Flicking the slowly forming beads of sweat, I
looked at the crowd. Like it usually happens in a Bangalore traffic jam, people
were shouldering each other to be at the front. I was not expecting this dance
of democracy after having obtained an appointment, but here I was, standing on the
street outside the embassy with my bowl. My backpack was stacked with piles of
proof regarding my antecedents accompanied with a furrowed brow, hoping against
hope that I had not missed anything.
After about an hour of jostling in the crowd, I
figured out the reason for the swelling crowd, people who had appointments much
later in the day, in their enthusiasm to see the holy shrine had queued up
earlier. Seeing the situation going out of hand, a security guard came around
shouting out the time of the current appointment, suddenly the waves parted to
the sides and like Moses I moved ahead smiling. Another security guard checked
my appointment document before letting me in through the temporary barricade
erected on the footpath. My sense of relief of having made it through a hurdle
was soon dampened with the second queue I was confronted with.
After a wait of 20 minutes, the queue started
to move slowly, after a series of pat down’s, I was finally into the den. The
den had an array of glass windows with Americans safely enscounded behind them.
I was ushered into a line by the visa facilitation guy(vf#), surprisingly these
guys called one another as visa facilitators as if calling names would
compromise their security. Others ahead in the queue had a smooth sailing with
their finger prints scanned at the end of it. When my turn came, the American
just kept tapping at his keyboard, after a couple of minutes, with my heart in
a state of fight or flight mode, The American nodded at the vf1. Vf1 promptly
scratched a number on my card and directed me to another counter, when I asked
why my finger print was not taken, I got a curt reply “you will have to come
back here”. I was now perspiring, my US dream however small it was, was now
quickly fading away. In the other queue, an Indian was diligently tapping away
at the computer, when I presented my Passport, he wrote an number at the top of
the slip and I was back again at the original queue. This time, the guy didn’t
nod his head and finally took my finger print.
I lumbered back and took a seat waiting for the
next interview. A local businessman was trying desperately to make sense of the
American accented English questions in one of the counters, finally the
exasperated American shouted out at the Businessman for more clarity and
finding it not forthcoming, the meeting
ended with businessman being shown
the door. In another counter, a college aspirant was happily chatting away until
it was noticed that he had dropped his passport in water, he was promptly
booted out. One more aspirant had an unknown destination written down in his
form which his agent had filled in for him, In the interview he was diffidently
mentioning a different destination, finally he was also shown the door. All in
all, a significant rate of aspirants were booted out from their America dreams.
