No exit from Mumbai

I stepped onto the scales and looked down. As I feared: during the past few days, I had lost two kilos. The reason for this rapid weight loss was clear: Raw, naked fear.

My life was out of control and even though I was doing my best to maintain a façade of meditative calm, my body refused to share my mind’s feeble lie. I was scared. The very last gasp of British colonial arrogance had just been knocked out of me.

This is how it happened:

I had been staying in India with a five-year visa. Each stay was limited to 180 days. In the past, on earlier visits, I had been registered, which permitted much longer stays, sometimes for years at a time.

Not anymore. In response to terrorist attacks, India had tightened its border security, which meant that a tourist like me could no longer enjoy the luxury of remaining indefinitely inside the country.

It was time to leave. But my flight out of Mumbai was three weeks later than the expiry of my 180-day limit. The correct course of action was obvious: rebook and fly before the deadline.

Yet I declined to take the situation seriously. Somehow, the faded glories of the Raj were lingering in my mind, and I assumed I could get away with it.

Looking nostalgically backwards, I nurtured fond memories of the Seventies, when we British colonialists did not even need a visa to live here. And later, in the Nineties, I’d been casually granted visa extensions by easy-going airport officials.

My travel agent shared my illusion. He shrugged and said, “Don’t worry. You’re over the 180-day stay limit, but your visa is still valid and anyway you’re leaving. They won’t stop you.”

Ha!

It was the airline staff that waved a big red flag. They refused to check in my bags until they’d taken me to Indian immigration for clearance.

I was hoping that Mumbai’s passport control would, as usual, be crowded and chaotic, so that some harassed official would let me go, just to get rid of me.

To my astonishment, for the first time ever, I saw it was completely empty.

No lines? No queues? In Mumbai? How was that even possible?

My airline escort directed me to an office at the side, where my request received an immediate rejection.

“Go back to Pune and get an overstay permit,” ordered the duty officer, looking at me with bright, beady eyes, set in a pale, poker face. There was no hint of deference in his manner, no polite apology for my inconvenience, no willingness to compromise.

“Can’t I pay a fine to you, and just leave?” I inquired. It was the closest I could risk to offering him a bribe.

“Certainly not.” He eyed me fiercely, as if daring me to wave cash in his face, so he could disprove my prejudice that, in this corrupt country, the offer of ‘baksheesh’ could solve any problem. At least I was smart enough not to commit that folly. I turned away in defeat.

Three hours later, drowning my sorrows in some god-forsaken bar, close to the airport, I happened to glance through the window and saw my plane take off for London. It was a bizarre sight, and very disturbing. For the first time in 40 years, I felt trapped in India. The bubble of my conceited assumption, that I could come and go as I pleased, had been rudely popped.

Back in Pune, returning to my favourite ashram, I was in for another shock: overstaying the 180-day limit in India meant that I could no longer be admitted. Out of compassion, I was quietly issued with an unofficial temporary pass. No photo, no name, just a plain white card with a date sticker.

The message was clear: fix your immigration problem and get out of here, as soon as possible.

I took the hint. Next morning I presented myself at the local police station. That’s when I began to sink into a surreal, Kafka-style drama that dragged on for 19 days and nights.

Sensing the helplessness of the foreigner who stood before him, the officer who could have helped me, smugly refused to do so.

“Go back to immigration and plead with them,” he suggested, with the superior sneer of one who enjoys squashing those below him.

We both knew that was useless. I needed police clearance to get out.

Over the next few days, well-intentioned friends directed me to a series of local officials, none of whom, it turned out, had the power to legitimize my status. Each avenue began with the promise of deliverance but ended in disappointment. More worryingly, as I stumbled from department to department, I met African students, Iranian refugees, and other poor souls who had violated immigration rules. Now I was one of them.

“We’re taking you to court,” a luckless Nigerian was told. The young man looked totally lost, swept up a legal process that could take forever and end in a prison cell.

As an alternative to banging my head against brick walls in Pune, I made repeated taxi trips to the Ministry of Home Affairs in Mumbai. I explained my situation. I filled in forms. I waited. I meditated. I closed my eyes and contemplated the insignificance of my personal problem when compared to the vastness of existence and the unfathomable nature of Tao.

My body was not impressed by such consoling thoughts. It continued to lose weight.

Eventually, though, persistence paid off. I achieved a breakthrough! I was given a ‘no objection’ certificate by Mumbai’s civil servants and immediately hurried back to Pune. Triumphantly, I presented it to the officials.

Imagine my dismay when they told me it would need to be ratified by every police station in the city. This could take weeks, even months!

Something snapped. I couldn’t take it any longer.

Instinctively, I knew that the pecking order had to be reversed. To put it crudely, I had to show these officials who were enjoying pissing on me, that I could piss on them. Morphing myself into a ‘famous journalist’, I gambled on a bluff. I wrote a press release listing the horrors of psychological torture and callous treatment to which an innocent tourist, namely myself, had been subjected.

I addressed it to The Times of India, the Indian Express, and every journal I could think of. Then I showed it to a friend who had a long experience of such matters.

“Don’t give it to the newspapers. Go and show it to the officials,” he advised me.

“Really? I mean… really?”

“Yes, really.”

I knew he was right. Even if a gullible reporter swallowed my story and published it, there was no guarantee it would impact my tormentors. Yet I dreaded the oncoming encounter.

Riding in the rickshaw, I told myself, “Either this works, or I’ll spend the rest of my life in jail.”

All too soon, I was at the office. As fate would have it, I found myself sitting outside the door of the one official whom I had not yet met. And who, as it turned out, would have been the right person to see all along.

A secretary poked his head out the door.

“You can come in now.”

This was odd, because I’d been waiting for somebody else. Anyway, I went in. This new official, I noted, was older, higher ranking, and seemed like a reasonable man.

“I’m rather busy. I’ve only got a few minutes,” he told me.

I showed him the ‘press release’. He read it and stopped being busy. He stared at me. He picked up his phone and, within seconds, all the subordinate officials who had been giving me such a hard time, were lined up in his office, looking terrified.

The ploy was working. Through this oh-so-flimsy gambit, I had magically risen above them in the pecking order. I fixed my gaze on the desk in front of me and did not look at the suffering bureaucrats. I could not afford to smile.

When asked, I made it clear I was not interested in lodging an official complaint.

“I just want to go home, commissioner,” I humbly murmured, addressing my newfound ally.

He got the point. After giving his underlings a lengthy tongue-lashing, he helped me fill in the forms, pay the fine for overstaying, and cleared me to leave the country.

There was to be no press release. No record of the incident. No trace of this strange affair.

At Mumbai airport, one of the airline staff recognized me.

“How long did it take you to sort this out?” she asked.

“Nineteen days.”

She raised her eyebrows in disbelief.

I cleared immigration, waited for boarding, reclined my economy seat, and breathed a long sigh of relief when the wheels of the plane left the ground.

This incident happened years ago, but I never forgot the lesson, especially when, from time to time, I hear of other tourists getting snared in foreign lands through ignoring local protocol.

And what lesson is this, you may ask?

Be sensible. Be humble. Be anonymous. Follow the rules, pay heed to deadlines, and glide like a ghost through immigration, attracting no attention.

Then you are free to do as you please. Not otherwise.

Photo by jeshoots.com on Unsplash