The Queue

Contributed by: Muslim Shower

So as it so happens, some poor relative from a country which shall remain unnamed, although I can tell you that people from that country speak Norwegian, decided to invite me and my family for his daughter’s wedding. Now normally inviting a relative over for a wedding is a good idea, but in my case, not so much. See, I have this knack for saying the wrong thing at weddings. Once, while saying goodbye to the bride and groom I, totally innocently (At least that’s what I told my parents), gave them both a giant thumbs up and in the most cute way possible said, ‘Enjoy’ and then giggled away like a shy girl.

Any who, so this particular trip required me to get my passport renewed which meant that I had to do something I had always dreaded. In fact, dread doesn’t quite cut it. Have you ever heard of the ‘Room 101’ from Orwell’s ‘1984’? I think my Room 101 would have a fat government employee, with a particularly disturbing moustache and thick ‘provincial accent’, sitting on an old chair, with old papers lying around and him scratching his armpits with his half bitten pen while eating a more than questionable item. And I would be standing in a long line in which all the people would be an exact copy of the said government employee, eating the exact same item and I would have to wait for an hour so that he could sign my ‘X government document’.

Urghhhh... Anyways, so I had to go the passport office. Now there is something particularly disturbing about swamps of people surrounding you as soon as you get out of your car. Scratch that, even before you get out of your car. For a minute I didn’t know whether I was being getting robbed, being sexually harassed or the guy was simply offering his services. One would imagine some sort of process or structured system in an office, but oh, how mistaken one can be! Let me go out and say that the system I saw on a farm in Rahim Yar Khan for feeding baby goats was more organized than this. Havoc, my dear readers, havoc! To use a more colloquial term, it was like a ‘fish market’. People running here and there, offering to get your work done for amount ‘X’ which happened to be this much cheaper than the amount offered by the other guy. Interestingly enough, the fact that on every level, these deals could be considered immoral, if not downright illegal never comes up. The guys supply, the customer buys and you shake the person’s hand (If you can completely disregard all research ever done on health care) and you walk away. More interestingly, this is all done in open view. There isn’t even a hint of trying to hide anything.

Source: Internet

Remember earlier when I said ‘you walk away’? Yeah, no you don’t. That is just the beginning. You see, when these deals are being struck, there is an understanding that these guys can only open so many doors for you, after that, you’re on your own. The really pathetic part comes afterwards. The part which I shall, for now, just refer to as ‘THE LINE’!!!At this point, I feel the need to point out that I have a general disregard for what people do, or say, or think. In fact, it wouldn’t be too unfair to say, I generally hate people. In fact, I despise them. Whenever I see a big swamp of people, I feel like vomiting. They make me want to go to the airport, buy a ticket to New York, go to the empire state building once I am there, climb to its roof and then jump off while screaming ‘Yaaayy’! Uh, I think I am diverting from the point here.

Anyways, the point is that I hate standing with people, especially in lines. I stood for a minute by the side, drank some water and gathered all my courage and stepped to enter ‘The line’. My woes were compounded by two problems. Firstly, that it wasn’t really a line. I would more preferably define it ‘an arbitrary formation of standing humans’, which, for those of you unaware of my level of English basically means a line which could be manipulated by just about anybody. Oh, how my blood boiled at seeing that beautiful guy breaking the line. ‘Please, by all means, please break the line. I have been standing here with these sweaty people since forever precisely so that you can break line and stand in front of me’, ass.

Understanding the second problem is premised on understanding the weather pattern in Pakistan. As you are all aware, temperatures reach an annoyingly high level. When people stand under the bright yellow sun on a summer day, they don’t just sweat. Allow me to draw an analogy what happens. Imagine that you’ve filled a kettle to the full and instead of tea, you’ve put a little tablet in there which has the power to cumulate all the smell that comes from an egg which has been rotting for three days and then, you’ve put that kettle to boil! This is what I went through. I promise to you that I am not exaggerating when I say that I actually went about telling people to raise their arms and sprayed deodorant on each one of them but to no avail!

Slowly, painfully and tortuously, the line moved. Every inch was agony. The line we were waiting in was to buy a ticket which would get us started on a four step process to submit our passport. Just submit it, and after submission, it would take anything between two to three months before I got my passport. As you can probably imagine, my woes were just beginning. By the time I got to the counter from where I would buy the ticket from, I was ready to give up. My nose was completely dysfunctional. The nose can only take so much before it completely collapses! My legs were hurting and I was exhausted. And then, I saw the counter…