Chapter
TWO
THE FIRST TIME I LOST MY PASSPORT WAS IN JAPAN. I WAS eighteen years old, and we were in the airport in Kyoto. Krishna, another Indian teen, and I were the winners of a debate contest organized by a Japanese organization, and this trip—two weeks of traveling around Japan—was our prize. From Kyoto we were to go to Hiroshima. When we got to the gate of our flight and were asked to present our passports, mine was nowhere to be found.
I was not at all worried. My brand-new Indian passport had arrived only a few weeks before my trip to Japan, and to me it was just a booklet. Our guide, Tanaka-San, a kindly businessman who had been saddled with the burden of chaperoning us around Japan, looked extremely unhappy, but by now Krishna and I had pegged him as a worrier. In the mornings, we were frequently late to meet him in our hotel lobby, and it was clear even this small misdemeanor was too much for Tanaka-San. Steeped in Indian Stretchable Time as we were, Krishna and I were clueless about how thoughtless we were. So when I could not find my passport and Tanaka-San looked unhappy, I didn’t give it much thought. I was an adolescent; I was practiced at losing things. It would turn up eventually, I thought, or we would find a way around the problem.
In a few minutes, the passport was found in a restroom in between security and the flight gate. A young man with a serious smile brought it to the lounge and left with a little bow. I had left it on the counter of the restroom sink. Someone had rescued it and handed it in to the airport authorities. A few drops of water had spilled on it, but it was not much worse for the wear. We boarded our flights.
Now I always know where my passport is. Right now, it is in the drawer of the secretary desk in my living room in New York, the one with the broken lid carefully propped up. The drawer also has our vaccination cards, our Overseas Citizen of India cards, and a random assortment of various currencies, waiting to be in circulation again. If you are an immigrant, you, too, probably have one of these drawers. The Document Drawer and the Spice Box—these are the poles that mark the axis around which my immigrant household spins.
One night a few years ago, when we were sleeping, I woke up to the smell of smoke. The building next door was on fire. It was March 2020, and schools and workplaces had just begun shutting down. The pandemic was still in the don’t-wear-a-mask stage of public information. We ran out of the apartment, quickly grabbing wallets. As we gathered on the street outside, watching firefighters hose down flames next door and rescue the building’s residents and hoping that the flames would not spread, I thought of our passports—sitting safely in the Document Drawer upstairs. It was then that the panic that should have struck me years ago in Kyoto truly struck. I imagined my newly acquired U.S. passport going up in flames, in the middle of a pandemic, while we were all at the mercy of an administration that had already delayed naturalization procedures.
Again I was lucky. The firefighters contained the flames and, eventually, we all went upstairs. And in fact, if my passport had indeed been eaten by the fire, I would probably have been just fine reapplying for a replacement passport. I didn’t know this in March 2020, but that passport was going nowhere for a few years. On the other hand, if I had truly lost my passport in Kyoto, I would have faced much more trouble as a tourist with a return flight to catch in a few days.
Yet, between that first international trip and now, my relationship with my passport has become so much more fraught. It’s not just that I grew up. The world is a different place. Traveling blithely through Japan in 1997, I had to explain again and again that I was not Hindu, that Islam was not a version of Hinduism. For some reason, everyone seems to have heard of Islam and Muslims since then. And of course I am no longer a teenager with a casual attitude to Things. I am an Extremely Responsible Adult and I never have to ask my child to find my glasses. I no longer leave my passport in airport restrooms.
But there are other ways to lose a passport. Between the bathroom sink in Kyoto and the neighborhood fire in Brooklyn, I lost my Indian passport forever. One day a couple of years before the fire, I winced my way through the Oath of Allegiance at a naturalization ceremony at the Brooklyn Borough Hall and acquired a U.S. passport. That put me in the strange situation of applying for a visa to go home to India. The Indian government required a certificate of renunciation of my Indian passport before I could apply for a visa. So a few weeks after pledging allegiance to one nation, I walked into an office in midtown Manhattan to renounce my allegiance to another.
It is a pretty harsh word, isn’t it, renunciation. I had never renounced anything until then, though I had heard of saints renouncing the world or kings renouncing thrones. In a process filled with forms and prepaid labels and passport-size photos, the word renunciation offered a glimmer of the melodrama of the moment. It made my Indian passport feel like the throne to a kingdom.
The story of my renunciation began long before, in 2010. It was a beautiful fall day in New York, and my husband, Rollo, said: “Imagine that you have a rich millionaire boyfriend and he is whisking you off to Paris for a long weekend.” We were sitting on the beat-up couch we got for free from a neighbor. I was four months pregnant, and we were considering doing something special before the baby arrived and changed our lives forever.
When Rollo was twenty-one, he spent two months in Paris doing nothing. Every evening, he ate at a restaurant where the chef cooked whatever she wanted and guests played the guitar in the corner. He didn’t go to a single museum. He always says Paris as if the word were a demitasse of coffee and he was stirring sugar into it.
I, on the other hand, had never been to Paris.
Well, that’s not true.
I once had to transit through Paris after Royal Jordanian rerouted me after overbooking my flight from Mumbai to New York. So I arrived in Paris in the middle of the night without a “transit visa,” which I did not know I needed. I spent most of the night in a small, windowless corridor of a room, with about a dozen other brown and Black people whose passports disqualified us from walking through the airport freely. When I went to the bathroom, a police officer kicked the door open after a few minutes. He did not apologize.
Early the next day, the airport police asked me to sign a statement. When I asked for a translator, the police officer who was questioning me turned fuchsia in the face and yelled at me. Finally, a young Asian woman came to translate, and she translated with so much sympathy that I burst into all the tears I had held back until then. She told me not to worry, that Immigration was having me escorted to the other airport in the company of two police officers and that the statement I was signing was to acknowledge that the police escort was of my own volition, not an arrest. I signed.
My first view of Paris was from the window of the police car that took me from the Charles de Gaulle Airport to the Orly Airport.
