The time between the expiration of my stay permit in Italy and its renewal is one where my wings are clipped; and I wonder how long the new one will let me stay in the country where I’m building my life
With the limitation on travelling abroad, my partner and I went to Padova, a small town in Italy, where it struck me that the Spritz o’clock there was infinitely superior than the orange-hued hour in Venice
I am currently preparing for what I like to call my Stay Permit trap, this foreseeable yet unideal time frame when the credit-card-sized document that lets me live and work in Italy as a spouse to a EU citizen will have expired and the renewal process will still be underway. It is a moment of limbo, because I am usually given a renewal date that is in the somewhat distant future, either three months or possibly even six months from my date of reapplication. During this time, I cannot leave Italy. I can return to my home country, but then coming back here in time for the date I am given would prove difficult, considering how impossible it currently is for anyone in India to get an appointment for a Schengen visa. My best bet is to stay put.
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It affects everything, this bureaucracy, because I, as an art critic, can no longer travel even to neighbouring Austria to cover an exhibition or an event, or to Germany, where I would have been able to see the Louise Bourgeois exhibition, currently on display at Gropius Bau. This trap time will be activated around the end of this month, and as I ready the reapplication documents, I am already living the suspense of not knowing how long it will take, and playing out the hope that this time around, because I should have more documents, and a child, I will be given a five-year permit.
By the time I am allowed to return to India, it will most likely have been almost three years since I left. I don’t think I had ever fathomed being away so long, and I think my body, in order to cope with such a long absence, has stopped dreaming about what it would be like to return. Living such bureaucratic quagmire has often had the intonation of a forced exile. I fantasise often about what it would be like to return and to meet all the people I love, to be back in our apartment in Kurla and to hug my parents and be fed by them and to meet all our neighbours and for them to meet our child. Even though I have been in touch with all my close friends, it simply hasn’t been the same. No amount of video calling can compensate for not being in the same room and hearing the edges of each other’s laughter, being silly together, going for a meal, or a movie. Simply being there. This year on my birthday my family and I spoke as they were exiting the mall after having had lunch at a restaurant and while it was wonderful to see them all together, they felt distant, faces on a screen, faces our child has yet to see, yet to have the opportunity to learn to recognise.
This is what it means, I suppose, to be immigrant, to ‘do the time’ bureaucratically, until you can access the rights to which you are entitled—in this case, basic mobility—all because we are obligated to comply with the logic of nation states which makes a person’s presence either legal or illegal. You do the time so that your child doesn’t have to, or in the hope that doing so rewards you with better opportunities for their future. The thought that in a few weeks the borders of Italy, that is otherwise elusive, will assume a concreteness feels somewhat absurd.
My partner and I have been making our peace with it by planning weekend trips to small towns that are two to three train rides away. Last weekend we did a trial and went to Padova, the home of ‘The Saint’. If you’ve grown up Catholic in India, even you would know who this title refers to, the one and only patron of lost things and causes—Saint Anthony.
Most tourists never arrive at Padova because it is so close to Venice, clearly the more sought-after destination, and this is a pity. On Saturday evening, after our darshan at the basilica, when we sat in the square facing the astrological clock with one missing zodiac sign (libra), it struck me that Spritz o’clock in Padova was infinitely superior than the orange-hued hour in Venice, because the Aperol Spritz is so significantly cheaper, thanks to Padova’s 800-year-history, perhaps, as a university town, and comes with free chakna. We spent Sunday afternoon at the Botanical Garden, the world’s oldest within a university, and wandered through the different climatic zones that house plant specimens from different habitats. It was there that I saw two large banana trees and felt so much nostalgia for my homes in India, especially Goa, where there are so many local varieties of the fruit. I fantasised about our child learning their various names and being able to interpret and decipher the differences in flavour. I am that odd person in Tramin that deliberately buys ripe bananas. The cashiers always give me an apologetic discount. I tell them this ripeness is gold, it allows for a deeper caramelisation when I fry them in butter or ghee. They salivate at my description. I realise in these moments that the idea of home is nestled in all these minor absences, the little things whose charm lies in how easily they can be taken for granted.
Being an immigrant, I suppose, is knowing that even when you can return home, your consciousness will lie suspended between the two worlds you inhabit, the one you left, the one you now live in, and the inalienable differences between the two whose texture is visible to you alone. This knowledge, this loneliness, this is exile.
Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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