the invisible line

November 2005

Right before my previous trip to India I lost my passport. It was awful timing. Fortunately, I was leaving from San Francisco so I could get a one day rush passport replacement as well as the Indian visa from the embassy there. I didn’t have the time to replace the long term visa for Bangladesh for which I had wanted to visit and had gotten from the embassy in Washington D.C.. So on that trip, I skipped Bangladesh and spent my time trying to swim a little deeper into the vast Indian archipelago of culture and geography.

About a year ago, I found that “lost” passport and seeing that special five year visa, the stamp taking up an entire page in my passport, seeing the letters of the country’s name, my enthusiasm was rekindled and the electromagnet of the country’s mystery was switched on – I immediately felt the pull.

On this trip, I decided to pack along this extra passport and the still-valid visa to see what I could do about it once I got to India. After landing and spending a bit of time in Kolkata and in preparing for my overland entry into neighboring Bangladesh, I went to the Bangladesh embassy to see if I had to get a new visa. Not surprisingly, the price had skyrocketed for American citizens. I hoped they would see that the old visa was still valid for several more years and could transfer it over to the passport I was currently using. Okay, this thought might have been a little overly optimistic considering the sympathy that paper pushing agencies have, particularly in this part of the world.

Well, it was to my surprise that after explaining my situation to the officer, I was told that the visa was still valid and so there was no need to get a new one! I explained the situation again, emphasizing that the visa was in an old passport that I was no longer using, hoping I could change her mind into manifesting the reality that I guess I was expecting. Nope, she wouldn’t budge. The visa was still good and there was nothing I could say that would change her mind.

A man who walked up behind me in the queue repeated key phrases in English that she was making like, no problem and visa still good and in my irritation at being double teamed, I turned to him and said, “Excuse me but do you work here or something?” He replied, “Yes I do” and that shut me up so I turned back to the counter and moved on to the next argument against my case. I said, “Look, when I get to the Bangladesh boarder, and they can’t find Indian exit stamps in the passport I am using to get into Bangladesh, I know they are going to give me problems. Can you at least write me a short note that explains that I was here and you have given me official permission to use this visa?” She shot back with a confident smile, “Not necessary. The visa is still good. Just show them both passports and explain what you have told to me.” “Come on,” I said, “as soon as they see two passports from a gora (a white person), it’s going to be baksheesh (bribe) central! Can you just write a short note? Please!”

Slight variations of this exchange went on for several more minutes. I joked with underlying anxiety that I didn’t want to arouse any reason to strip down the foreigner at the border but the officer adamantly danced around putting anything in writing for me. In bureaucratic India, no one wants to exert any more energy than they have to, particularly when it means putting their name on something like this.

However, in my stubbornness, I wouldn’t leave my position at the counter without something. As if we were in the market and I was purchasing a kilo of bananas, we came to a compromise: she would write the embassy’s phone number on a piece of paper and if there was any problem, they could just call her for confirmation. She almost got away without any accountability. I pushed the paper back to her and said, “And your name?” She obliged and scrawling her name on the back of the paper, she pushed it back through the small hole in the barred-over window. I folded it up, slipped it into my pocket and walked out. I felt both some satisfaction and some lingering trepidation that I tried to cast off as the little Mr. Cynic on my shoulder.

(Jump ahead. Scene: I am sitting in immigration on the Indian side of the India-Bangladesh border. Outside, it is a crazy gridlock of cargo vehicles, money exchangers and their aggressive touts, jewelers, official-looking military personnel/cops who are milling about, and a sense that some illegal things are going on here and it’s being permitted. Busses, taxis, and rickshaws are dropping passengers off who are scuddling about before walking across the no-man’s land between immigrations checkpoints before getting on a different vehicle to continue their journeys. There is a sense of urgency to people’s movements. The immigration office is like an old jail. Musty cement-block rooms. I’ve been told to “Sit down.” several times, so I do.)

On rolling up to the end of the road on the Indian side, a bus attendant collects all of our passports and puts them into a plastic bag. Because I am the only foreigner, mine is kept on top of the stack. As the bus neared its stop in the frenetic congestion, the attendant hopped off the bus and jogged away. I reflexively bolted over to the window to get a good look at his stature and dress in case I had to track him down later. In that moment I felt naked without my most important document. Sure, everyone had given up theirs too but I was convinced that an American one might “fall out of the bag.” Usually, if I have to hand it over to someone, I make sure I stay within eyesight of their movements. Now, it was gone and my next priority in my survival triage was to get to the rear of the bus before someone made off with my bag. I think everyone else had the same feeling because we all jumped for the door and scrambled around to where the bags were already being unloaded, claimed, and some, tossed over a metal fence onto concrete. I nicked mine just in time to avoid a broken DVD burner. Why some bags were being sent over a fence I reasoned, was for their transfer to another bus. Why they were being pushed over a fence to land on cement was beyond me but I just pushed the incident into my dusty pile of unexplainable Indian phenomena that I might revisit someday while sharing stories and misadventures with other graduates of travel on the Indian subcontinent.

