It’s not her real name, but let’s call her Zahreen. Does the name matter, you might askIJ In fact it does. But more on that later. Zahreen bought her first car a few years back, a second hand Maruti Zen. She had been trying to buy one for more than a year before she managed to get behind the wheel. She had about Rs 50,000 to spare; the rest she thought would be easy to borrow, given that she had a rather well-paying steady job. Tough luck! That loan never happened. What happened instead was a reality check for Zahreen. She realized how difficult it is to simply be in this country, indeed in the capital city of the country, if your name sounds a certain way, if your place of birth is suspect, if you are a woman, and yes, if you’re single.
Zahreen is Muslim (that’s obvious from here name). She was born in Assam; her mother tongue is Assamese. Based in Delhi, she worked for a top auto magazine. Getting a loan for a car would have been easy for her, you’d imagine, given the auto magazine background.
Everywhere she went she was firewalled by some regular (no permanent residence proof in Delhi; rent agreement not good enough) questions, and some not so regular insinuations.
The search for identity in a big city is a huge crisis for migrants. The ‘aadhar’ card will perhaps help in this regard; back then Nilekani was still chairman of Infosys. Those who own property or have grown up, say, in Delhi, cannot imagine what a nightmare it is to get oneself recognised as a bona fide citizen if one does not have pre sunk roots here. Skilled workers like barbers and carpenters shell out huge sums to get a voter ID or a ration card.
Think about it, Ashok Malhotra of ‘Cholegate’ fame (a scandal that broke about 5-6 years back, and has been forgotten over time. To refresh lazy minds, Malhotra who sold chole bhature astride of Delhi’s Assembly building, curried sufficient influence among the high and the mighty to be able to run a huge investment empire) acquired 5,000 plots and a few hundred cars, but our friend Zahreen can’t get a petty loan for a second hand car. He was clean; she was suspect!
Zahreen had her ration card registered back home. Moreover, she was unwilling to pay grease money to get another one made here; the second one would have been illegal. Were she to apply for a passport, the verification would have to be done back home in Assam, which means at least six long months, besides loads of embarrassing enquiries; in any case as a person born in the North East, she would be issued a passport for just one year initially; she’d have to renew it after the lapse of one year (the trial period, I suppose) to get the sort of passport the rest of us get.
Zahreen was once a devout Muslim, which also meant she was generally respectful towards all religions. Older now, though in her early thirties, she’d had enough of religion. Today, she lives in the US, has a great life as a restaurant manager, and eats all meats, much to the chagrin of her family back home.
Frankly, she doesn’t give a damn about what others think. She would like to live life on her own terms, and finds any kind of orthodoxy completely offensive. In the US as well, she has faced discrimination of the type she did when she tried to buy that car in Delhi. On that occasion it is I who provided a private solution to a public problem by extending a bridge loan for the car; after all, she has been like a putative daughter to me.
Zahreen presents an interesting case. She is a survivor who has gone on to shine and prosper. But her success story ought to alert us to the flip side. With all the discrimination and disappointments she had to face, even while trying to buy a cheap second hand car, things could have turned out differently. In the little spaces we fail to recognise, is born the sort of resentment that radicalises even regular middle class individuals who simply wish to get on with life.