by Dave Prager
There is, however, one gloomy rite of passage that both medium-term and long-term expats can discuss with equal melancholy. But before I recite our tales of grief, I must first encourage any Indians reading this book to prepare their eye muscles for a great deal of rolling. Because I am indeed going to spend the next few pages complaining about the one instance that foreigners must deal with the Indian bureaucracy. And I won’t once appreciate the fact that locals have to deal with a lifetime of it.
That being said: woe are we expats for having to endure the FRRO!
For expats with employment visas, our invitation to visit the Foreigner Regional Registration Office is printed on our passports and date-stamped the moment we set foot in the country. “Registration required within fourteen days of arrival in India,” it says. Which means that no sooner do we get settled in our offices than we’re required to abandon them for a day of stamping and shuffling and standing and squirming and sighing.
Delhi’s FRRO office is located just a few hundred meters south of the Hyatt Hotel, mockingly close to the hotel’s efficient air-conditioning and Italian espresso machines. Nevertheless, it’s extremely difficult to locate for those foreigners whose companies haven’t hired a tout to lead them through the maze and grease palms along the way. The pale blue sign that announces its presence is hidden behind another sign of some other agency that’s been erected right in front of it. The building itself is one of many squat cement government buildings in the complex. To reach it, one must pass a burned-out hulk of a taxicab rusting in the parking lot; it’s hard not to assign symbolic meaning to the wreck.
The first stop for registrants is the pre-queue: that is, the queue in which one waits to secure a spot in the actual queue. If one arrives before the office opens, there’s even a queue for the pre-queue, with a sign-in sheet that is completely ignored when the doors are opened and everyone stampedes in. At the desk at the end of the pre-queue, a registrant is assigned to one of a handful of counters. And then it’s just a matter of waiting as comfortably as possible on the hard plastic chairs, hopefully in front of a fan, with nothing to do but cringe at the loud Americans bemoaning their misery with the spittle-flecked bitterness of which Americans are so exceedingly capable (I find it so much more dignified to complain in literary form), and listen for the glorious sound of that magic number being called.
It’s a long wait, though. Each counter is manned by an expressionless clerk with a fondness for unannounced chai breaks and a clear aversion against typing at a rate perceptible to the eye. Each transaction takes a minimum of fifteen minutes, assuming that each registrant’s paperwork is in order, that his or her passport photographs are the acceptable width and height, and that everything is photocopied at least twice. I failed the latter two requirements my first time around—as it turns out, not all passport photographs are created equal and not all government offices are kind enough to have a photocopier behind the counter. I had to trek down the street to a small market where various entrepreneurs have set up photo booths and Xerox machines for this very purpose.
The FRRO has all the elements of the perfect bureaucracy: soulless lighting, chairs engineered for backaches, and automaton clerks drained of every last drop of empathy. It’s like any American city’s Department of Motor Vehicles, but without the joy. My co-workers had advised me to stash a few hundred-rupee notes in various pockets so I could pay bribes without revealing the full contents of my wallet, but the one element of bureaucracy the FRRO actually did seem to lack was corruption: at no point did I spot an opening to bribe my way out.
My conversations with other expats taught me that there was actually a method for defeating the FRRO: one can use the momentum of the bureaucracy against itself. Unfortunately, I learned of this bureaucratic judo only in time for the last of the four days I could have been contributing to India’s GDP but was instead getting paid to stand in line at this office. Here’s what I did: once I got my counter assignment from the clerk at the end of the pre-queue—my assignment was C18, the eighteenth person in line for counter C—I turned on my heels and walked out of the FRRO. I took an auto to Green Park and had lunch at Evergreen. I spent an hour on my computer at Barista. I took a walk through the nearby monuments. I relaxed in the shade and watched kids who should have been in school play cricket. And then I moseyed back to the FRRO, cut directly in front of C29 and C30 despite their glares, waited patiently for the clerk to finish with C28, and then showed her my number. Though I hadn’t been there when she called my number two hours prior, this is the way bureaucracy sees the world: having a number is more important than actually waiting my turn.
Why did I have to go to the FRRO four times when foreigners are only required to register once? Officially, it was because my company changed its name when we split from our former sister company, which required a new visa and new registration; and then twice again because my tax papers were in question. But I believe the true reason I had to visit so many times is karmic retribution: I was being punished for the time I told Murali that I’d be spending a full day in a queue at the US embassy to drop off my passport for renewal, and another full day again two weeks later to pick it up. I knew that Murali’s expectations of government bureaucracy would lead him to believe me when, in fact, those two transactions actually took fifteen minutes each.
So karma paid me back with four miserable visits to the FRRO. (“Four visits!” I can still hear Murali gasping in mock horror when I made the mistake of whining about this to him. “You should ask President Bush to invade us immediately!”) And karma’s divine will was manifested by a finicky clerk who decided that the FRRO’s mandate to process my registration extended to making sure my taxes were paid. The little scribble she wrote in my registration book obliged me to return at the conclusion of the fiscal year with proof of my contribution to the Indian treasury; and another clerk’s subsequent scribble on my third visit a few months later obliged me to return again with even more paperwork.