So Paris, the word, always makes my shoulders brace. A face floats into my mind: the North African man who sat opposite me in the detention corridor that night in Paris. He was there before I arrived and he was there when I left. When a policeman called out my name so I could go get interrogated, he looked at me and nodded with a kind of bored despair. Whenever someone mentions Paris, I think of him and wonder how long he sat in the corridor waiting for his name to be called.
And yet I was tempted by this other Paris, the romance capital. What would it be like to walk through that city and not think of the city of windowless airport-interrogation rooms? Since my unfortunate Paris layover, I had been to other parts of France, always skirting Paris. But suddenly it seemed silly to let one bad experience put me off forever. And what would it be like to enjoy Paris as a tourist, armed with the reflected glow of my husband’s white American privilege? After all, who was I to resist Paris? Could you even say you had traveled if you had never been to Paris?
Paris is often called the most visited city in the world. It’s as if there is a Paris-shaped lacuna in the life of every tourist until they visit the city. A couple of million Americans visit Paris every year. Interestingly, the average American would not have thought of France as a tourism destination until well into the twentieth century. Prior to that, European travel from the United States was largely limited to the wealthy, soldiers, businesspeople, and diplomats. It was the twentieth century that made Paris an American destination, beginning with U.S. troops who carried back Paris’s reputation as a city of pleasures. In the flurry of postwar travels, many American writers and artists made themselves at home in Paris. A Moveable Feast and Tender Is the Night and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas captured the life of these expatriate American bohemians in the Left Bank. It was the beginning of an enduring American Francophilia.
This turned out to be an extremely convenient infatuation after the Second World War, when France was in ruin after the German invasion. In We’ll Always Have Paris: American Tourists in France since 1930, Harvey Levenstein writes of how the Marshall Plan spurred the revival of tourism in postwar France. The multibillion-dollar five-year American-aid program was aimed at rebuilding the western European countries as a bulwark against Soviet Communism and as a market for American goods. France, whose powerful Communist Party lurked at the threshold of power, was the centerpiece of this effort.
In early 1948, three thousand Americans descended on Paris to run the Marshall Plan. At nearly the same time, a host of CIA operatives and government public relations officers arrived in Paris (Paul Cushing Child, Julia Child’s husband, among them). The city was flooded with thousands of Americans, most of them recruited from elite Ivy League universities, which were, as Levenstein notes, part of “the same circles where traveling to France was much appreciated.” Monte Carlo sent croupiers over to the United States to learn how to run craps tables the way Americans did. Norman Mailer wrote in disgust to a friend, “All the fucking Americans are here.”
They were not, of course. And nobody realized this better than French tourism officials who set their eyes on, as the commissioner of tourism Henri Legrande put it, “the great middle-class from America, which has not traveled to foreign countries.” Marshall Plan officials enthusiastically supported the French campaign for middle-class American tourism. That was a better use of Plan dollars than reviving the inefficient French industry. It would also mean that French manufacturing would not be competing with American manufacturing. In a triple win, dollars earned from tourism could then be used to buy American-made goods.
And so, developing tourism to France became an important objective of the Marshall Plan. In Overbooked, Elizabeth Becker writes of how French hoteliers and restaurateurs were sent to the United States for training in American consumer tastes: plump pillows, bedside lamps for reading, hotel gift shops. An especially astute calculation was to market Paris as a convention venue. The French government convinced officials at the Marshall Plan to underwrite more hotel rooms and large meeting rooms to encourage well-populated American associations to hold their conferences in Paris. And to top it all off, the Plan spent millions on advertisements to convince Americans to travel to France.
Working together, the Marshall Plan and French tourism officials eliminated the shortage of steamships on the North Atlantic, encouraged off-season tourism, organized low-cost tours, and cut the red tape at border crossings. The French government was only too happy to cooperate. For instance, despite continuing electricity shortages, the government arranged for the great sites of Paris such as Notre Dame and Place de la Concorde to be flooded with light at night. “Fall is fine in France,” they advertised to older Americans who were able to make off-season visits. The Plan’s plan worked all too well. In 1951, An American in Paris, a film about a former G.I. who decided to remain in Paris after the war to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a painter, won the Academy Award for best picture. The rest of Europe fell quickly. “But if it’s Tuesday, it has to be Siena,” a confused American tourist tells another as they are about to board a tour bus somewhere in Europe, in a 1957 New Yorker cartoon. By 1969, there was a movie, If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium. France served as the gateway drug for the rest of Europe.
Even today, for so many Americans, France has the quality of a sweet dream. Moving to France, learning French, mastering the art of French cooking, adopting French women’s beauty and diet tips, raising children as the French do: perhaps no other national group harbors as many French fantasies as Americans. The American wanderlust for France has a solid but invisible bedrock in the infrastructure and advertising that was sponsored by the Marshall Plan more than seven decades ago. So often, the middle-class wanderlust that is responsible for the mass tourism that we all participate in has the same recipe: infrastructure and advertising, the government and the private sector, working together to create smoothly oiled machinery that throws dream-sparks into our consciousness: “Disneyland!” “Taj Mahal!” “Imagine! Your rich millionaire boyfriend is taking you to Paris!”
“Only if you can keep our round-trip tickets under a thousand dollars,” I said from the couch as Rollo hunted for fares. “Done!” he said. “Only a little more than a thousand.” Before I could ask the details, he added, “Don’t worry, I’ll do all the work for your visa application.”
With his American passport, Rollo did not need a visa; he could simply walk into France. With my Indian passport, not only did I need to apply for a visa, but I also had to interview in person at a French consulate and pay a visa-application fee.
It would be too vague to call this discrimination racism. The scholar Srđan Mladenov Jovanović writes about the importance of a separate term that differentiates citizenship-based discrimination from racism and xenophobia. We know that the inequality of passportism has been baked into immigration policy. But tourism has also played a big part in normalizing it. Jovanović writes, “Passportism can thus be broadly defined as the speech, policy or act of a discriminative nature, in which an individual or a group of individuals are discriminated against on the basis of their citizenship, i.e. passport.” While racism discriminates on the basis of the color of a person’s skin, passportism discriminates on the basis of the color of a person’s passport. Passportism is the fear of Third World passports. And while there has been some recent, much-needed reckoning among travel publications about how racism impacts travel, there has been no such reckoning about passportism and its big and small humiliations.
