Aadhaar and my doomed love affair: Why I didn't enrol for so long
We first met because of the UIDAI project in 2010. He had written asking if I would like to look into the child mapping efforts of the UIDAI after a column about homeschooling I had written appeared in the newspaper I then worked for. We spoke over email and I thought he was a bureaucrat who wanted to discuss policy matters with a journalist. On the day I was to meet him, I was running a little late.
Since it was to be our first interaction in person, I messaged him saying that I would be wearing a red shirt, and asked him to wave at me. When I entered the café where we met, I found that he was a young man who had returned from abroad; one of those recruits who would consult the government with regards to the scheme. He was dressed in a white shirt and black trousers and suggested I write a story about the new song for the launch of Aadhaar. He drank his green tea and I ordered coffee. He insisted on a second cup but I wanted to go to Janpath and so I said I had a meeting and left. It rained that evening and by the time I got to office, I was drenched. That's how it began. I wrote a few stories including the one about the blind man who took a sabbatical to lend his "perspective" to the largest ever exercise in the "identity building" of a nation with so much diversity. Back then, we spoke a lot on the phone.
When he came next, he got me donuts from Bombay. I had told him I missed coffee and donuts from my years in a small town in the United States. I called Dunkin' Donuts the "working class coffee" and every morning I would buy a large coffee and a donut. He remembered. There were six donuts in the box. I shared them with a friend in the month of October in 2010.
Small things. I still remember many things. I remember he told me he couldn't see colours much later after our first meeting. He couldn't see red and therefore he had not waved in the cafe. We laughed. I asked him if I looked black and white to him. He said he once got a pink shirt thinking it was blue. I remember I got him a blue shirt later. I always wondered about colour blindness. I asked him if he could drive safely. He said he could make out from the sequence of the three colours and drove pretty okay.
We argued about UIDAI's mandate. I was not convinced. He said it was for the greater good. We were invited to Aadhaar and inclusive growth dinners back then. We hung out with the "bright minds" who were helping us all get an identity card so everything could be monitored. He would say it was like social security. It would help fight corruption. I quoted John Lennon's Imagine's lyrics. He was idealistic. He was young and worked "many, many, many" hours. I was turning cynical. I was older. He said he was in love. I smiled a lot those days.
Our doomed affair was governed by the UIDAI arguments. We first met near the Jeevan Bharti Building in Delhi's Connaught Place many years ago. Eight years is a long time. We once bumped into each other at the same building after we had ceased to know each other.
He had once called from a small outpost in 2010 where he had been camping along with his colleagues for the launch of Aadhaar. There had been nothing much to do except drink Magic Moments vodka in the nights in a mofussil kind of town, he said. That's when we started talking for hours. He would dial from a remote outpost and I would listen in from a metropolis.
It is strange how much we remember. For all these years, I had forgotten to remember. But as I stood in the queue to get Aadhaar card enrolment, I remembered conversations, dinners, him and myself. When we broke up, I thought I'd never get an Aadhaar card. It was a stupid indulgence. It doesn't make sense to most. But to me, i thought it would be like constantly living with memories of someone who left. Just like that.
I always recall "Why don't you dance?", a short story by Raymond Carver. It is about this man who puts everything he owns, except three cartons, in his front yard. A boy and a girl stop by thinking it is a yard sale. He has stripped the mattresses bare after his wife dumped him, cleared out everything, and left it in the front yard. The man pours the boy and the girl drinks and says "everything goes". And then he asks them, "Why don't you kids dance?" Later, he dances with the girl to the beat of an old record player.
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When he left, I packed everything I could find, put it in cartons and left it with someone who would pass it on to him. I didn't check if he received everything. Those who suffer emotional and nervous breakdowns on and off like me must always remove the reminders. I thought I had purged myself. But then, standing in the queue for hours, I remembered. Suddenly and then slowly. Everything. It is not his fault. It is not mine either. We had moved on. We found others. But in the grand scheme called life, a year counts, too. But it had all started with this UIDAI in a cafe that is no more. I remembered a questionnaire he had once sent me. At 23, he wrote that he was kind of idealistic - he wanted to save the world with the UIDAI project. That was for an interview. But everything was somehow related to UIDAI. And in a folder marked in his name, which I read today, I came across the UIDAI references. One email is marked "confusional sleep state and UIDAI" and if I type UIDAI in the search option of the email account, it throws up our exchanges.
Once, I had even said "no more UIDAI" and signed off saying, "I am on my crossdresser's network. Divine intervention." What I meant was I needed a break from the UIDAI overdose. I never wrote on UIDAI after we became strangers again.
