Oh Visa, My Visa!

When we were traveling to the northern province of Sikkim, Jenna and I met an amiable German couple named Joe and Bea. Over the course of a few days traveling together, Joe and Bea told us stories of their travels in Asia. Beaches in Thailand. Jungles in Cambodia. Island-hopping in Malaysia. Hiking in China. They told us all the fun parts but they also told us some harrowing tales, too.

Like the time they happened to visit Indonesia in 2003 just as America invaded Iraq. As they sat in a café in Jakarta, a group of angry Muslim protestors spotted them through the window, assumed they were American, marched up to the sidewalk in front of them and burned an American flag.

Or the time they got stranded in southwestern China and had to barter their way through a series of bus rides and taxi trips through the desolate and polluted ruggedness of the countryside to get back to Guangzhou.

Still, Joe and Bea remarked one night in Gangtok, as the four of us sat over a dinner of Tibetan beef and Sikkimese beer, that India was the hardest place in which they had ever traveled.

“Really?” I asked incredulously. “Why do you say that?”

Bea responded with an arched eyebrow: “Everything here is so overwhelming. People coming up to you, talking to you, asking you questions. You are always the center of attention. And, then, the paperwork…”

I shook my head at the time. I still could not believe India was more challenging than facing down angry protestors in Indonesia or dickering with steely-eyed Chinese cab drivers.

Now, nearly four months later, I am beginning to think Bea had a point. Our visa fortunes have changed. What Bea derisively termed ‘paperwork’ is coming back to haunt Jenna and me.

It turns out there is a qualification for our student visas that we missed in the fine print, which was written on our visas in a microscopic amalgam of English and Hindi script and covered with the customs stamp. As holders of student visas, we are required to register with the Indian authorities within 14 days of arrival in the country. Of course, that deadline passed months ago.

The missed deadline is not such a big deal. A short bit of Internet research (the Indian immigration website looks like it was last updated circa 1998) proves that we can pay a small fine and still register our visas late. But nothing in India—especially when it involves visas or passports—is ever that easy.

The same bit of research also tells me that we need the following in order to register our visas: copies of our passports (easy), four headshots (easy still), ‘duly filled-in registration book’ (which is done when you register), proof from our ‘educational institution’ that we are taking courses (a little harder but surmounted by a letter we got from ATI before we left the US), and the coup-de-grace: ‘valid and notarized’ proof of residence while living in India.

The last requirement is the stickiest wicket. Yes, we have lived in India for nearly five months, but in different places. Where should I get proof from? Kolkata, Bangalore, Tirur? No official has answered that initial question satisfactorily. What constitutes ‘proof of residence’? The answer here is more concrete but no more satisfying. The Indian immigration website says a ‘lease agreement’ or a ‘phone bill’ or a ‘hotel C-form’, which is a legal document all hotels and guesthouses are required to fill out for all guests, regardless of the length of their stay. (My parents had to fill a C-form out when they came to India last month.)

Well, we don’t get phone service, so we have no phone bill. We have not signed a lease agreement, so that won’t work either. We have letters from ATI in Kerala stating our address and our living arrangements while we teach in Tirur, but does this constitute a ‘lease agreement’? Probably not. We might possibly be able to get our hands on a hotel C-form from when we stayed in Kolkata but that was almost a half-year ago. Would that still count as our ‘proof of residence’?

To sort these questions out and in hopes of talking to a human instead of an automated response system or a mass-generated email directing my queries to other offices, I went to the local superintendent of police in Malappuram District, of which Tirur is a part. The Indian immigration website told me these police offices may also serve as registration points. I hoped this was correct.

The official with the Malappuram District police took one look at my visa and said, “You must got to Kolkata.”

“Kolkata?” I said. “But that is very far away.”

“Yes, it is.”

“It would not be easy to get there. It would take a few days by train.”

“Yes, it would.”

“And to buy plane tickets on such short notice. Very expensive.”

“Yes, they are.”

“Why can I not register here? The Indian immigration website—

“Because your visa says Kolkata on it,” and he held it up so I could see and he pointed to what I already knew was there: the words ‘American TESOL Institute-Kolkata’ written in the space reserved for the name of the ‘educational organization’ sponsoring my trip. Some official at the Indian consulate in Chicago had written those words in black ink more than six months ago, and now they were deciding my fate.

“Kolkata is very far, though,” I repeated lamely.

“Yes, it is.”

My eyes wandered to the walls of the office—chipped plaster and dirt stains, piles of dusty ledgers mildewing before my eyes, the omnipresent image of Gandhi, sewing at a spinning wheel. My eyes drifted further along the wall to a corner of the room where there hung a print of a painting of a peaceful mountain pass, complete with a rippling brook and snow-capped peaks. It was the type of ersatz artwork that has made Thomas Kincaid a millionaire. In fact, this image may have been a Thomas Kincaid piece. The picture had a message printed in bright red at the bottom of the image: “God speaks in many different ways.”

If I had been an observer to the scene, I would have chuckled at the irony, the sheer Dickensian pathos of the moment. The symbolism of that painting was too obvious to be an effective literary device. But since I was being told in reality that I would have to travel more than 3,000 miles to get one piece of paper signed because one word written on my visa more than six months ago decreed that it be so, the painting made me search frantically for God’s message in this experience.

“You are absolutely sure I cannot register here?” I asked one more time.

“You must go to Kolkata,” the official said, handing me back my visa. He smiled, then, the smile of bureaucrat who has just gotten out of some work.

“But that is far away.”

“Yes, it is.”

As I walked out of office at the Malappuram District police station, Bea’s words came suddenly back to me. The woman who had stared down angry Indonesian protestors had been right.

A week later, Jenna and I booked a flight to Kolkata. We will leave Tirur one week earlier than expected on February 20. We are not certain at the moment what will be the resolution to our visa situation—whether we will be able to register late, whether the immigration authorities will tell us to leave India, whether nothing of any consequence will happen. It has now turned into an unsatisfying waiting game.

But just like all our other experiences so far, it will be a story to tell others at sometime in the future.