Passportism can strike at unexpected moments. In 1999, the year after he won the Nobel Prize in Economics, Amartya Sen was on his way to speak at the World Economic Forum in Davos. After his flight landed at Zurich airport, he was detained and questioned by its airport police because he was an Indian passport holder without a visa. “The police were very skeptical about my financial means,” Sen recalled later in an interview with The New York Times. Not satisfied with his U.S. residency card or the letter from the Swiss authorities promising him a visa at the Davos airport, they asked him to produce a bank statement. Only after he convinced them that he was solvent and would not become a burden on the Swiss state was Amartya Sen allowed to enter Switzerland and deliver his speech titled “Responsible Globality: Managing the Impact of Globalization.”
The “transit visa” is one of passportism’s slyest tools. In an eloquent essay titled “The Color of Our Passports,” Tabish Khair, an Indian writer based in Denmark, writes about the perils of not giving up his Indian passport. Khair recalls trying to board a flight from Copenhagen to an academic conference in Munich, armed with his ticket, his Indian passport, his Danish permanent visa, and the letters from his employers in Denmark as well as the conference organizers in Munich—if this seems excessive to you, you have never had a Third World passport. This is how we travel.
But Khair’s connecting flight was through London, and someone had changed the rules a few days prior to his flight. It used to be that transit visas were required only if you had to leave the London airport, but now he was politely informed at the airport in Copenhagen, people with certain kinds of passports needed a transit visa simply to get out of one plane and board another in London. “The colour of my passport was wrong,” Khair writes.
What exactly, I sometimes wonder, do immigration officials think will happen in the usually hectic hours that we have to transit from one airport to another airport or from one plane to another plane? It is as if we are novice monks who must wear transit-visa chastity belts lest the brief glimpse of Paris or London suddenly unbuckle any commitment we have to our current lives. The annals of Third World travelers are full of stories like these, and they are minor humiliations compared to the trauma and uncertainty that mark the lives of many refugees and immigrants. But the passportism that lies under this wide range of pain is based on the same power hierarchy.
Unlike many other forms of discrimination, it is a hierarchy that can be mathematically ranked, on the basis of the access provided to other countries and the time spent in applying and going through the visa process. The Covid-19 pandemic initially wreaked havoc on passport hierarchies—in April 2020, the U.S. passport fell dramatically in the ranking, but as vaccination rates entrenched the rich-poor gaps between countries, it recovered. On the other hand, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates have been steadily climbing the passport index—a sure sign of shifting geopolitical realities.
Even as the Indian passport encounters passportism outside its borders, the Indian immigration authorities practice passportism toward citizens of countries they deem unfriendly or dangerous. Visitors from many African countries and most Muslim countries, as well as those who can trace their heritage to Pakistan, routinely find their visa applications rejected, especially as the right-wing government that has been in power since 2014 grinds down civil liberties. Thus the passportism hierarchy is not just a simple East-West binary; it is more akin to a caste system with multiple strata, clearly marked in a descending order. Many Third World countries including India have internalized passportism. In Africa, despite the African Union’s attempt to launch a continent-wide common passport, many of the richer countries make it harder for fellow Africans to visit them as compared to European visitors. This is particularly ironic given that many of Africa’s borders are arbitrary lines drawn on a map of the continent during the Berlin Conference of 1884, in which the continent was carved up among the colonial powers.
Passportism has also opened up new avenues in global real estate and finance. Take, for instance, Arton Capital, which maintains the Arton Passport Index: “the only real-time global ranking of the world’s passports, updated as frequently as new visa waivers and changes are implemented.” Arton Capital focuses on “impact investment programs for residence and citizenship”; in other words, they help wealthy people in Third World countries figure out how to acquire First World passports through real estate and other financial investments. At the most obvious level, Arton Capital seems to be an immigration agency for HNWIs—people who are so wealthy that in the time it takes to write out high-net-worth individuals, they could have made a few million.
But beneath that somewhat benign disguise is an active financial channel that connects expensive investment projects in First World countries with eager Third World investors. Golden visas and economic citizenship programs are an easy source of cash for countries that have strong passports. In return, the country gains a particularly obedient set of investors—their goal is not so much to make profit as it is to buy their way into a richer country. Arton calls this a “global citizenship movement.” It is in the interest of assisting its investors to make the most up-to-date decisions that Arton Capital maintains a passport index.
In much the same way that, in the United States, parents of school-age children will try to rent or buy homes in zip codes with “good school districts,” billionaire migrants can now shop around the globe for real estate that will enable their access to the best educational and lifestyle prospects. Australia, the United States, and Canada all have lucrative programs that trade passports or permanent visas for investment, targeting wealthy migrants fleeing China, Brazil, India, and Turkey. Debt-laden European countries, such as Portugal, Spain, and Greece, offer an alternative to those who would prefer their economic citizenship with a discount. In fact, according to Andrew Henderson, who runs the website Nomad Capitalist, the pandemic was a time of fire sale for the “immigration investment industry,” with several countries lowering their prices or even launching special deals. Thus, passportism has helped create side hustles for the countries that benefit from being at the top of the passport hierarchy.
But in 2011, lying on our thirdhand couch listening to French-language lessons while my husband assembled my French visa application—we didn’t know all this. We were almost a decade away from the pandemic. Travel still felt like a disproportionately pleasurable recreational activity. Or maybe it was that we didn’t have a child yet. We had Time and Energy. Surely a little French passportism could not stop us.
•
“France is well in the way of passportism,” says the fifth volume of Chambers’s Pocket Miscellany, a series of essay collections edited by William and Robert Chambers, Edinburgh-based publishers, starting in 1829. This is the earliest reference to passportism I’ve found, and the author is describing how annoying it is to be asked for a passport when he travels outside Britain. In resentful detail, he outlines the suffering of a British man who is detained by a sentinel for smoking a cigar in Prussia and has to spend the night in the guardhouse.
