Ward Office
The lucky ones sit on rickety plastic stools at the entrance to the large room. A line of penitents, punished for crimes we haven’t committed. This is the Office of Births, Deaths and Marriages of the first (amongst equals) ward of our city’s municipal corporation. Here, the celebration of life, the sanctity of human relationships and the evidence of mortality must be sanctioned, stamped and approved. Without these grubby chits of permission, we may not live, marry or die, it seems.
At 3 pm in the afternoon, the room is devoid of activity. Five women employees sit sleepily at their ramshackle, makeshift desks, while their two male counterparts scurry in and out, carrying ancient files, cups of tea and other necessities that make life in this office bearable. Not so much as a glass of water is offered to us of course. The furniture in this room is a record of decades of changing fashion in government office accoutrements. Wooden chairs with hard seats and harder backs, those curved metal chairs with fake coir seats, the plastic chairs that have given up pretending to be comfortable – all these lie around aimlessly, yet not one of us in that line dares to sit on these. For us, the plastic stools are enough comfort. Plonked in the middle of the room are two large freezers, relics of the covid years. Rats have chewed through the piles of cardboard boxes stacked alongside, stamped with the ominous words ‘one time use syringe’. The ceiling of the large room is artistically decorated with cobwebs. The filthy windows are thankfully open, and the dusty fans whirr efficiently, providing a gust of stale air in counterpoint to the discomfort of standing in line or sitting on those little stools for hours on end.
We are all here to have corrections made in the certificates issued by these same stalwarts. My father in law’s death certificate requires a correction in the spelling of his given name, the elderly lady next to me needs a change made in the spelling of her son’s surname so that he can get married next week and the ridiculously young parents carrying their new born son need to correct his gender on his birth certificate. Life for this baby has barely begun and he is already fighting to stamp his claim on his own existence. A group of tough young men turn out to be naval sailors, all new fathers, waiting to register their babies in the annals of this megapolis.
The fatigue of repeated visits to achieve the seemingly impossible is telling on us all. The young men periodically get aggressive, before being shushed into abject compliance by the rest of us: the older, the wiser, or simply the more frightened. We sympathise with each other, though wildly differing circumstances have brought us here in this afternoon’s fellowship. I am awkwardly aware that raising my voice, or speaking fluently in English might fetch results that my companions might not be able to achieve. Or it could completely backfire, and I could be targeted for throwing my weight around in this fiercely parochial, almost foreign environment. I keep quiet but my clothes give me away – I am that other, the madam, the memsaab. I am offered a stool and over my protests, forced to sit. I use a stiff back as an excuse to vacate it after a while because it’s an unbearable imposition to sit while the young mother or the elderly gentleman stand stoically.
We wait. We wait for the Officer-in-Charge who is always in a meeting between 2 and 4.30 pm. We wait even though he knows and we know that corrections will only be done between 3 and 5 in the afternoon. We wait for the only clerk who can make the corrections in the system, to edit the mistakes he has himself made. We wait even though we’ve been told that this clerk is on leave and will only resume work the following week. All the other staff refuse to touch his computer, it is a sacred object. They look through our pleading eyes, past our tired faces, they are obdurate in this little power play. So what if you are elderly, wheezing and have a brace on one leg? So what if you have come from across this merciless city because it is your misfortune that your mother died in a hospital in this ward? So what if you are the father of a new born babe who might lose his daily wage job because of all the days you’ve spent haunting these corridors? This young man breaks down in frustrated tears and all I have to offer in cold comfort is empty reassurances that today is the day, today his work will surely be done. His young wife looks at me stoically, cynical pity in her eyes for this clueless memsaab.
The Officer wanders in at 4.30 pm, as per promises. I am allowed to speak with him for the briefest of moments, in which he reiterates his entire office’s dependence on the missing clerk, his current helplessness and an assurance that in four days’ time, the correction on the death certificate will be made.
Four days later…we are all back, as if the treadmill we were on last week has brought us back to the future. We smile tentatively at each other. Hope flutters in the air. The clerk is back to work. A short, stout man, he struts around like a bantam rooster herding his hens. Then hope begins to die. The clock is ticking: 3 o’ clock and he will not even begin to enter our details into that sacred computer because, and this truly leaves us all at a loss, we haven’t filled in an all important paper form. The forms, printed on dirty, cheap paper, are lying there in a heap on one of the tables. The other staff members could have certainly handed these out to us, to be filled in and photocopied and stamped, while we waited the interminable wait of the damned. When one of us points this out, we are treated to a masterclass of staring at their phones, cleaning finger nails or scrupulous examination of the cobwebs festooning the ceiling. No one will acknowledge that yes, in fact, they have cost us precious minutes. After all, the medical officer will grace us with his presence only for 30 minutes and the clerk has already informed us that he will be quitting his post at 5 pm sharp in order to catch the 5.30 Virar fast.
We rush en masse to collect the forms, listen to contradictory instructions on how to fill these (issued by all eight staff members simultaneously in a belated attempt to appease the public), and huddle near the lift doors to clarify doubts for those of us who cannot read Marathi or cannot read at all.
By 4 pm, we have all trickled back, clutching the precious form in duplicate, and now the countdown begins. Will the Officer finish his meeting by 4.30 sharp? Will he deign to clear all our forms? Will the little clerk work fast enough with the data entries so that all of us might finally be released from the 5th floor? These questions weigh us all down, then lift up our spirits, a seesaw we ride helplessly.
At which exact moment the Officer enters his office remains an unsolved puzzle. In a Jack in the Box fashion, he appears suddenly, seated in his officious and comfortable arm chair. Suspicions of hidden passages, theories of secret doorways are abandoned because the man looks up and makes eye contact with me. Startled into action, I give him my best steely eyed ‘you civic official I citizen’ look. He beckons me in, glances at the form, mumbles a word to the hovering and suddenly attentive clerk, and waves me away. I can’t help it: I gesture to my companions and start to plead. He looks up, barks a short command to his staff and says to the air: Sab ka kaam aaj ho jaayega. Heartened by this short and hopefully successful encounter, my compatriots make a respectful but urgent rush for his attention.
A mere twenty minutes later, we are all beaming at each other in the dark basement of the ward office building. In a miraculous reversal, the despair of the fifth floor has given way to the serenity of accomplishment. The young father comes up to me and indicates, in gestures, how happy he is that his son will now possess that all important certificate with correct details and then embarrasses me by wordlessly conveying his gratitude to the memsaab. I retreat hurriedly, shaking my head in negation of any part I might have in this small victory of the people. He turns away to his wife and baby. The young woman gives me a measured glance and then, a tiny nod of acknowledgement. I nod back and leave the ward office, into a street filled with the setting sun and office goers rushing to their 5.30 Virar fast. The rooster is just another one of the thousands making their way home after a busy day at office.