Bag in hand, I was now on a mission to find the man with the crazy looking shirt (and the bag of passports). Sliding through the slim margins between lorry trucks, I walked in the general direction I last saw him trotting off in. After about ten seconds, I realized I was without any bearing and had no idea of where to turn. It seemed everyone on the bus had scattered off in different directions. I saw someone I thought I recognized from the bus and tried to catch up with him. After crossing the congested road, a flash young man approached me with a dark blue passport in his hand. “Follow me” he said. That was my passport and I made double time to keep up with his pace. He was doing business (whatever that was) and I was lugging overstuffed bags, heavy on my shoulders. I wasn’t going to let that little paper book out of my sight again.

I followed him through a long dark corridor and into a room where people were calling out to me to change money and I knew at that point, something’s wrong here. I kept checking in with myself, “Okay, I’ve got all my bags and my passport is right there, he’s holding it.” A few moments later, the power shut off and the room went black. I am standing in the dark, back pedaling to the chair where I had set down my duffle bag. For a few moments, my passport became just a fiction and the pulse of blood into my head seemed to amplify into a strong surge that I could feel in my neck and at the inside corners of my eyes.

Amidst, groans and the mixed voices of people who were all complaining in Bengali, bolted the words “Follow me!” his voice finally emerging from the darkness. I hoisted my bag up and moved blindly towards where I thought the voice was coming from. I followed his faint silhouette to the door and to the dim corridor outside. He walked in trot down the hall and I struggled to keep up while keeping the straps of my bags on my shoulders. We made it outside, crossed the road again and entered another building where we shuffled down another hallway. This one was unkept, dusty, and a bit moist. On seeing me, people in the building turned for a second look. Don’t dwell on that, follow the passport! I told myself. We stepped into a room where men sat around a variety of tables and the sounds of rubber stamps being hammered onto torn up, half dry ink pads echoed from wall to wall. The flash young man handed my passport over to another man at a desk and rattled something off that I couldn’t get any traction on. I assumed I was in the immigration office and figured the rest would be a breeze.

My first clue that things wouldn’t be smooth sailing all the way to the Bangladesh-side bus was the number of times that I was told to “Sit down” in the moments after my passport was slid across the desk and the two men had spoken about me. One of the men turned to me and said you have no Bangladesh visa, you have to go back. I had anticipated that that’s what this was all about. I explained with an aire of complete confidence, “Oh yes, the visa is in my other passport.” Eyebrows rose, the officers hand shot out, “Let me see it.” I fumbled through the money pouch around my hips and produced the book in question. I attached the verbal story to the document as I handed it over.

The immigration officer slid both of my passports into a desk drawer and finished up with several passports that were there before me, entering the information from each into maddening non-carbon copy paper triplicates – ahh, Indian bureaucracy! My instinct was to get my camera out and make a few snaps of all of this, including the group of gawkers who had by this time formed a semicircle in front of me, but I realized that this would be probably be unwise and wouldn’t help oil the chain of the bike I was riding.

The gawkers around me started to field questions my way. They were the usual curious kind: “From what country? What is your occupation? Why are you going to Bangladesh?” I started answering each of their questions with the kind of politeness and confidence that one tries their best to espouse in the face of knowingly undeserved reverence, such as with slimy immigration officers (you can see I’ve only had positive immigration experiences in the past). That quickly changed when I felt that these were mere peons in the hierarchy of who was going to actually do anything about my case in that room. When one asked me, “When did you arrive in India?” I shot back, “It’s in my passport with all of the other information you are asking about!” That muffled any more personal questions and they instead just stood there and looked at me.

In India, this staring is something that a person just has to get used to keep their own sanity. (I was to later experience the nerve-racking and ultimate test of endurance, the gold standard of all staring cultures, Bangladesh in all of its infamous glory and the torture by silent-staring technique whose method was secretly smuggled out of the country in the early eighties to assist several U.S. backed military coups in Central American nations who had actually used the democratic process to elect their governments.)