These words were published in the middle of the nineteenth century, the dawn of modern tourism. It had only been a couple of decades since trains had become a form of public transportation, nine years after the first Thomas Cook expedition. According to Martin Lloyd in The Passport: The History of Man’s Most Travelled Document, for the upper-class British traveler of this era, a passport was a tiresome document. So many countries did not require it, which made it especially annoying that France did.
It seems remarkable from my perspective in the first quarter of the twenty-first century that there was a time when many people traveled abroad without passports. But in the nineteenth century, travelers from wealthy countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom frequently moved through the world undocumented, fully confident that their bearing and social class made a passport unnecessary. Passport officials had a great degree of discretion in choosing to ask to see a passport or not. Across the Atlantic, Lloyd notes, the constitutions of Mexico and many South American countries, including Venezuela, Uruguay, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru, provided the right to travel freely without a passport to all foreigners. Many guidebooks of the time indicate that while passports were not needed for travel, they could be useful for reclaiming packages at the post office or changing money.
When it did exist, the nineteenth-century passport was usually a single sheet of paper, tucked into a traveler’s wallet. A single passport could apply to an entire group of travelers, including servants. Sometimes, it described the passport holder; often it did not. Photos were not required until the twentieth century after a German spy impersonated an American during the First World War. The passport frequently functioned as a kind of entry permit, more akin to the modern visa, rather than a document of nationality. Passports were issued by a person’s country of nationality but also by other countries—if you lost your passport while traveling abroad (or if you were British and had simply not bothered to get one), you could apply for a passport from the country in which you found yourself. They could be issued by Italian duchies, German kingdoms, and mayors in the United States. They were hardly passports as we think of them today.
Prior to the nineteenth century, passports were much more commonly used as domestic documents. A commoner in eighteenth-century France had to have either a passport issued by the local town hall or an “aveu,” a character certificate from the local church. The point was to make it difficult for peasants to migrate to cities, especially Paris. Elsewhere in Europe, internal passports were used to control the movements of “gypsies” and “vagabonds.” At the turn of the eighteenth century, Lloyd writes, the lowliest Continental agricultural worker who wanted to walk thirty miles down the road had to possess a passport describing him down to the color of his eyebrows and the shape of his chin. (The much-hated passport system was briefly overthrown in the immediate wake of the French Revolution but was quickly reinstated after it was found useful in preventing the French aristocracy from emigrating to friendly countries with their baubles.) And while the upper-class British were affronted by having to acquire passports for travel abroad, a 1662 law in England, adopted by Charles II, empowered the local authorities to remove to their place of legal settlement anyone likely to become a public charge.
I have often used the word passport as a metaphor for mobility. But the more I read passport history, the more I realize that preventing mobility is the real ancestry of the modern passport. While it is tempting to look on passports as documents of access, enabling us to move freely through the world, they are, in fact, documents that started out preventing travel, or permitting travel only along state-approved itineraries.
The passport’s ancient origins hint at this state control of private movement. The Old Testament records that the prophet Nehemiah required letters from King Artaxerxes (of modern-day Iraq) to the governors of lands across the Euphrates so he could travel freely through them when he went to Palestine. Roman emperors are known to have issued tractoriums to permit their officials to travel throughout the far reaches of the Roman Empire, and, according to the Codex Theodosianus, students who wanted to come to Rome had to first get permission documents from the judges in their local provinces. Passports have also been traced back to the safe-conduct documents issued by medieval kings to soldiers and negotiators of enemy countries.
Thus, right from the beginning, the power of a passport to facilitate travel is a corollary to the power of the state to deny passports and prevent travel. It was in modern times, however, that the passport as a state tool came into its own. John Torpey writes in The Invention of Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State of how the rise of the modern nation-state is intertwined with its control of mobility. The “stateness” of a state, Torpey writes, stems from its ability to control who travels within and into its borders. The modern nation-state inherited this legacy from medieval kingdoms that zealously monitored the movement of the poor and marginalized.
In 1885, Canada introduced a “pass system” to control the movement of First Nations people. Without a pass, a First Nations person who was found outside their reserve could be incarcerated. Enslaved people in the American South were also required to carry a pass from their owners whenever they traveled beyond the borders of their owners’ properties. In fact, during the Civil War, this domestic passport system was extended to whites as well, as various cities declared martial law and prepared for a federal invasion, thus leading to the ironic sight of white and Black people waiting in the same passport offices. This is one of the central ironies of the passport system. The same passport that represented mobility to one set of people represented restrictions to another group, in the same way that a First World passport today opens doors that a Third World passport can only dream of from a distance.
These internal passports are rarely remembered when we talk of passport history, but the systems of surveillance and control they built are the bedrock on which the modern passport rests much more comfortably and glamorously. The nineteenth-century French passport system was extended to control the mobility of foreign travelers. A traveler arriving in a French port had to surrender their passport, which was forwarded to Paris and had to be retrieved in person from the prefecture of police. Hotel concierges had to submit foreign passports to the local police station for a second checking. Today, these obsessive-compulsive rituals have been written into the law in many countries in Europe as well as in Asia, causing hotels to keep extensive passport records for the use of governments—and whoever can hack into hotel reservation systems. In 2018, Marriott Hotels discovered a four-year-long data breach in its system, as a result of which 339 million guest records were exposed to Chinese government-sponsored hackers. Still, we are told, this is for our own security.
Why is it that our passports today are modeled on that old French system? In 1782, after the United States won its own war of independence, close on the heels of the French Revolution, the new nation’s first-ever diplomat, Benjamin Franklin, who was a Francophile, modeled the text of the American passport on the French version. The rise of tourism and the vagaries in which nineteenth-century British tourists, traveling abroad in much larger numbers than those of any other country, found themselves on the Continent prompted the British Parliament to take a leaf from the French. Colonization helped make the French passport even more widespread. As Martin Lloyd writes, the passport system as practiced in nineteenth-century Europe was not the only system in the world that involved tokens of permission and identity, but it became the most widespread simply through European imperialism. Europeans brought their administrative systems to Africa, Asia, and the Americas. And so, a system primarily created to control the movements of peasants to Paris became the basis for power and permission in international travel around the world.
