JUST A FORMALITY RAIN

India's bureaucratic paper chase is hardly different from its yearly soakers, the country's monsoons.

Not a soul at Chennai’s Jeeva Park.

In the summer of 2005, when my mother left the world, my late father, Daddykins, hurried my sister and me to the municipality office. “If I were to kick the bucket tomorrow, and lord knows that can happen anytime, I don’t want the two of you to curse me for not having added your name to all the documents,” he said, as the three of us sat there helpless and hypnotized amid the sound of rustling paper and stapling machines. One thing was true in the land of my birth and in the land I now call home: The formalities built around the future act of dying made the present act of living on earth so painful that the only thing glorious about life was death.

The paper chase in Chennai is more unyielding than Chennai’s yearly northeast monsoons. People like my late father tend to match that flood with a deluge of their own inside their homes. When Daddykins passed away, he left behind at least SIX copies of every document he had ever owned over eight decades.

And, naturally, the second he died in 2014, our own paper trail began, a never-ending torrent of it, for everything our father had once opened or owned, as the case may be, for which we turned in more copies—and still more copies—of every document that established, confirmed and reiterated our identity as Daddykins’ children. Wherever we went, there was one official at the other end of the table who clucked in sympathy for the minor fact of a major inundation. “It’s just a formality, madam, nothing to worry. All this is so we can do the needful without any problem.” And so we kept doing the needful—even when it was not needed—because more xerox copies of more signed documents were individual anchors of security that, together, tethered us, with some sort of a tenuous guarantee, to the world of the living.

I was reminded of all that one January a few years after Daddykins passed away when it rained madly for all of about ten minutes before it stopped and the sun peeked out again.

“Don’t worry madam,” Daddykins’ chauffeur, Vinayagam, said with his standard optimism. “The monsoon season has ended. This is just a formality rain.” Saying that, he cackled wildly, pointing out that my husband, his other younger boss who had chosen the right time to be out at Jeeva Park for his morning walk, may have got caught in the sudden shower and would now return home sopping wet.

My late father’s daily haunt gets a makeover. When I’m in Chennai, I try to fit in a short daily walk at Jeeva park.