The Joy of Having Paperwork

It's all done now: we're foreign residents of India and have submitted our documents to the police department in the district where our apartment is, so with the approval of the house board, it should all be kosher... or halal, by tonight, and we can move into our apartment. It's a bizarre feeling of joy that possesses you when you're finally clutching at that little document you didn't know about just some weeks before and when you realize how many hours you actually spent trying to get it.

This same thought obviously occurred to the mixed Franco-American crowd, about 10 years younger than us, who were going from station to station, from one bored, chai-sipping, clerk to another, with inexplicable mirth. What really got them in stitches was that one person's photograph didn't pass muster because the ears were hidden--it turns out, you can't wear glasses or have your ears concealed. I recall that the same rule applied to the U.S. green card, but at least we got our pictures taken at the same office, rather than circling around the stifling town trying to find a passport photo place. By the way, they are vastly superior than the ones in the U.S., not to mention about 10 times cheaper: the photo is taken against a stark white background and then photoshopped. Misha got some of his shoulders lopped off and a haircut; I got just the haircut and emerged looking like Dunya from the Russian sticks, somehow transplanted to India. The photos are forthcoming...

It's amazing how many files these bloated bureaucracies hold, and how rare computers are, and how imperfect. For the second time (the first being when we applied for our Indian visas), we had to say that our previous nationalities were Russian and Ukrainian although that was obviously never the case. The Indian system doesn't understand the concept of no nationality, just like it doesn't understand the concept of no permanent residency and no religion--it's about assigning places to people in a well-ordered universe, I think. Speaking of well-ordered, one of my next posts should be on why Indian streets don't have house numbers...