•
In 2010, with my Indian passport, this is what I needed for the French visa application:
a valid passport
ID photograph
proof of my legal status in the U.S.A.
document describing the planned program (letter of invitation; reservation confirmation of an organized trip)
prebooked round-trip ticket
travel health insurance certificate
proof of accommodation
copies of bank statements for the last three months
letter from my employer
application fee of sixty euros
This is what my husband needed for his application: nothing. He did not need a visa at all. He could simply walk into France, straight off the airplane.
Every place we had traveled to together until then, from Cambodia to Slovenia, my husband, with his U.S. passport, had walked straight off the airplane into the foreign country, while I waited in a line to be seen by immigration. In reparation, my husband had offered to do all the paperwork for every visa application or immigration document.
This meant that before he could start on my France visa application, he had to check the status of my Advance Parole online. We had just applied for my green card—the little card that would change my status from nonresident alien to permanent resident. The Advance Parole was the document that would let me travel back to the United States while the green card was being processed. We could not apply for a French visa till we had the Advance Parole. It was a nesting doll of paperwork. We were trapped in a video game with higher and higher levels of form-filling.
And yet we were enormously privileged in that all my documents were in order and I was not a risk to the U.S. government in terms of health, criminal record, public charge, or security. With help from my husband’s white privilege and the expertise of an immigration lawyer, I had cleared one hurdle after another. Now we waited for the Advance Parole. “Any day now.” That’s what our immigration lawyer told us when we asked him when it would arrive.
“The website says it is pending,” my husband reported before turning back to assemble my France visa application. He grabbed a folder and made a list. He was humming to himself cheerfully as he began to gather copies of my pay stubs. The humming stopped when he got to the bank statements. By the time he started collecting my income tax returns, the mood was definitely grim. But it was the passport photo that finally did him in. Per the website of the consulate of France, the photo needed to show my hairline and my ears. Drawers were pulled out; files were shaken. But in every single passport photo in our possession, my hair was covering my ears. “This is so fucking stupid.” My husband threw up his hands. “Why why why?”
•
The colorful history of the Western passport does not account entirely for passportism against Third World countries. For the crucial piece of subtext missing in this history, we have to read between the lines. In the nineteenth century, the British had made it a common practice to move around indentured labor between their colonies. However, when its colonized people started using their status as Commonwealth subjects to move around of their own free will, the British government realized the dangers posed by this open-door policy. In her brilliant book Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State, Radhika Mongia writes about how the migration of about two thousand Sikh men to Canada in 1905 prompted a long chain of pearl-clutching correspondence. The men had “doubtless come under misrepresentation as they are not suited to the climate, and there is not sufficient field for their employment. Many are in danger of becoming public charge and are subject to deportation under the law of Canada,” the governor general of Canada telegrammed to the secretary of state for the colonies in London. This concern trolling would prove to be unfounded: by 1907, all but fifty to sixty of the men had found employment. It’s also safe to assume that they managed to find appropriate winter clothing and kept themselves warm.
But as Mongia notes, this unprecedented migration created an interesting administrative conundrum for the empire upon which the sun was not supposed to set: “how to distinguish between British subjects, members of a single expansionist state, without calling the entire edifice of the empire into question.” How does one prevent colonized people from moving freely through the colonies without striking an obviously racist-colonial stance?
Working together, the governor general of Canada (whose goal was to safeguard Canada’s whiteness), the secretary of state for the colonies in London (whose goal was to keep the empire strong), and the British government in India (whose goal was to pretend that Indian colonialism was a force of good) came up with an elaborate scheme that involved, among other rules, a policy that only travelers on continuous journeys from their port of origin would be allowed to enter Canada. Since there were no shipping companies plying nonstop between India and Vancouver, this effectively halted immigration from India.
Problem solved until 1914. On May 23, 1914, the Komagata Maru arrived off the coast of Vancouver carrying 376 passengers, mostly Sikhs. Hired by Sardar Gurdit Singh, an Indian entrepreneur with sympathies to the Ghadar movement (a diasporic political movement to overthrow British rule in India), the Komagata Maru had artfully managed to fulfill the continuous-journey requirement by having its Indian passengers board the ship in Hong Kong and Shanghai and Yokohama, from the Indian diasporas located there.
All the storms that the Komagata Maru encountered on the high seas could not have prepared it for the storm of racist outrage unleashed against it as it sat for two months in the Vancouver harbor. Not only were the passengers not allowed to disembark; a military launch patrolled the ship constantly to ensure that it could not even dock. The local South Asian community advocated fiercely for the ship’s passengers and raised money to keep paying the charter fees that became due since the ship did not return to its owners. But they were not allowed to help the passengers, who rapidly ran out of food and sat half a mile from the Canadian shore, starving and harassed, while the former prime minister, Wilfrid Laurier, now in the opposition, declared in the Canadian Parliament: “The people of Canada want to have a white country.”
After two months, the Komagata Maru was forced to sail back to India. It was escorted out of the Vancouver harbor by the Canadian Navy, prepared to shoot, and it was met in Calcutta by the British army, who declared the ship full of insurgents and shot and killed twenty passengers.
The Komagata Maru incident had revealed the hollowness of the continuous-journey regulation, and once again the question remained. How to prevent brown people, armed with the juridical definition of themselves as equal subjects of a huge empire, from moving into white countries? The problem was that the colonial government in India could not be seen to be obviously racist. There was a difference between shooting at “insurgents” and denying migration outright on the basis of skin color. So much had been invested in the propaganda of the British as just rulers, bringing fairness and equality to the tropics. Besides, the anticolonial movement in India was gathering strength, and the last thing the colonial government wanted to do was feed that fire.
The solution reached was to establish a passport system for Indians. This British Indian passport would entitle a traveler to admission anywhere in the colonies. But the number of these permits or passports would be limited. And it became a criminal offense to embark on a journey from any port in British India without a passport.
This is the useful paradox of the passport as a form of control. The passport would entitle, but the limited number of passports would disentitle. In one stroke, the seeming granting of a privilege would actually be the mechanism that took away a privilege that was freely available, at least theoretically, until then.