After making some noise about the connecting bus that I was supposed to catch on the Bangladesh side, for which I had already bought the ticket, the officer started asking me questions and eventually got to his main point: “You have two passports.” “Yeah?” I countered. “I wanted to get a new visa in my current passport but I was told by the officer at the Bangladesh embassy in Kolkata, yesterday morning – you can call her, that this is fine, the visa is still valid and I am to be admitted to Bangladesh.” There was a bit more arguing and he got to his second point: that my situation was bad and that I might be put in jail.

At this point, I thought, I have two options: freak out and melt into a sobbing fool or become the come-from-behind attorney who stuns the jury with his logic, delivery and aptitude to play onto their emotions and hypnotize them with surgeon-like confidence. I had but a moment to weigh the pros and cons of each choice. All great actors at some point play the courtroom lawyer. Today was my day.

Earlier I had seen an applicant slide a few hundred rupees across the desk in an overtly casual manner with his passport. This immigration officer made a gesture like, Oh no, I don’t do that and pointed to his assistant who quickly collected and pocketed the cashola. I wasn’t surprised in the slightest. There is so much crookedness in these kinds of matters, it just reaffirmed my detest for anything that combined Indian bureaucracy, unneeded complexity for the man with less perceived power, and this ridiculous charade of reverent formality. On telling me of this potential penalty, it seemed as though the immigration officer was leaving a slight window open, just slightly, as though I had a choice whether I wanted a hearing or not. I knew that his comment of six months in jail for having two passports was supposed to evoke a certain kind of response that would look something like a fat wad of rupees. And I knew that it would not be cheap with a threat like that.

In all fairness, I hadn’t knowingly done anything illegal, I wasn’t trying to pull one over on anyone, I had done everything I thought I was supposed to do, and I wasn’t smuggling in weapons. “Yeah, go to the magistrate, I want to talk to your boss.” I told him. He shuffled out and I had the sneaking suspicion that he was just on the other side of the door planning-out with his assistant how they could avoid the lengthy hearing and go for the gora’s jugular – the one in my back pocket.

(And now an important message from our sponsor: “The cost of a straight blade shave on the street in Kolkata: twenty rupees. The cost of a beer at the chic Tantra night club: 200 rupees. The cost of an overnight train trip from Kolkata to Chennai in 2nd class sleeper: 450 rupees. The cost for entry into the Taj Mahal in Agra: 30 rupees (or if you’re white, 800 rupees!). The cost of a bribe to stay out of an Indian jail for six months: priceless. Mastercard – it’s there to keep you out of the places you don’t want to be.”

Like clockwork, the flash young man that I had followed in who held my passport came into the room and waived me over to a place where people could not hear what was going to be said. He whispered some half intelligible non-sense about six months in jail and that things were looking really bad for me. And…I might be able to pay a fine. Curiously, I asked him how much it would be? He answered with the rubbing together of his thumb and index finger. I knew what that meant. Surprise!

“No, I am talking to the magistrate and that’s the end of that.” I said. He tried to reemphasize his offer but I wasn’t going to have anything to do with it and I brushed him off with a few go away flicks of my hand.

I don’t think the magistrate knew what to do about me. I was a dressed nicely, sat in the center of a group of eager assistants who were trying to catch-me-up on something and were all being stymied by my inability to be bullied or backed into a corner. He watched as I was the one on the offensive with his lackey paper-pushing juniors who had aspirations to be chosen to move up the hierarchal ladder within the relatively stable governmental bureaucratic environment. When he stepped into the ring and started firing questions that didn’t allow time for a complete response, trying to trip me into a bog of fiction, I protested his technique and asked for tea so we could have this discussion in a civilized way. He couldn’t find reason to refuse this request that I knew must have still held historical remnants for him. When I put my hand in my pocket to dig for a few rupees to give the chai boy, the lower immigration officer shook me off with a hand gesture and than emphasized this expression with an English phrase he had memorized, “You are my guest.” I thanked him and knew that the chai bar was now open.

The magistrate wasn’t able to find fault in the answers to each of his attacks and finally used his last strategy, the one that he was sure would put me into a full-nelson: the letter of the law didn’t allow citizens to hold two passports. This was a crime that was clear and straight-forward. I took a deep breath and sighed with an expressive exhalation. I shook my head at him and said, “I’m not an Indian citizen.” He replied with a confused and startled look on his face. I went on, “We don’t have the same rules and procedures in my country. They do not require us to give up our found passports at the police station and get all of these documents that you’re mentioning. Clearly, I have followed all the rules, my intentions have been to do the right thing, and you can see that I have made every effort do things correctly.” I emphasized this by sliding the piece of paper that the officer of the Bangladesh embassy had written for me, with their name and phone number on it, across the desk to the edge on his side. “Call her, go ahead. Her name and number is right there.” I pointed to this obvious information. “I am sure she remembers me – it was just yesterday morning.” I was now egging him on with a challenge. He turned to the person who had been his primary tag-team partner in the now two hour interrogation and started barking something that I couldn’t understand. It seemed there was disagreement between the two. The other man was the immigration officer who I had initially dealt with, he was the one playing the bad guy.

