The Foreigners Regional Registration Office (FRRO) for the Hyderabad area is housed in the old Begumpet airport, a facility made obsolete two years ago when the shiny new Rajiv Gandhi International Airport opened south of town. I had heard of municipalities using old airport sites for redevelopment; the former Stapleton Airport in Denver, for example, is now a neighborhood and shopping district. But this is India, not Colorado. Instead of leasing the land to a developer, as Denver did, the government here just decided to use the crumbling airport terminals as office buildings. Take a baggage claim, add cubicles, throw in a few plastic chairs for the public to sit in, and voila! An instant DMV.
The first time I went to the FRRO, I was with Jessica and the immigration consultant her employer had hired to facilitate her registration. It was a two man job actually: one guy with excellent English to tell Jessica what to do, and another guy who used to work at FRRO who works behind the scenes, pestering his former colleagues to hurry up. She was in and out in less than two hours.
But the consultant wasn't hired to help me. As soon as we sat down, I learned that there was an online application I should have filled out. (The Fulbright people told me it was paper.) So I took out a laptop, created a temporary WiFi hotspot with Jessica's cellphone, and submitted the application.
Then they told me that after submitting the application I had to wait twenty-four hours for the systems to sync up. And I needed a letter from my university in Hyderabad. And because I had a research visa, I also needed an HIV test.
So that ended day one. I went home and started accumulating paper, plotting my return. I got an HIV test at the local clinic (more about the clinic in a future post). I got a letter from my department chair. I even got a letter to the government from my wife granting me permission to live with her in her company-sponsored flat.
I returned six days later ready to kick some official ass. Once again, I was humbled. After two hours of waiting, they called my number and I was escorted behind a partition. There sat the boss of the operation, a man with henna-dyed orange hair and a salt-and-pepper handlebar mustache. He asked if I was being paid to teach at the university. I said I had a government grant. "But are you receiving remuneration?" I said I was, yes sir. With a stern finger wag he informed me that I had the wrong type of visa. He and my case worker chatted in Telugu for a few minutes, and then he said, in excellent English, that it was not my fault: the Embassy had made the mistake. "Can I go?" I asked hopefully.
"The server is down," he said, handing me half a sheet of photocopy paper. "Come back on this date. Then you can take your certificate."
Five days later I returned. This time I had none of my previous swagger; this time I knew better than to believe I could bend the Government of India to my will. A secondary purpose of the registration process, I have learned, is to remind foreigners that India can be colonized, but it can never be told what to do. Western ideas about efficiency--for example, that processes as simple as tax registration can be accomplished simply and easily over the phone, or in conjunction with another necessary chore, like buying a local SIM card for your cell phone. Remember the Motor Voter Bill? That would never happen here. For one thing, combining the processes of voter registration and drivers-license renewal (as in Motor-Voter), would halve the number of government employees required. In a country of 1.2 billion, jobs are always welcome, no matter how unnecessary they may seem to us. In fact they are quite necessary: it is necessary for those people to feed their children.
Long story short, I finally got my certificate. Don't tell anyone, but I'm going to miss that place. Where else can you hang out with a cup of Nescafe in a room full of Ethiopian immigrants and their adorable children? Or American study-abroad chicks in $1.50 pink kurta pyjamas? Or foreign technocrats with paid local minders? All of this under the watchful third eye of a sleeping security guard. Tell me--where?