Luckily, the First World War was underway, and passport regulation was easily established under the aegis of security theater. The rules requiring passports from all Indians traveling outside India appear as the Defense of India (Passport) Rules. But, as Radhika Mongia points out, these were actually the Defense of a White Canada Rules. Not only did the passport allow the empire to absolve itself of racial motivations; it also permitted the exploitation of “security” as a potential realm for controlling the audacity of migration, and it consolidated the power of the empire as the sovereign authority that gets to decide who gets to travel. A passport is a pretty convenient thing to have—if you are a state.
The anxieties and suspicions of the First World War led more and more countries to institutionalize passports. It soon became clear that the document needed to be standardized across national systems. Starting in 1920, the newly formed League of Nations held a series of meetings that they called the International Conference on Passports, Customs Formalities and Through Tickets. Over the course of the interwar period, the thirty-two-page booklet-style “international passport,” with the name of the issuing country on the cover and the first four pages devoted to the bearer’s identity, as proposed by the conference, became more and more universal. Even the U.S.A., not a member of the League, introduced a passport in 1926 that followed most of the specifications laid down by the conference.
Periodically, the Conference, as well as others like it, would consider abolishing the passport, but with vast numbers of war refugees created after the world war, most European countries were reluctant to sign on to this. With the explosion of tourism after the Second World War and improvements in aviation that translated into increased movement possibilities—whether for migration or tourism—the dream of a passport-free world disappeared forever.
But again, within this seeming universalization, there emerged new hierarchies. As passports increasingly got standardized, visa controls also became more normalized. Travel-visa regulations became a useful extraterritorial policy tool to not only control immigration but also express geopolitical clout. Today, visas have become the primary method of controlling mobility. Visa-based restrictions enable states to preselect travelers of the right kind and deter would-be migrants. In a tweet, Josef Burton, a former U.S. diplomat who worked in Turkey and India, described the U.S. visa officer as “an unquestionable black box capable of irreversible decisions they don’t need to explain.” Through the visa-granting and visa-denying power of consulates, the modern nation-state is able to extend its powers beyond its own borders.
It is a fundamental paradox of visa regimes that the poorer your nation is, the more you have to pay to obtain a visa, while the citizens of wealthy nations pay less or nothing at all. There is an injustice here at the level of human rights, but it is even more stark when we consider how free trade is thrust down the throats of poor countries, while free movement is so blithely denied. The paradox deepens when you adjust visa costs against the purchasing power of different currency regimes and the wage discrepancies across the globe. How does the cost of an average tourist visa translate across the world? An April 2021 article analyzed data sets of visa-application costs across the globe and concluded that while Western, Northern, and Southern Europeans, North Americans, and Australians and New Zealanders have to work for less than two hours to pay for the average tourist visa, Central Asians have to work more than ten days, Southern Asians have to work two weeks, and sub-Saharan Africans have to work three weeks to pay for the same document. Travel is not just less bureaucratic; it is also much cheaper with a Western passport. I shudder to think of all the money I have spent on visas and immigration. The application fees. The processing fees. The lawyer fees.
•
Suddenly our emails to the immigration lawyer didn’t seem to be getting through. But after several follow-ups, he replied that we could try to expedite the process by submitting a letter stating that there was a family medical emergency abroad. If we got a letter from a doctor in India saying that one of my parents was dying and this was my last opportunity to see them, the system might be tricked into coughing up my Advance Parole a few days early.
I guess it was our fault. We did ask for any other ideas.
“I mean, maybe you should,” joked a friend of mine to whom I reported this ridiculousness. Her parents had moved to the United States from the same part of Kerala where my father grew up. “Indian parents would prefer to die than have you lose a thousand dollars.”
I will admit, it was the thought of losing those thousand dollars that gnawed at me the most. The flights we had already bought, with money rescued from the jaws of student loans and Brooklyn rents only to be thrown into the jowls of the airline industry. I had heard that babies were expensive. And there we were, gambling on visas and tickets instead of saving for a bigger apartment. Or a new laptop. Or a decent mattress to replace our ancient Ikea futon.
“Let’s just think of it as dummy tax,” Rollo said. This too was a gulf between us, the way we thought of money. From the earliest days of our relationship, we fell into these roles: the Spender and the Saver. What mattered more to him was that we might not go to Paris. Fall evenings on the Seine, bookstores on winding streets, cafés au lait, all that romantic crap. “If we don’t go now, we might never go,” he added after a minute. I knew what he meant. The opposite of “We’ll always have Paris.” I felt our studio apartment closing in around us. It was as if the arrival of a baby would mark the end of something carefree and spontaneous about our current lives. Parents; we’ll be parents, I thought. Parents don’t go to Paris. Lovers do.
Pending. This was what the website said every time we checked on my immigration status online. Our flight to Paris was only a couple of weeks away, and the Advance Parole still had not arrived. We checked again and again. Maybe the website has not been updated, we told ourselves as we checked the mail twice a day. The possibility of Paris was now trapped between two government documents: the Advance Parole from the U.S. government and the French visa.
Amid all this, a thought kept running at the back of my mind: If only he had listened to me. Perhaps every partner in every relationship has said words to this effect at one time or another. But it seemed to me also a reflection of a fundamental gulf between our experiences. Surely only a white American man would assume that if you take care of your paperwork in time, life will sort itself out. The rest of us know that immigration statuses and travel plans can never be taken for granted. The rest of us have stood in lines and tried to persuade stone-faced bureaucrats. The rest of us expect things to not go well.
•
One morning in my obstetrician’s waiting room, I heard a woman sobbing. The sobs were coming through the thin walls behind me. All of us pregnant women leafing through magazines or eyeing the reality show on the TV slowly became alert. We did not dare to meet each other’s eyes. A nurse hurried to the cubicle. “What is wrong, sweetie?”
“My baby died,” the woman crying replied. A collective spasm of horror passed through the waiting room. Our hands shook; our lips trembled. Her sobs continued. Each one of us felt her grief, albeit in a diluted form that was accompanied by the selfish thought Thank god thank god thank god that is not me.
