One night @ the passport office,Kolkata.

Well,we weren't exactly inside the passport office.

Getting a cab after midnight is certainly a difficult task.So 4 of my friends and myself decided to pay someone in advance.We reached the taxi-stand and decided to speak to the first person we saw.His name was Raju who wanted us to give him Rs250 and said he would not go by the meter rate.Well in my mind i calculated the rate and i felt that he was charging Rs100 more.We discussed amongst ourselves for few seconds before giving him Rs50 in advance and taking his phone number in return.We thought that he would not throw away his sim card just to cheat us by Rs50.

The 5 of us live in 5 different places so the best option to go out together was to assemble in my house.We chose our house because it is nearest to the passport office.My friends arrived at my home at around 8pm on Sunday 6th June.We played cards, had dinner and at 1am on Monday,called up Raju the cab-driver who drove us to the PASSPORT OFFICE.

Well the 5 friends studied in the same college and got job at the same company.So we had to issue a passport for ourselves.Because issuing a passport usually takes an entire year and we were in a hurry so we opted for the Tatkal scheme in which passport arrives at our home in between 1 to 14 days.Obviously this costs Rs1500 more but we had no choice.

Well let me first tell you some facts and power-play in this business.There is a  middle-man (Dallal) who makes passports for you.But he does it only for the regular scheme in which your PASSPORT will arrive after a year.He charges Rs1000 for it.If you want a passport to be made by a dallal in the Tatkal scheme it would cost you around Rs3000.Also there is another type of dallal who stands for you in the queue while you are away.This type of service costs you Rs300.If you are very illiterate and need someone to fill-up the form for you,then this service costs Rs30 per form.But who would be a fool to hand over all the original documents to a dallal or illiterate enough to get our passports filled up by another man.

We  reached the passport office at around 1:30am on Monday and found nobody.Searching here and there we arrived near UCO bank where a  man was just sitting upright beside a sea of men in their sleeping postures.I inquired to the man where is the queue for issuing passport.Fortunately he was able to relate us to another man who was writing names for those who had just joined the queue.

He wrote down our names and warned us that if we left the place he would give our numbers to somebody else.So our mission began.

Only 60 passports are issued in a day under the tatkal scheme.Two separate days are required for issuing a passport.The first day is for issuing a token and a date when we will be able to submit our form.The second day is basically for verification for our submitted documents.

So under UCO bank,and just like the old days of Ishwar Chandra Vidwasagar who often studied under the Lamp-Post ,the five of us decided to read something to pass the time.Actually it is illegal to make a queue at midnight for the passport so a sensible person has to attend his queue near UCO bank.At 4am the queue gets shifted to the main office.

Here is an advice for a person who would want to issue a passport.He must carry at least 500 gms of newspaper,a toilet soap and 2 liters of drinking water.These things come in handy.

We had made a terrible mistake of bringing only a few pages of newspapers and by 2am we found that we needed to lie down on the pavement for a quick nap.Although the newspapers were not enough we tried to stick close so as to avoid the muddy pavement.

Before we knew it there were bloody ugly rats roaming around us.I think we had blocked their paths,but who cares.They were the typical rats of Bengal whose sizes range from a cat to a larger cat.They are scary,dirty and thrive in the local drains.

Fear gave our hope of sleep a hindrance.And we decide to give the VIPs(the rats) way.They vanished instantly like the ghosts of horror movies.Now the panic of their return anytime made us to stay awake the entire night.We played cards for sometime,strolled the open road for sometime,ate some chips for sometime and tried to talk for sometime.But doing the latter was the most difficult one as our mouths were not interested in movement due to the heavy sleep we were getting into.

We had just a few minutes before our queue would be shifted to the pavement of the passport office.So we had to extra careful not to vacate our numbers in the queue.But 2 of our friends got calls from nature at the same time.It was 4am.

Being our friend we had to give him support.Not by accompanying him to the lavatory but by keeping his line in the queue.Luckily when the shifting was going on no one realized that 2 persons were missing.Luck however did not favor the 2 guys.They had been searching for a proper bathroom for 45 minutes with a compromising situation with their nature calls.

Dawn arrived,and we still had to wait another 11 hours near the pavement of the passport office because we would get our tokens strictly after 4pm.Well that is another story and i will narrate later.