Lahore is abuzz with events and happenings. And get this: they aren’t weddings! Well, not all of them. My Instagram feed blew up because this week alone we have/are having: the Lahore Biennale, Lahore Eat, yet another fashion week, and a PSL cricket match. Choices! I know about the Biennale because of everyone’s selfies at the opening night at the Fort (word to the wise: neon up-lighting is nobody’s friend); I heard about Lahore Eat because I have an eating disorder but I love myself anyway; I know about the fashion week because everyone there, being professionally invested, had no problem taking a good selfie; and, to be perfectly honest, I had to be told about the cricket match because those are not the kinds of the selfies that tend to pop up on my newsfeeds. The cricket match in particular seems to have caught everyone attention and enthusiasm. Not being a fan myself (horror sports flashbacks) I know about it mainly because every road I tried to drive on this week was blocked and barricaded in anticipation.
There is an energy in the air, a light, frothy, expectant energy that usually hits our city when spring comes for the few minutes that it does. Everyone wants to do things, see things, be places. It is an infectious zeal that I was so looking forward to catching until I was inoculated by the doom of a visa appointment.
I think I speak for everyone when I say I hate visa appointments. Hate. Nothing makes me feel quite as unsuccessful, unwelcome, and unqualified at life as having to codify my existence into a petition asking to be let into a country that really would rather not have me ask in the first place. The EU usually tends to be the most bothersome, because they ask you to basically plan and pay for a detailed trip before they even deign to look at your application. You even have to get insurance just in case you die there, and those who know can attest there is nothing more existentially terrifying than getting insurance (“Tick this box if you are absolutely, positively divinely sure that you really, really, really DO NOT want to be covered in case of paralysis and/or decapitation during an earthquake measuring 6.5 or lower? Are you sure?”).
Crowds make their way to the Lahore Biennale
The U.S visa is about just as complicated but requires less things of you. This week I was applying for the mythic UK visa. In the pantheon of visas, the United Kingdom stands alone on a plinth, lazily staring out at the masses of hands below her while she eats grapes. Perhaps it’s because there are lots of Pakistanis there, or maybe it’s because they are the colonial mother ship and therefore have a weird relationship with us. Whatever the reason, it has a reputation for being a difficult visa to get. I have heard of more people being rejected for the UK visa than I have of all the others put together (except for Argentina, which also doesn’t seem to take particularly kindly to Pakistanis).
So it was with a certain trepidation that I approached the visa office here, located on Lahore’s most crowded, least convenient road. I dressed to impress in pair of white pants. This was, I realised fairly quickly, a grave mistake. I was dropped on the other side of the road to the entrance, and white pants don’t really work if you’re running across two main roads of peak traffic to get to the armed gate on the other side.
Once I had been scanned once, I surrendered my phone and (book!) to the guard and went through another heavy door to be checked again. There wasn’t anyone there though and it seemed rather odd, so I waited. But nobody came. When I inched towards the heavy iron door and slid it open, fully expecting to be shot, I heard instead a loud, mournful, hysterical wailing. The guard standing just outside looked at me and to the floor just outside the room. I walked out and saw a woman crying violently, lying spread-eagled on the floor as if she’d just fallen badly – her dupatta flung across a hedge, her shoes scattered in different directions. She was surrounded by what looked like hundreds of pieces of paper.
“Just leave me,” she wailed through thick tears as the guard tried to help her up. “LEAVE ME!”
He recoiled, probably not wanting to upset her further, and by now a small crowd of people had gathered in a circle around this woman trying and failing to help her. The guard came over to me and gave me a cursory pat down, his eyes still cast to the woman. She looked like her world had just ended. Knowing the power that a visa can hold in this country, maybe it had.
“This isn’t a good sign,” I thought, as my white pants and I walked into the main building. I took a calming breath and pushed open the door. I saw a cute little girl playing with a Barbie on the floor as I entered. She looked at me with her big doe eyes, waved her pink doll, and then projectile vomited with a fury that was nothing short of paranormal. Her mother, thus far busy talking to an official, swooped down and picked her up from the puddle she had left.
“Not a good sign at all…” I repeated as I walked around the puddle, in a confident stride that I hoped projected that I was not wearing white pants.
The good thing was that with a beginning like that, the rest of the appointment went fairly smoothly in comparison. I got my ticket number, was called for my appointment and gave in my documents. There were a few “I forgot my homework” moments when they asked for photocopies I didn’t have, but thankfully they have a machine that you can pay to use at the facility.
Now I await the power of the pantheon. But at least there are art festivals, food fairs, and fashion shows to distract me. And even, God help me, even cricket. Except not in white pants. Obviously.