In the spectrum of human troubles, worrying about whether I would go to France or not was a good problem to have. There was so much in my life to be grateful for. I had a good life. I could feel it then sitting in the waiting room—my strong, healthy body, all the different species and genera of love radiating around my life, the pleasures of supermarkets and park benches and popcorn. And compared to this abundance, there was something petty about how much I resented the restrictions imposed on my passport. I was not an undocumented immigrant living in fear of police in the United States. I was not a Palestinian who had to subject herself to inspection in her own land. I was not an innocent man in Guantanamo.
My own taste of passport powerlessness was only a tiny glimpse of the enormously lopsided world that people with the wrong passports live in. An entire universe of people waiting for documents that may or may not come, now or never. Only now, after years of reading the history of passports and reading between the lines of this history, do I realize how directly connected these systems are.
After India secured its independence from the United Kingdom, for two decades, from 1947 to 1967, the newly independent Indian state would provide passports only to those citizens it deemed capable of representing India abroad. Naturally the passport system it put in place in order to ensure that only qualified Indians could travel abroad was based on the prevailing notions of caste and class. Kalathmika Natarajan, a historian of passports, writes of how the “international” became a space of anxiety where India’s reputation had been besmirched by the shame of some of the earliest Indian migrants—indentured “coolies.” The “coolie” had become a metaphor for an India that had been colonized and emasculated, and, newly independent and determined to erase this reputation, the country sought to prevent the travels of any Indian person who might embarrass it abroad. So, in addition to the hoops of educational qualifications and financial guarantees, bureaucrats were also encouraged to use the arbitrariness of their discretion to exclude anyone who had the potential to bring dishonor to the nation-state abroad. Natarajan notes the many euphemisms that Indian policy at the time used to avoid naming caste and class: unskilled, undesirable, pedlar class: words that were both laughably vague and subtextually precise.
•
Three days before our flight to France, as I was teaching an afternoon class, I got a mysterious text message from a strange number: “Your case status has been updated. Please check online.” I forwarded the text to Rollo. His reply came back in seconds, in all caps: “APPROVED!”
The Advance Parole had been mailed out from a Missouri office. Would it reach us in time? It was Wednesday evening when we got the message, and the flight was on Saturday. The last possible day that I could get a French visa was Friday.
On Thursday morning, we called our local post office. “Sorry,” they told us, “there is nothing from Missouri for that address.”
I called the French consulate. “Madam, speak up please. No Advance Parole, no visa. No. No. No printouts from the website. I don’t care if it has been approved. You cannot come late. We cannot wait for your mail, madam. What is that, madam? Speak up, please. You want to go to France, you must make Advance Parole.”
Again, we called the post office. When we explained our situation, the post office manager, a woman who will get a rent-stabilized corner apartment in heaven when she dies, told us that we could come to the post office early in the morning on Friday so we could pick up our mail before our 10:00 a.m. interview at the French consulate.
The next morning, we arrived early at our post office. It hadn’t opened yet. We paced outside in the chilly fall morning, holding hands. At 8:45 a.m. we walked up to the door and noticed a very tiny sign saying that the post office was closed for repairs. Parcels could be picked up from an address three doors down. We ran there. The mailman was sorting packages.
“This is only for parcels,” he told us. “All first-class mail is at Kosciuszko Street.”
Before he finished the sentence, we were in a cab, on our way to the real post office. “Can you wait for us outside? We will need to go to the French consulate right away,” Rollo told the driver.
Inside the Kosciuszko Street post office, the kindhearted manager remembered us immediately. “So you are looking for mail from the Department of Homeland Security? Right, let me go get it.”
Rollo put his arm around me and kissed my hair. A woman waiting in line smiled at us. I smiled back. Young lovers! Going to Paris tomorrow! The post office manager walked toward us with a long envelope.
She shook her head and said, “I am sorry.” The envelope was not from the Department of Homeland Security.
Everyone was terribly sorry. “We regret that we cannot be of assistance to you in this regard,” the ticketing agent from Air France told me after I canceled our expensive nonrefundable tickets later that day. My Advance Parole would arrive on Saturday, a day too late for my feeble Indian passport.
Rollo called from work a few hours later. “How are you doing?”
“Great! It’s just money, you know,” I said.
“Do you still want to go to Eid dinner?”
Of course I had forgotten all about the Eid dinner. Eid had fallen earlier that week, and we had made plans to attend Eid dinner at a community gathering in Times Square on Friday night. But after a sleepless night poring over my French visa application and a morning of running around, the thought of dressing up and talking to people seemed exhausting.
“We don’t have to go,” Rollo said. “The tickets were just twenty dollars each.”
That was it. “We can’t just keep buying tickets to things and not showing up,” I snapped into the phone. “I’ll see you at six.”
And even though I had dragged us there because money didn’t grow on trees, somehow Eid dinner managed to be fun. There was a Jeopardy! game based on the Qur’an. A kind older lady insisted on feeding me multiple helpings of baklava “for the baby.” Most of all, how restorative to spend a few hours not thinking about not going to Paris.
As we were leaving the building, we heard music coming from the auditorium on the first floor. We peeked in, and then, somehow, we ended up sitting in the front row of a church open mic. The building the mosque was in housed various religious organizations, and a bunch of teenagers from the youth ministry of a local church were having a Friday-night social a few floors below the Eid dinner. And because we were not yet parents, because we had, for the last time in our life, nowhere to be, we joined the audience. Someone had to support the amateur stand-up-comedian industrial complex.
“Our next musicians, I found them busking next to the carousel in Bryant Park and told them they should come to our open mic,” the emcee said. “So here they are, Jean-François and Augustin, from Quebec.”
Jean-François had a long mop of golden corkscrew curls and a colorful scarf knotted around his neck. Augustin was lanky and shy, his cap obscuring a birdlike head. The moment they started performing, it was clear that these two had outclassed everyone in the room. After a few tentative notes on Augustin’s harmonica, they were off, Jean-François keeping time on accordion. Stories tumbled out through their instruments. Feet started tapping, bodies started swaying.
