Vive La Canadienne

The Indian High Commission in Islamabad fronts on to Diplomatic Enclave Road. Its orderly and meticulously manicured garden stands to attention behind a well-guarded, un-scalable decorative fence. To the casual passer-by it presents a generic impression of polite aloofness intended to meet the expectations of the host country. There is no hint of a smile: no banner, no bust, no dancing god or multi-armed goddess to remind the citizens of Pakistan, land of the pure, of the distant land just across the border. Hindu chanting and incense burning is permitted only in a tiny temple tucked away out of sight, like a little secret.
My visas for travel to India were usually arranged through my husband’s office. It was the easiest thing: fill in the form, attach the photos, include the fee and, in good time the passport comes back with a visitor’s visa all in order. Then came the time my husband was out of country and I decided to visit my son in Bangalore. My sense of independence reared its little head: why should I need an intermediary to get an Indian visa? I am a person in my own right, fully capable of getting my own visa. Did I not once manage to stage my own little sit-in in the Italian Embassy in Piraeus, refusing to come back the next day and vowing to stay on the premises until I was given my visa? Am I not the one who braved the cavernous visa office of the Czech Embassy in Vienna in 1967 to get my South African passport stamped with a communist visa? Surely getting a visa from the well behaved, hospitable looking Indian High Commission on Diplomatic Enclave Road could not be difficult? Passing it on my regular visits to the American Embassy, I saw no long queues of Pakistanis clamouring for visas. Why would they? I thought simple-mindedly, forgetting the longing relatives looking at each other across no-mansland at Wagar.
On a fine spring day I set out bravely for Diplomatic Enclave Road expecting to be admitted to the visa office through the front gate. No, said the guard, looking with amusement at the Canadian Passport I was waving like a ticket. No, said the guard with a twinkle of mischief of one watching another about to step into a hole. No, he said, pointing me around the corner to the back of the impressive main building. The visa office is on the other road.
The other road was in another world. It was mean, dusty and full of potholes. Here the Indian High Commission was well fortified by high walls. Beside a barred gate and flush with the wall stood the tiny hut of a visa office. Its bullet proof windows were thick and opaque. A faded sign, requiring reading glasses, listed the scant hours of operation and many rules and regulations in Urdu, Hindi and English. It seemed as though the place by its very ugliness and inaccessibility was designed to discourage all but the most bold and determined. But these were not in short supply. As I turned to look at the empty lot across the street, I saw a veritable campground of customers squatting in the shade of acacia trees beside makeshift shelters of sticks and blankets. The smell of kebab on the grill wafted across the road and deep fried puris piled into pyramids marked the location of food stalls scattered throughout the lot.
I remembered sunset at Wagar on the Punjab border between India and Pakistan when soldiers face off against each other in a flag furling ceremony. It is a ritualised show of military prowess in extra smart uniforms and exaggerated steps and salutes. It draws tourists from all over Pakistan; it also draws relatives who, for a short while after the ceremony, are permitted to gather at the gate separating the two countries.  Through the bars of the high gate I saw hands reach in wonder to touch dear ones partitioned long ago. Grandparents seeing grandchildren for the first time, sisters whose husbands decided whether they should stay or leave, brothers whose ideological differences had long since disappeared – all caught in the tragedy of fragmented family. I remembered the ambivalence in those tearful faces as the sorrow of separation mingled with the joy of meeting, the wonder at how years apart can change the appearance. And my own heart throbbed with the ache of exile.
Perhaps some of those camped opposite the visa office had been to Wagar and decided to turn that brief encounter into a proper visit. I imagined their journeys: walking from remote villages across mountains or plains to reach a bus stop. I pictured them waiting for hours or days until the bus arrived in its jingli splendour, covered in colourful folk-art, its exuberance flying in the face of the seriousness imposed by the faith of the state. In my mind’s eye I saw the determined hopefuls being bounced around on the hard seats of the crowded bus, sharing food and stories and anticipation.
Nose to the sign, I checked the visa office hours again. It seemed from the barely legible official timings that they were open for business and yet the space behind the thick glass seemed to be in complete darkness. I knocked on the glass and rattled the narrow slot obscured in the bottom left hand corner of the window. Spectators began to gather; watching an agitated western woman was always good fun. A guard at the gate took pity on me and shouted something over the wall. I could see light as the door between the wall and the hut opened and a distorted human figure approached the window.
“Visa application!” I shouted.
Slowly the form emerged through the slot.
“You close at 12? Don’t go away; I’m bringing the application right back, with the photos.”
Amazingly human fingers opened the slot and faintly I heard: “Come before. Lunch at half past eleven.”