When you are killing time in a queue and you are the 208th, you know that time will pass very slowly and maybe painfully. Perhaps we always underestimate the recall value of things. It is a trap. I had even composed a letter once and found it in the "Drafts" folder. Of course, I never sent that letter to him.
"That Nizamuddin house no longer remains. Just like that Barista. They broke it down last year, and I went once to stand outside and pay homage to memories.
I threw away the furniture, and many other things. I didn't keep any reminders of you. I was in a hurry to forget. I never saw the rains with you. And I listen to a composition of Mihaly Vig called 'The rain', and I miss not having seen the rains. You left in August. We saw the rains from our windows in different cities.
Maybe time is such a layered beast. We are never sure bout what time it is, or what time was it. But we didn't say goodbyes. We just got up and left.
And we had one encounter where we exchanged words. And that was incomplete. I was on a terrace, and you came by, and we spoke of white shirts, and friends, and stories I wrote, and the ones you read. And you asked if we could meet again.
Then, there were emails. And again, we left. And we never returned to each other."
But I never could manage the courage to get the Aadhaar card because I thought I was a keeper of memories and any triggers could set me off balance. I am much older now. Not wiser. Still the same. Confused and lost. Later in the day, I read Carver's short story again. I wondered if "everything goes". I was one of those people who thought the UIDAI's Aadhaar card would not be needed. I believed in the Supreme Court's way of deciding cases. No, I wasn't bothered about identity theft. I don't know who I am and a series of numbers can't really solve an existential dilemma. But I have a job and I have to pay my bills even at the cost of remembering.
We have been held hostage to a set of numbers that promises better governance; having been in the queue for enrolment for so many hours, I was dazed and felt sad for the old woman with the limp, who had to walk in to complete her enrolment. A man standing next to me said it was difficult to miss work and pay so much to get to the Pragati Maidan centre. He had to update his card. He asked me why I hadn't got one until now. I smiled and said we are made up of our little rebellions. I didn't want to remember, I said. He didn't understand. Nobody does. And seven years later, I was here to get enrolled. My poetic rebellion had to surrender to a list of "essential things" - bank account, phone connection, mutual funds, LIC, travel, etc.
At 4pm, I left. Without the enrolment. Until then, enrollee 79 had been called in. I was, after all, the 208th.
Later that evening, my friend showed up and shared her own Aadhaar saga. She happens to be his cousin and we met during those UIDAI years. She travelled to Ahmedabad recently to get herself enrolled. She had been against the UIDAI in principle. "What's the point of the argument of getting in the database? I am paying taxes. I am already in the database," she said.
"Why didn't you get it done earlier?" I asked.
She said she was waiting for better judgment to prevail.
"Tomorrow there is a hearing on the UIDAI in the Supreme Court. I expect a stay order," she said.
An insignificant document held the key to her efforts at sanitising herself. She got discovered and now has applied for Aadhaar with her maiden surname hoping she can sanitise her other documents with her original name. Perhaps, she said, this insignificant document now holds the most significance in my life. This is now a question of moving on with my original name and reclaiming myself. And she offered I could go to her father in another town to get Aadhaar enrolment and that way they would come full circle - our stories. So much has changed. We changed. She is moving to Kabul for work in a few days and we decided to share a laugh over cups of tea.
"My dad who could have been your in-law is more than happy to adopt you and get your Aadhaar card enrolment done," she said as she handed me an old diary of his first love story about a neighbour he had been in love with.
"This is a gift," she said. "He wanted you to have it."
Maybe this is what it is then. A story of UIDAI and related stories of love and friendship. Unconditional.
I am dreading more encounters with memory as I run around to get enrolled. And I am thinking about the man and his front yard and his words: everything goes. Not quite. Nothing goes away entirely. And because writers keep their notes intact for future, I am surprised at my own filekeeping abilities. Maybe all love is for research. Maybe all love is material. And maybe I will remember more of that brief affair now that this series of numbers has been tied to my identity and there's no escaping it.
But memories also make us smile. Like I used to once. I laugh often now. And it is nice to smile standing in a queue reading through emails from a bygone era. And that's a solace. My memory is intact. I just have to remember and I can conjure smells, sights, everything. And maybe I will eat a donut once I get the card. For the sake of old times and UIDAI memories. My friend came with me for enrolment today. Just to give me company in the queue. And to remember those days when we were young and thought we could rebel against the UIDAI.