It would have been much easier to just slip my income through the treasury’s cracks. After all, Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods claims that only nineteen percent of Indians pay taxes. And no police officer ever visited my house to examine my FRRO registration booklet as they were supposed to, so nobody would have known if I hadn’t gone back with my tax receipts. But I consider myself an honest fellow, so I made the effort necessary to contribute whatever I owed to fund the government’s bodyguard regiments for VIP politicians and gardener corps for their taxpayer-supplied houses.
My company automatically withheld around twelve percent of my salary, but my tax bracket demanded more than that. So I relied on the accountancy services of one Mr. G., a certified accountant who was friends with the finance guy at my company. Mr. G. helped me get my PAN card (my taxpayer ID) when I first arrived and, at the end of the fiscal year a few months later, helped me bequeath what seemed like far too much money to the Indian government considering how little of the year I’d been in the country.
For the next year’s tax obligation, I knew I had to act in advance. The Indian fiscal year ends on March 31, and we were planning to leave the country for good on April 1. I was terrified that our timing might raise eyebrows at passport control, and I had visions of airport customs officials tying me to a chair in the basement of Indira Gandhi airport and demanding that I write an enormous check to the Income Tax Department of India right then and there. (Or, perhaps, simply deposit a lesser amount of cash directly to the Bank of Rajesh the Customs Officer.)
So when January rolled around, I duly informed Mr. G. of my leaving date, making it clear how critical it was to get my accounts settled before I departed. But despite my insistent emails, phone calls and SMSes, it wasn’t until the second week of March—just two weeks before our departure—when I finally found myself in the same room with him. I handed over my papers and explained for the tenth time that my departure was growing more imminent by the second. His mouth formed a little shocked “o” as he looked up from
my tax papers and said—and, dear reader, he actually said this—“April first? We should have started this a long time ago!”
Which is exactly why I’d hedged my bets against him. At that point, my meeting with Mr. G. was only out of courtesy, because the estimated payment he’d emailed me a few days earlier seemed so absurdly high that I had gotten a second opinion. I’d queried the expat email lists and found an accountant who specialized in foreigners. And while this new accountant’s estimate for what I owed was still many multiples of India’s average per capita income, it was many multiples less than what Mr. G. wanted me to pay.
So after Mr. G. assured me there was no possible way that my tax obligation could be any lower than his estimate, I handed him a check for his services and assured him that I’d send over my forms the next day. And then, once he was gone, coward that I am, I severed our business relationship via SMS, making up some story that my friend’s uncle had volunteered to do my taxes for free. Still, my hand shook slightly as I signed the check for the amount my new accountant assured me I had to pay; it still seemed far too high when considered against the general cost of living in India and the specific state of our finances.
Because, believe it or not, our finances weren’t doing as good as we’d hoped.
We’d calculated my monthly salary when we first arrived in India. And after we deducted our expected housing, food and transportation costs, we admired the amount we expected to save and then set about learning how to calculate the forty-to-one exchange rate on the fly. We successfully trained our minds to value mangoes in terms of Granny Smiths and samosas in terms of Big Macs, and then we never gave the exchange rate a second thought beyond sighing happily whenever we remembered to consider a Café Coffee Day double espresso on a Starbucks continuum. So it was a cruel bucket of fiscal water poured on heads happily ignorant of the dynamics of global finance when Dipankar slapped me heavily on the back one day and gleefully informed me that the exchange rate was now forty-four-to-one.
This was terrible news for me. Even though I saw life in dollars, I was getting paid in rupees. My salary—as expressed in US Treasury bonds, shares in Google stock, rides on the New York City subway, doughnuts purchased on Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn, bets on baseball with my brother Eric, birthday spa packages for my sister Susan, and anything else I’d use dollars to buy—had just gone down by ten percent.
What caused this shift? Economists might point to the global financial crisis, the price of oil, a butterfly flapping its wings outside the offices of the Reserve Bank of India, or the failure of Anoop Desai to win American Idol. Whatever the case, it all coalesced into a sudden macroeconomic buggering.
I refused to acknowledge this rate shift as permanent. For months I resisted changing the cell containing .025 in our financial spreadsheet, afraid to see what the new .0222 would mean for all the money we’d hoped to save. Instead, I began to watch the exchange rates for good news as closely as I watched Facebook for high school friends to post unflattering pictures of themselves. Reloading the finance sites dozens of times a day, I’d cheer a tenth-of-a percentage movement in my favor and curse any hundredth of-a-percentage plunge in the opposite direction. And I’d follow either shift with quick calculations as to how much (usually expressed in fives of dollars) our savings had gained or lost in that single day.
Jenny and I decided to delay transferring our money back to our US account while the exchange rate was forty-four-to-one. We feared locking in our losses. So naturally the rupee hit fifty-to-one a few months later, and we mourned for the good ol’ days of forty-four.