My receipt instructed me to return on the Friday with my passport and fee. I decided to go early but the campers were there already shouting and waving passports. Perhaps they had been there since prayer time. The concept of a queue comes with western style civic education. That morning at the Indian visa office the crowd followed the conventions of the bazaar, each one pushing and shoving for himself. I realised I was the only woman in the crowd though many of the men had several passports each. Across the street women could be seen watching as their business was being done for them. I had been in Pakistan long enough not to fear robbery in such a crowd though I knew I could be risking pinching, bra flicking or sly touching as one does in a crowd of macho men anywhere in the world. But the crowd was good-natured and some men even tried to make space for me. I was, after all, a middle-aged woman dressed in shalwar kameez, my dupatta at the ready to cover my head if need be. Still, despite the goodwill of the men around me, I was unable to see how I was ever going to get to that mean little slot in the dark window to even hand in my passport and fee, let alone getting it back.
And then I saw her. Like a princess from her coach, she descended from a brand new Landcruiser. She was a tall girl dressed in a pure white shalwaar kameez but there was no sign of a dupatta. Her raven hair was curly and stylishly cut. With flashing eyes she summed up the crowd before she waded in. Like Moses parting the Red Sea she used the Urdu imperative reserved for underlings. Soon she found herself near the front. Now she turned her attention to me. She smiled a big smile of recognition when she saw my passport.
“Oh, you’re Canadian too? Come, we don’t have time for this.” She waved her hand over the heads around her. “I know the fast track. You come with me.”
She shouted something at the guard at the gate. He waved us along, opened the gate and let us through the turnstile beyond. Green lawns and fountains greeted us, palms and bougainvillea and the scent of sweet peas in spring. The immaculate mini mandir stood proudly in one corner.
“We go this way,” she said as she led me to the ornate back entrance to the High Commission. “I’m Zeinab Shah, by the way.”
“Did you ever go to school in Hamilton, Ontario?” I asked. “You remind me so much of one of my Middle School students.”
“No, I would have remembered you. I’ve lived in Montreal since I was four.”
‘Ah, tu parles Francais?’ was followed by ‘Mais oui, bien sûr’. We exchanged a few sentences but it was soon obvious that her French was far better than mine so we fell back into English. She told me she had come from Abbottabad where her family was gathered for her brother’s wedding.
“Oh, an arranged marriage?” I asked brazenly.
She sniffed disapprovingly: “Yes, to one from a landed family in need of a Canadian passport. My brother is much more of a traditionalist than me. You won’t see me coming here to get married. I’m going to be an architect before I’m a wife. My parents know not to even try and suggest an arranged marriage to me! That’s why they immigrated to Canada so that we could grow up without the restrictions of the feudalism and fundamentalism of this society. Now, look at me, they got what they wanted.”
Or perhaps more than they bargained for, I thought.
“Why are you going to India?”
“I’m getting too restless.  I’m bored with all the wedding preparations. I’m also fed-up with being chaperoned everywhere. My mother says I criticise too much and I’m becoming an embarrassment. So she’s letting me go to Goa for a week to let off steam with some Indian friends from McGill who are there already.”
Just the thought of sun and fun and partying on the beach put a big bikini grin on her face.
The guard at the back entrance received us like guests rather than petitioners. We were shown to an elegant waiting room where we handed in our passports and receipts and waited in plush seats.
“This is more like it. Thanks for rescuing me. How did you know to come here?”
She gave me a knowing patrician look.
“In this country you have to know someone who knows someone who knows something,” she said mysteriously.
Soon we were received by a handsome young man with an easy Brahmin manner. He chatted for a while, verifying the facts on our applications without being in the least inquisitorial.
My particulars: My diplomatic residence visa to Pakistan. Did I like living here? The purpose of my visit to India. The Canadian School in Bangalore. My son’s sitar playing. My other visits to India. How did I like India? Temples, towns and textiles.
All this soon convinced him to stamp and sign the visa already pasted in my passport. I was free to go but decided to wait for Zeinab to assure my safe passage through the throng beyond the gate.
Zeinab’s particulars: Daughter of a surgeon and a professor. Her brother’s wedding. How did she like being back in Pakistan? The reason for her visit to India.
She responded to these enquiries with the same frankness she showed me. I saw the face of the young man turn from cordial to cautious. Her overt freedom was too much for him. She would have to be cut down to size. He examined her Pakistani visa carefully.
“There is just one problem,” he said with just a hint of spite, “yours is a tourist visa and for me to give you a tourist visa to India, you would have to bring me a letter of permission from the Canadian High Commission.”
Zeinab’s face fell. It seemed the someone who knew something did not know everything. He tried to disguise the victory in his voice with encouraging words:
“If you go over there now you can be back here before we close.”
On the way out I gave her my address and telephone number and offered her a bed should she not manage to finish her business that day. But I never heard from Zeinab again.

Another Indian visa application, this time in Jakarta. My Pak experience had emboldened me, besides, I was not nearly as mollycoddled by the office in Jakarta as I was in Islamabad. I called the Indian Embassy to enquire about the documentation needed for a visa.
“The form, two photos, the fee and the letter.”
“What letter would that be?”
“The letter from your husband that permits you to travel.”
My jaw dropped. And then I remembered: this was why an American teacher I knew insisted on marrying her Indonesian husband in the States.
“I don’t think I need that letter with a Canadian passport.”
And added, more to congratulate myself than to make a point:
“Canadian women always travel without permission.”
Well, almost always.

Whenever I think of these incidents the opening lines of the folksong dance through my mind: Vive la Canadienne, vole mon coeur, vole – Long live the (female) Canadian, soar my heart soar. For others a cliché, for me a little hymn of thanks.