Actually, as time went on in the verbal hammering of this small concrete room, I started to think that this officer’s act was in fact, his reality. He seemed generally irritated -- not just about my case but in general. On several occasions, I shined a light on this and used it to my advantage. He would shower me with sharp questions with a menacing tone and the dramatic facial expressions of the villain from a Bombay masala movie. A couple of times, I saw in him the Bollywood actor that never got his shot at stardom, still playing the part he had been practicing alone in front of the mirror since his childhood when he was first impressed in an Indian cinema. I would smirk, wanting to let out a chuckle at his knightly efforts. That seemed to prod him in the ribs and as a result. he would turn up the gain on his determination to dominate me, which of course made my timely protests to the magistrate even more legitimate.

On one occasion, I put my arm out towards him, palm stretching against my line of sight with his face and turned to the magistrate and said, “Could you please ask this gentleman to speak to me not as a criminal but as a human being, as his guest?” The magistrate paused for a few moments, I think, to figure out how he was going to translate this to the officer. He did and the officer sank back from the edge of his chair and went blank.

(another scene from the action that afternoon)

With time, the magistrate was clearly taking my position and was shouting at the immigration officer who was proving to be part robot, part bulldog. Neither of them wanted to call the Bangladesh embassy for some reason and so they kept trying to put the responsibility of registering me onto the other. Finally, the magistrate relented and we walked back to the main immigration room where all the men at scattered desks were waiting with anticipation to witness part of this melodrama.

The magistrate grudgingly opened the first of the in-triplicate registration books. He thrust his chin up to better see through the bottom of his bifocals and thumbed through the pages. After several more agonizing minutes (Just enter the information and stamp my passport before you change your mind!), we came to the point that both he and I were relieved to reach: for him I would be out of what remaining hair he had left and for me, so I could just get the hell out of there. It was just about dark now, my bus had left three hours ago, I had no idea what I was going to do in this border town that breathed a menacing wind. This wasn’t the kind of place you would want to hang out in and I was pretty sure the Bangladesh side wasn’t going to be any more inviting!

In the minutes before we finished completely, I crossed the mental fence several times over whether I should say one last thing. Nah, just be glad it’s over and get out. Do it man, make a stand for what you think is just! Ready to just be done with this whole incident, I stood up to leave. My heart was pounding through my chest and head. I lifted my bags over my shoulders and with stood with physical stillness to silent the room, I addressed the magistrate and said, “I have one last question.”
“Yes?”
“I know that there are probably other rules that are different between our countries and I was just wondering – is it illegal for a government employee who works in the immigration office to accept baksheesh (a bribe) from an applicant?”

“It certainly is!” he replied.
“So it’s a crime? It’s against the law?”
“Of course.” Everyone in the room was motionless, the room had gone quiet and all eyes were now on me.
“Oh! Huh.” And with that, I panned my gaze over to the immigration officer. I could only make a guess at what the temperature was reading right around his collar.
The magistrate asked, “Were you asked for money? Did you pay a bribe?”
”No. I didn’t pay a bribe. I was just curious.” I looked back at the immigration officer to speak without saying anything. After a few long moments I turned back to the magistrate and thanked him in Bengali and offered him the appropriate Muslim farewell. I then strode out of the building into the night half-expecting some kind of physical confrontation by the officer’s goon-dogs.

Sure enough, out they rushed to follow me for a bit. I turned around with a straight on look and inflated my chest (later realizing that this gesture is shared by male species of feather and scale all around the world). The flash young man with the crazy looking shirt, who was now standing in the middle of several of his assistants, slung his arrow, “They’ll put you in jail. Bangladesh side. Very bad.” He gestured in the direction I was walking. “Thank you for your help. I’ll remember you.” I pointed back at him between his eyes. With that, I spun around and picked up my pace to the final gate on the Indian side, stamped passport in hand.

