[Reader-list] With a thunderous salute of stamps, signing and stapling, Mrs Brown has finally arrived

[Harsh Kapoor]

The Independent (UK)
12 October 2002


In Foreign Parts: With a thunderous salute of stamps, signing and stapling,
Mrs Brown has finally arrived
By Phil Reeves in Delhi

On any given night, between midnight and 2am, another few thousand souls
arrive in this world and embark on the hard task of trying to exist in
India. At the same time, a host of other forms of life – dogs, donkeys,
fruit bats, monkeys, eagles, vultures – is born or hatched, or strays across
the borders to join the throngs living on their luck in this giant,
overcrowded and overburdened nation.

Wildlife drifting in and out from Bhutan and Burma and Bangladesh is
undocumented and untaxed. And, though the law says they should be
registered, many of the humans born in the countryside also appear on Earth
without so much as the thump of a rubber stamp.

None of these facts deterred the two portly and impeccably polite gentlemen
from the Indian customs service whose task was to determine whether to admit
into India a small and unremarkable feline, freshly landed from Jerusalem
via London Heathrow, called Mrs Brown.

Journalists often write about their pets. Nor should we waste column inches
bemoaning bureaucracy, because knowing how to circumvent it is a central
part of our job, and complaining about red tape is akin to an undertaker
grumbling about the presence of a body in his parlour. But this episode
reflects a larger truth about India, and about the crossroads at which she
now stands.

We arrived to pick up the cat from Delhi International Airport at midnight.
She has no worth, being one of a countless community of cats in Jeru-salem
whose natural habitat is the household dustbin. We had already spent many
hours gathering a fistful of documents, quarantine papers, a health
passport, rabies certificate and a bill of health from the Israeli Ministry
of Agriculture. The late-night run to the airport was the final stage.

To enter the baggage hall had been a challenge in its own right. First, we
needed a gate pass. Then a duty police officer had be rustled up, to sign
it. Then our chit had to be inspected by another group of security men, who
logged my name in a register. Only after this obstacle course were we
allowed access to the two portly men.

They frowned at our paperwork. They hauled out two big, green folders
containing the laws of the land, special reference, cat smugglers. They
thumbed through our documents. We waited, and waited. Their otherwise stark,
strip-lit office had a brightly coloured poster on the wall that proclaimed
the merits of Lord Shiva and spelt out a Hindu mantra, which I noted down.
"Om tryambekam yajamohe sugandem pushtu vardanam," it began. Chanting this
would, promised the poster, protect you from "snake-bite, motorcycle
accidents, lightning strikes and all accidents of all descriptions". It did
not have any evident impact on customs men.

I do not know exactly how many signatures were required to import our cat.
Perhaps 30, more probably 35. She arrived in Asia to a thunderous salute of
stamps on paper, of stapling, signing, clipping, copying, hole-punching and
filing.

The smirking of the porters who finally produced Mrs Brown in her cage – and
who were amused by the similarity between her feral features and the
expressions worn by scores of other worthless (undocumented) cats who
scrounge around the airport every day – was particularly annoying.

After we took the cat, we had to hurdle a path back through four separate
departments, each merrily stamping, logging and signing, to get permission
to leave the area. By then, it was after 2am.

Mrs Brown now remains confined to quarters for a month of "home quarantine",
by order of the Indian government. India's various institutions of
government are monolithic hierarchies, each pared into thousands of slivers.
Every person has his role within them, often tiny. The chits and signatures
he dispenses often have no meaning, beyond confirming his position in the
order of things.

His little nugget of power is just enough to snag your progress through the
system. To call it Dickensian is to understate the scale; the stacks of
paper generated by Jarndyce versus Jarndyce (Bleak House) are nothing to the
turrets of paperwork amassed in the offices of power in India, where labour
costs a pittance, by its myriad bureaucrats.

Getting the cat was by far the hardest part of moving to India. Everything
else was easy. While the wheels of government remain clogged with red tape,
other aspects of life, especially for the minority with money and consumer
habits, are a comparative doddle.

Only one call was needed to enrol with an internet service provider, install
air-conditioning and receive cable TV. You can acquire a pay-as-you-go
mobile phone in 48 hours, a taxi or a Chinese takeaway in 15 minutes, and a
television set, delivered to your door, in 30.

Once cannot spend a night in Delhi's five-star hotels without somebody
thrusting a questionnaire into your hands, asking for an assessment of their
services. I filled out four in three days at the Taj Mahal hotel, and was
rewarded with a personal e-mail, expressing gratitude for my complimentary
remarks.

One moves, amazed, between the two worlds, the past century, with its echoes
of imperial Britain, and the new. Will the gap ever close?