3 done....1 to go

Told you my life's been about visas, visas and visas for a while now.

And honestly, each a story. (likely it always is, it's about how we perceive the story I guess :)

Once we dropped off Dhruva at the airport, thoughts shifted to my visa application. I'd been vaguely working on documentation for a while now, but it was like half done and scattered. 

Diksha had already started planning a trip to Bangalore.... she was just waiting for her annas' departure. She's talking B'lore and I'm talking visa....and through those conversations we reached  "are you sure you need me here ma, and that you can't do it on your own?". 

A moment when I had to set ego aside to say "I'm sure. Not that I can't do it alone, but that I don't want to do it alone".

And what was amazing is that, in that moment she took over ownership. And I discovered the magic of reciprocity.

She's like "so what's next step ma, show me your checklist".  

She runs through it and says, "I really want to go to Bangalore tomorrow ma, but my commitment to you.......I'm going to even book my tickets only after your application is done"

Sounded good. In fact I loved how that sounded. 

Any skepticism I'd voice then on would be put down with "sshhhh, remember what you say? think positive, no doubts expressed, keep the faith".

She even took over the decision making...."not tomorrow ma, lets try and get the passport notarization done now.....do you know any notary who might be open on a Sunday?". 

I was like "okkk babes, let's go search town". We found one, a real nice guy, who patiently worked on it. The moment we said all sheets, he said "australia jaare ho aap?" It was each sheet of the new and old passport....xeroxed, notarized and uploaded". 4 hours later and Rs 1850 down, we were done.

Got back home only at 10 pm, and Monday morning we started on it early.

Started with the cover letter and gave it all we had ( Diksha's consultant had mentioned that there's high chance diksha got her visa grant on the strength of her SOP..... as the Australian consulate gives it high weightage. Diksha's was a powerful and compelling one...a 5000 word essay she'd written on her own. A beautiful piece of work, if she'd give permission, I'd put it here :). 

Through the day we're in and out of the house....the printer .... home....the bank.....home.... the xerox shop...home....the studio....home. Focused combined effort the whole day long. In fact at one, I left for work, but she kept at it. At that point she'd hit a server error. But even bugs in the system didn't stop her, she got on the forum, got on chat support...........and even with me gone, by 5 in the evening she messaged "all set ma, come soon as you can and we'll file"

I was like "If you're certain you've got it all covered, go ahead and make the payment and file".

She: "what??? are you sure? you don't even want to check?"

Me: "na, go ahead, I've seen how thorough you can be, and it's what's called faith sweetheart.... I'm sending you the money, go ahead". followed by "and sending you money for your B'lore ticket too, book off "

In ten minutes I got "yayyyy ma....done, submitted" 

And if that wasn't fulfilling enough, what was absolute surprise was, Monday evening we'd filed, and Wednesday morning I had the visa !!