The uniformed man at the fence inspected my document and waived me through. I had made it, well, at least to no man’s land! My bags bounced with my long strides. I took a place in the queue to have my bags hand inspected by the Bangladesh security team. I couldn’t wait for them to find all of my interesting toys to ogle at! A security supervisor seeing that I was a white man, waived me forward; I wasn’t to wait in line with all of the ordinary locals. This was one time I didn’t feel a bit of guilt in conceding to the demand that I cut the line because of my skin color – I just wanted to get out of this place. I placed my bags in front of him and showed him the Bangladesh visa in my other passport. He compared the picture with the face on my head; I tried to embody the youthful and innocent look from that old picture. He decided not to open any of my bags and waived me through.

I pushed my way through a throng of Bengalis that were standing on the Bangladesh side, waiting for their friends and relatives that were coming over. I had crossed the invisible line and was now in Bangladesh. I just had one more thing to do – get through Bangladesh immigration.

The first order of business was finding the building. I asked several people and they kept pointing towards a group of overburdened lorry trucks, parked in the middle of the road. I decided to head in that direction and squeezed through the thin gaps between them. Now that they were behind me, I could see that there was indeed a building on the other side of the road. I took a few deep breaths and walked inside. Again I got priority treatment because of my tall, radiating good looks. I put the passport on the desk in front of the man and greeted him first as a Muslim, then as a Bengali. He was surprised and asked me if I could speak his Bengali language. I charmed him and said that I could only speak a little and gave him a big smile. He repeated my response to the other officers on duty and they all had a delighted chuckle. He gave me a form to fill out that asked about the time and the reasons I had for visiting his country. When I got to the ubiquitous “Father’s Name?” space, he asked me where my exit stamps from India were.

Now my temperature was rising. Sweat glands around my face were kicked into high gear from a combination of the thought of again going through what I had just narrowly escaped from, the heavy bags on my back and the dark, humid, still air inside the small crowded room. I decided to forget getting into any kind of explanation about it and so I just reached into my belt, retrieved my other passport, opened it up to the exit stamps, slid it over to him and put the tip of my index finger on the mark in question and went straight back to the application that I had been filling out. I didn’t bother to even look back at him. I didn’t want to leave any space for anything to arise. In a few moments I had finished the questions and presented it to him as if I had done this many times before.

He stapled part of it in my passport and reached for his rubber stamp which he pounded into the near dry pad a few times before giving my book the seal of approval. I thanked him in Bengali, he and several others around him smiled, and I made a turn for the door. I stepped out into the cool night. I was now in Bangladesh.

Something so simple which had become so messy was now as real as the breeze that cooled the moist skin around my neck and face. It was now dark and the evening was nowhere close to being at an end for me. I had to somehow figure out how to get to a place that was five hours away by narrow, bone jarringly bumpy roads.

This proved to be easier than I thought after I met a young man named Obaidul Islam whose heart was big and bright and who spoke remarkably intelligible English. He took me under his wing and made sure I found the right bus which wouldn’t be leaving for a couple of hours. We sat and chatted and I took the opportunity to write down translations of phrases that wouldn’t be described in my phrase book such as, “Who remembers the old songs of the village?” and such.

Although he was only twenty-five years old, he walked with clout and even threatened the bus assistants that they better take care of me and make sure everything goes smoothly for me because I was a friend of his. They took him seriously and let me sit in the front with all of my gear on the seat next to me. Over the next five hours, I was worn down into a hypnotic pulp by the oncoming high-beams and the surges of adrenaline from so many near-head-on collisions. I was forced to experience first hand, due to my front row seat right behind the large plate glass window of the bus’s front end, a delicacy of any employed South Asian bus driver, the game of night time chicken.

This is basically a jousting match of cockiness, ego, and the ultimate criteria – the weight and size of your vehicle. Busses and lorry trucks trading top honors, hand-pulled rickshaws and pedestrians at the bottom of the hierarchy. Combined with a single lane road where traffic is moving in both directions and nobody wants to drive off the bumpy pavement onto the even bumpier dirt, the use of a blasting horn to intimidate is almost ubiquitous except for occasional five second stretches. Although the applications of several countries in South Asia have so far been denied by authorities, the opportunity to introduce this as a competitive Olympic sport, one that Indians are confident they can monopolize, is still just a fantasy.

However, I felt lucky and relieved to be on this bouncing and swaying bus, moving through the cool night. I from bounced back and forth from one adrenaline buzz to a state of near-exhaustion and back again, occasionally surrendering to the heavy lids over my eyes. I hoped that I wasn’t going to have to be as lucky getting back into India! Before I made my dramatic exit from the Indian authorities, I made sure to get the names of both the magistrate who supported my case and the rude immigration officer who I had seen take the bribe. I hoped I wouldn’t ever need to use this information again but in this part of the world, it might just save my butt.