (In spite of living in Goa for years and knowing many people, we had to go to an agent. I am told, in years gone by, people just ‘spread the word’ and got what they wanted. But the times they have a-changed.). First experience: I was shown a 2BHK-1toilet flat behind a row of shops. There was only a ground floor to the building, with a provision for raising more storeys: quite obviously, for there were metal rods sticking upwards from the pillars and a staircase outside the door leading to nowhere. Interesting place to put potted plants, I thought. The flat was surrounded by the trees in the compound: sounds good? Except that they were but a couple of feet from the windows and the outer wall touched them. And the neighbouring buildings were very close, too. Which meant that no sunlight or breeze would enter. The architect was either the dear but unqualified landlord who lived in the cottage adjoining, or a college dropout. At Rs 8000 bucks a month, that was really the fungus on a dustbin (antonym of icing on the cake), for the walls within were painted purple and green. Think that’s unusual? You haven’t stepped out to see what’s happening then: orange kitchens, turquoise bathrooms, striking colours are the code of the day. But the latest colour is purple.

             Go to Caranzalem (I believe the fad began there) or St. Inez, or even in the heart of Panaji, there are so many new monstrosities painted in garish purple. They are supposed to stand out, perhaps, like protestors and activists at a gay parade. But the latter have an agenda; here, what point are the builders making? If they are making a point, why not choose shocking pink or parrot green or sunflower yellow or jet black? Panaji can then have dotted buildings, exteriors with checks (I’ve seen some with such patterns), or stripes. There could be buildings with optical illusions painted on them. I need to copyright my ideas. The government always had tutti-fruity exteriors and honestly, they’ve started looking quite classy compared to what I’ve recently seen hereabouts.

Some would think that to be an experiment in individualism, style, forward thought, creative expression, etc. Goa always leads in such things, eh? I saw a ‘bungalow’ (we still use this word for a house, no matter how cramped or tiny, a hangover from ‘the Raj’, which never existed in Portuguese Goa) with fake palms at the entrance, a la Dubai style. I saw that at one restaurant or shop (forget which), too. Great, let’s start manufacturing plastic plants (so common in many drawing rooms anyway) now that we’re decimating the real ones.

Along with a sense of colour (what was wrong with the simple white so suited for our tropical clime?) and other things, we’ve lost some of our food habits. On a popular tv program, I was amused to see tomatoes and garlic being ‘traditionally’ used in fish curries. To my grandmother, tomatoes were a novelty and garlic a strict no-no, tho’ fish-curry was staple food. Give you an example of how hard it is to get local ethnic once-upon-a-time fare: My coz from the UK wanted (oh these NRIs, always going back to their childhoods) of all things, vatamba solan to make fish curry. The local grocer hadn’t heard of it. Markettant melltale, he said. The old market said, go to the spice shops. The spice shops said visit the new market. There I was told no one bought these any longer, stick to birindya solan. Finally, someone suggested, try the phool stalls. The flower stalls? Oh yes, that was just where one woman had two, just two packets of what I wanted.

I discover new aspects of Panaji every time.

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