The Mad Hatter Idea - 2

Decision made - the very first step was to get Upendra a passport.

That I thought would be fairly straightforward, it's after all a passport.

I couldn't have been wronger.

It was an absolute roller coaster experience.

First I discover that his real name is Uppari Uppaliah, which he thought was too old fashioned for a city, so when he moved to Hyderabad he just decided to rename himself. Just like that. And it doesn't end there.

To my utter dismay I saw that each of his identification cards, believe it or not, had different names. 

He had five identification cards; an aadhar card, a driving license, a ration card, a voter card, and even a pan card (thanks to Kamlesh aunty who had ensured all that for them when she was here), but each with different names. I've no idea how he managed that but there it was. One had Upendra, one Upender and the other three had Uppaliah, each with different spellings. 

We took two whole months to navigate through that mess..... a lot of visits to e-seva, the pan card agent, his village.....until we were finally ready to apply for a passport. 

And oh yes, a twist....his date of birth read 1.1.1980. I was like "oh, nice...you are born on Jan 1?", and he's like "ledhu amma, naku emi telusu epudu putano...edho date chepesanu" (how do I know when I was born, I just put some random date when they asked me :).

That was so sweet....and it passed.

Then we hit the next major obstacle. 

The address in the cards was Kamlesh aunty's house, which no longer existed. It had been demolished and converted into apartments.

I initially thought that wasn't a big deal, we'd get new address proof for where he lived now.

That's when I saw how different, and difficult it is for people in that demographic to wade through system and bureaucracy. We couldn't get address proof. Try as we might, we were just going in circles.

That's when I decided to do some jugaad. Decided to go with the old house address, a house which didn't exist. (The options were to say he continued to work as watchman there, or as cook in one of the apartments which had taken on the old address)

That was scary as police verification is physical and real. Told you it was jugaad.  Don't want to put too much detail here, but suffice it to say that I told Upendra that if our plan fell through both he and I would go to jail.

By this time this was hot topic in the family. My dad was totally against what I was doing saying it was just too risky. So was Dhruva.  ( I agree, I'm normally a law abiding citizen too.......but :)

We lucked out. Guess it should be he lucked out, but I had my neck stuck out so much in this, that I was as thrilled as he was. He cleared the police verification, in fact that police guy and he sat and had chai at the gate of the house....a half hour that Shobha and I spent biting nails, wondering if Upendra could hold the story.

He now has a passport ...and in a shiny nice case to boot (for which I had to go to the passport office twice :)

By this time everyone was saying if we could swing this, it would be nothing short of 'a miracle'. Well, to me the passport itself felt like one.

Next is the visa documentation. Will make that phase 3 :)