After a couple of songs, Jean-François pulled the mic toward him. “Er . . . zank you.” His accent was so over-the-top that we all laughed. And he laughed with us. “If you want to take a piece of us home, we have CDs for sale. And if you really want to take us home, you can take us home because we need a place to stay tonight.” Then it was time for a performance art piece about heartbreak involving a piano and a fork.
“Where would you have stayed last night?” I asked them the next day over breakfast.
“We go to café and stay awake the whole night and then in the morning, we sleep in the park.”
Music students from Montreal, Jean-François and Augustin were taking time off from school to travel around the United States, playing songs and forming impromptu bands with other wandering musicians. They had gotten used to sleeping on park benches, in McDonald’s, in the living rooms on couchsurfing.com. But New York had bewitched them, and they had decided to stay here for a couple of months.
“What will you be doing? Are you going to get jobs?” I asked.
“To make music is our job,” Augustin replied.
“It is also our passion, so it does not feel like job.” Jean-François flashed his killer smile. He picked up the Paris guidebook that was lying on the table. “You go to Paris soon?”
I summarized the Paris trip. Advance Parole. Visa appointment. Nonrefundable flight. Blah blah blah. Even as I told the story, I could hear how boring it was. Is there a plot? Where is the drama? How anticlimactic. It is impossible to tell a good story in which your primary antagonist is paperwork. That is the astuteness of using bureaucracy as a weapon of mass oppression. Our stories end up sounding like strings of bad luck rather than the result of a calculated move to stop peasants from coming to Paris.
Especially to two sweet white Canadians who were bouncing around the United States, making music, indifferent to borders and application forms. After they left to play music at the farmers market near our apartment, I thought of how the day before, as we were returning home with them, both of them declined when I offered them my MetroCard, instead swinging their legs and instruments over the turnstiles, gracefully evading the fare.
I was impressed. Every time someone evades a fare in the subway, my heart thrills with pride on their behalf. But somewhere within the admiration I save for this kind of recklessness, there is also a touch of resentment. What would it be like to commit a minor misdemeanor without worrying about how the color of my skin would be treated by the justice system? How would the world be different if smart, curious young people everywhere had the same opportunities to travel and take chances and sleep on park benches without being considered a public charge? Our young friends would have been horrified to hear about the Komagata Maru, yet the delicious freedoms they were enjoying and my own aborted travels were all historically connected.
This was when I began to consider renouncing my throne. After all, it’s just a chair, really.
This is how one takes a defeat and begins to rationalize it into a kind of achievement. The Canadian writer David Rakoff wrote that the desire to become American comes over one suddenly, “not unlike that of the pencil-necked honors student suddenly overwhelmed with the inexplicable urge to make a daily gift of his lunch money to the schoolyard tough.” It didn’t come over me suddenly, it came over me gradually, but it too was a gift to a bully.
More accurately for me, it was a question of which bully to propitiate. Writing this in 2023, I am watching India turn into a fascist state where the repression of Muslims has become so casual and ordinary that a killing or two does not even make a news headline. Perhaps it’s healthier to propitiate a bully whom you are not emotionally attached to. All I feel is the cold relief of someone who made a lucky bargain.
Besides, the question of what citizenship means goes to the heart of a question that is slowly brewing existential momentum: What is even a country? In a world where climate change is certain to wipe out low-lying island countries and create a whole new class of stateless people, a passport is increasingly a transactional commodity rather than a national identity. I do not see my story as a story of finding a new nation, about becoming American. I see myself as part of the transnational movement of people who acquire passports with a calculating eye on the benefits it can accrue. We are not motivated by nationalistic feelings or cultural affinity. Some of us are wealthy, like the billionaires who shop around for passports that will decrease their tax liabilities, and some of us are broke, like the Bidoon of the United Arab Emirates, a nomadic people for whom the government of Dubai bought Comoros passports, and some of us are in the middle, boringly middle-class with our aspirational fantasies of travel and civil liberties. In other words, I am not so different from the billionaires who shop for the most convenient citizenships, except, of course, for the billions.
A few hours later, Jean-François and Augustin knocked on our door, having lugged their accordion up four flights of stairs for the second time in twelve hours. This time, they were also loaded down with vegetables: broccoli, squash, potatoes, purple carrots, eggplants, brussels sprouts, beets. All the bounty of a farmers market in fall.
“We thought, since you cannot go to Paris, maybe we bring Paris to you. So we are going to cook you dinner and play music, and you can pretend you are in bistro in Paris,” Jean-François says, eyes dancing.
“If you like,” Augustin added prudently.
Jean-François held up two small yellow cylindrical objects. “Look, we got you candles. It will be very romantic, like Paris.”
I knew these candles. They were beeswax candles from our favorite farm stand. They are not cheap.
“I hope you guys didn’t spend all your money on this,” I told Augustin.
“Pas problem. We made some money playing and we sold some CDs,” he replied.
And so that night, when we should have been in Paris, we ate vegetables from upstate New York. Jean-François paced around our tiny kitchen smelling herbs and spices, pouring in way more olive oil than strictly necessary, flipping the pan and making the vegetables dance while Augustin cleaned up as they went. They served us on our own chipped and mismatched plates, inherited from generations of roommates. Fresh dandelion greens, caramelized peppers and zucchini and beans, dabs of goat cheese, and a cup of beet-red quinoa nestling in the middle. After we ate, Jean-François put a strawberry-rhubarb pie in the oven and took his accordion out. As the strawberry filling oozed out of the pie and filled the apartment with the smell of sun and butterflies and flowers, Jean-François and Augustin played French waltzes for us. And tango. And old jazz melodies. And klezmer music. And then French waltzes again, because, after all, this was supposed to be a Parisian evening. We danced awkwardly, laughing at ourselves, our unborn child in between us. I looked at my husband—a man who has voluntarily performed onstage in an adult diaper—and I thought, What fun it will be to raise a child with you, what a good life we have ahead of us. And so we danced, hoping that the finicky neighbor downstairs wouldn’t come pounding on our door because the music was too loud, too abundant. And my heart melted like a beeswax candle.