I complain about my tax burden and my forex losses, but I’m also fully aware that I made far more money than most. My salary was justified in terms of the cost of living in the country I’d eventually return to—I had to save for life there, not here. But it still made me feel awkward with respect to the cost of living in the country I was in and with respect the co-workers who surely knew how much more I made than they. So my good fortune was accompanied by an overwhelming sense of guilt: guilt about my high salary, my nice apartment, my private taxi, my reliable air conditioning, my uninterrupted water supply, my precious Apple computer, and the fact that I could go back to New York City any time I wanted. I felt guilty about my very accident of being born an American, and the thirty years I’d spent being unaware of just how lucky I was.
Most of all, I felt guilty that I’d arrived in Delhi thinking that everyone’s everyday struggle was going to be my grand adventure. It was Western privilege for me to take smiling tourist pictures in the back of an autorickshaw, because I could always call a cab, or lease a car, or fly to America. It was Western privilege for me to blog about how brave I was to eat in an actual dhaba, because I could afford McDonalds, or Park Balluchi in Hauz Khas village, or Masala Art in the Taj Palace Hotel. Given the sheer odds against being born into American privilege, the actions I perceived as broadening my cultural horizons—buying vegetables from an old lady! asking a poor tailor to repair a button on my shirt!—could justifiably be perceived by everyone else as poverty tourism.
My guilt manifested in an exaggerated pretence of humility that I wore as often as I could, as if arguing with the chaiwallah who withheld the single rupee of change he owed me would be too evocative of the world’s geopolitical inequities. I’d play down my good fortune and my spendthrift ways. I’d deflate my salary, my rent, and the salary we paid Ganga to anyone who asked. I’d find myself fibbing when Indians would contrast my country with theirs, like when Birender asked if Europe had as much traffic as Delhi did. As we both stared at the sea of motionless tail lights stretched before us, my instinct was to dispel his national inadequacy; and not only did I not clarify my continent of origin, but I gently assured him that Europe’s traffic problems were worse.
But I never felt more guilty about my country’s place in the world than when Murali was unable to attend our company’s annual creative directors’ meeting in France. As an Indian, Murali had to apply a month in advance for his visa; whereas I, as an American, could cross the border at any time without prior permission. So when Murali’s visa wasn’t granted in time, I was sent to Nice in his place, bearing the presentation he’d intended to deliver along with such overwhelming guilt on top of my everyday guilt that it took all the Camembert and Pinot Noir I could consume to look him in the eyes when I got back to Delhi.
We didn’t have it nearly as good as many of the expats in Delhi. For instance, we managed to score only a handful of the coveted invitations onto the US embassy grounds, and at no time did we experience the joy of swimming in the embassy’s pool. So we had to find other ways to cool down on Delhi’s hottest weekends. We considered at one point attending the Sunday night pool party at the Park Hotel near Connaught Place which, we’d heard, was open to non-guests; but I was sure there was a rule dictating the minimum bicep size necessary to gain entrance. So for those times when even the green waters of the ancient Hauz Khas village water tank started to look refreshing, we did two things: we bricked up our consciences against the inequities of swimming in a landlocked city with chronic water shortages, and then we shelled out a fortune to swim at one of the five-star hotels.
A few of Delhi’s top hotels will, for what most Indians would consider a nice weekly salary, give outsiders a few hours’ access to the facilities that their guests rarely make use of anyway. On those few times we splurged, the blue water and white lounge chairs were ours alone, empty but for the groundsmen discreetly watching Jenny from behind some hedges. There were 125 licensed swimming pools in the city2 when we lived there, but nearly all of them were in the hands of hotels, embassies, or the exceedingly wealthy, so swimming was a rarefied pastime outside those who’d dive into the ancient stepwells or wade into the Yamuna.
The city does run a few pools, including one at Siri Fort, the sports complex near our flat. Demand is understandably high, though, so they only allowed one hundred people in the water during each of the eleven one-hour daily shifts. Si
ri Fort’s pool was both within walking distance and far more affordable than a five-star hotel, but Jenny assumed that the sheer number of boys and men to be found in the swimming complex—combined with the presumed rarity of foreigners wearing swimsuits—would be the ocular equivalent of her walk up the Jama Masjid minaret. For her, a cold shower was far less uncomfortable.
So we learned other ways to beat the heat. One of the best was Indian-style clothes: loose and flowing, they made the climate much more bearable, capturing cooling breezes without sticking to sweaty skin. Jenny took advantage of this much more than I: the kurtas I’d bought when I first arrived migrated to the back of my closet when I realized I’d be the only one at the office wearing one. But Jenny found Indian-style clothing to be fashionable, comfortable, and demure. And it was critical for Jenny that she cover her skin—not just to keep it out of the sun, but to ensure auto drivers kept their eyes where they belonged. In Mumbai or Pune, it might be slightly more acceptable to dress like Bollywood starlets, but Delhi’s cultural conservatism meant that any skin she left bare would be burned both by the sun and by the concentrated attention of the city’s men.
Although she really couldn’t win either way. On her last day of work in Delhi, Jenny decided to mark the occasion by dressing in a full Indian ensemble: a bright blue salwarkameez ensemble complete with a matching blue dupatta. As she and her co-workers walked through the neighborhood on their way to her farewell lunch, the men stared and made catcalls louder and more openly than they ever had when she just wore Western clothes.