I’ve been married to an Indian woman for seven years and have lived in Chennai, India for five years. This is a story of life in the second most populated country on the planet.
In 2010, Malathi and I packed a change of clothes, toothbrushes, our laptops, our passports and credit cards and hired a moving company to transport our belongings from Wellington, New Zealand to India. In two efficient days, our wine glasses and everything else were transformed into neat cardboard tubes for the sea journey to Madras (as Chennai is still known by its freight-forwarding name). Soon, we were on one-way plane tickets to the land of my wife’s birth.
Moving to India was easy. As the spouse of an Indian citizen, I qualified for the ludicrously named “Person of Indian Origin” (PIO) visa, a combined residency and work permit. Living in India, though, is hard. There are hundreds of wondrous things about India: it’s a deeply historic and rich culture, the food is amazing, the climate in the South is unfailingly warm and the dynamism is impossible to miss – new streets and buildings rise like cornstalks in spring. Yet, for all that is exciting and delightful about India, this country is rough terrain. I had been warned by one of my friends in Washington D.C. how tough it might be. I had no idea.
It began with a request for “proof of address.” India is a culture imprisoned by bureaucracy and bound by paper files. Knee-jerk security laws mean that opening a bank account or getting a telephone line require waves of documentation, beginning with proof of residency. Even expats sponsored by a company struggle in India. For example, apartment leases in the company’s name don’t help an individual demonstrate actual occupancy.
We were moving into the home of my wife’s parents. The gas connection, electricity bill, and phone line were all in my in-laws’ name. How were we going to show “proof”? My wife had been taken off the ration card (a government-issued document qualifying the household for subsidized food). The ration card had served as an important ID document for her during her childhood in India. We finally were able to demonstrate “proof of address” by opening a bank account in her name at her brother’s bank and using her account statement to get two cell phone numbers.
No Comments