Waiting for a Visa: Epilogue

This is the epilogue to my Waiting for a Visa Story. You can read Part I here, and Part II here.

Just outside the Turkish Consulate in London, a small and tranquil English garden is orientalised by the Middle Eastern vibrancy of the visitors. Groups of young men with gelled-back hair in black leather jackets and tight-fitting jeans jostle for attention outside their cars, while an audience of women of all ages sit on ornate metal garden chairs, like only the English would ever buy for outdoors use, and spit out the husks of dried seeds and talk on mobile phones. Just beyond the gate that leads to the cul-de-sac where the Consulate lay, the deafeningly quiet pace of Knightsbridge and England kept the contrast sharp.

I wondered then what Ghassan was doing at that moment. If he had been given the chance to be here today, how soon would he have waited to go back to the Middle East? Ten weeks and more, a full seventy-three days, I had waited and planned to get back to London. One week after getting there I was booking flights and getting ready to go back to an imperial capital we had known even before Britain planted its presence on our shores and changed our mental orientations forever.

He might have not been able to file his own papers, but the old boy spoke the truth when he said,

“if your envelope comes back full, it’s because they’ve given you the rejection letters … if you get a thin envelope, they’ve just given you the passport back.”

How strange it felt to get only my passports back; I almost wanted to throw them away, to hand the opportunity to Ghassan and many others like him who deserved the opportunity every bit as much as I did. The mocking grass seemed insignificant and I couldn’t care when the young woman next to me laughed at the way I jumped in the air. Then I could feel the Sun’s glow on my forehead, and the bitterness of a visa odyssey hit me.

While London had been in throes of a blistering dry cold, Amman was drenched in much-awaited torrential, freezing rain. Just a day before I had come to Jordan the first time around, to make my initial application, Tamara had seen me off at Heathrow, and our scarves and jackets could scarcely hold us apart. She had waited for me for two hours on a train platform before I arrived to catch a flight neither one of us wanted me to be on. The summer Sun and Mediterranean air already seemed so very different from the cold breezes of those days; and the only achievement I could show for the time it took the weather to change was a piece of paper giving me the right to work in London, and it came a month late.