I should have been a U.S. citizen by now. One year ago, I set aside a weekend to work on my naturalization application. It took me three uninterrupted hours to complete multiple forms and another hour to comb through details of my life that evaded me—where was I on October 6, 2019? Am I a person of impeccable moral character? Instead of submitting it immediately, I decided to wait a week and then carefully re-examine every detail. 

Thinking back, I likely did this less for diligence and more to imagine how proud it would make my mom. If she heard about my bureaucratic work ethic, she might say, “Wow, for the first time in his life, he completed a piece of mundane but important paperwork without making a mistake.” Instead, I promptly forgot I had ever worked on the application.

Tasks like these resurface when I’m triggered by context clues, like the immigration line at the Montreal airport I encountered a month later. When I logged back in to submit my application, I found it had disappeared. Apparently, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) deletes applications from their system if they aren’t completed within thirty days. 

I sat on redoing the application for another seven months. When I sought absolution from my therapist for procrastinating, she suggested that the problem might be that I was scared of losing my identity as an Indian. I laughed and submitted the application the following week. Out of spite. I guess therapy works. 

Last week, I completed the second step in the process—submitting my biometrics to USCIS. When I got in the Lyft for my biometrics appointment, the driver, who was Sikh, inquired with a familiarity in his voice, “USCIS?”


“Yes.”


The familiarity became more deep-seated in the timbre of his voice when he asked, “Fingerprints?”


“Yes.” 

We did not exchange another word for the rest of the drive—we had just conveyed 200 years of colonialism and globalization under the guise of transactional information. 

The USCIS office in Oakland is located in a strip mall of unremarkable offices, in a block that could be anyplace, anywhere, USA. It reminded me of something I learned about U.S. expats in other countries—their neighborhoods are replicas of suburbs from Middle America, down to the last detail. As we pulled in, I was confused to see a line outside that looked eerily similar to a line outside a village office in India. Perhaps sensing my confusion or used to this routine, the Sikh driver reassured me in his best Indian uncle voice, “Just go stand in line.”

While in line, I noticed that I could distinguish Indians from other South Asians by the sheer amount of paperwork they carried. They have always been overzealous about paperwork. I say “they” because I’ve never had this affliction when it comes to bureaucracy, much to my own detriment. There is a good case to be made that I am seeking amnesty in the United States because of the amount of paperwork required to simply exist in India. That day, I carried precisely the one piece of paper that USCIS asked me to bring. 

The occasion of my biometrics was also marked by a couple of other oddities:

• Several signs outside the office asked visitors to refrain from using their phones, yet a woman in line was playing the Barbie theme song out loud. Was she trying to prove her worthiness to be in this country?
   
• Inside, a TV played America’s Funniest Home Videos. Had they done user research on what a future U.S. citizen might like? I’d say they got it spot on—America’s Funniest Home Videos is one of my earliest cultural memories, one of the few American exports that transcends language and status, devoid of post-modern Waspy irony.
   
• The monitor on which I saw my fingerprints being captured had a Superman sticker on it. Was it pro-American messaging, or did the elderly Asian woman who took my fingerprints really like Superman?


My faith in American bureaucracy was rewarded with an appointment that took barely 15 minutes. On the way back, I got another immigrant Lyft driver. As I got in the car, he inquired, “Fingerprints?”

I replied with a deep-seated familiarity, “Yes.” 

He told me he had got his citizenship in 2019. “I waited until I got the passport to go back to Afghanistan.” He paused to take a left turn, then continued, “but by the time I got the American passport, the Taliban had come to power ... I never went home after.” He laughed as he finished this sentence. A sincere laugh as if he had gone through all the stages of grief and irony and then arrived at the joke. 

“I haven’t been back in six years,” I said, trying to empathize. 

“Why don’t you go?” 

“Too much paperwork,” I deflected. I realized I’ve never really dwelled on why I haven’t gone back home. 

Perhaps sensing my hesitation, he switched to topics he knew all South Asians to be competent in—arranged marriage and what computer languages his son should learn to get a job. 

When we got to my destination, he said, “Take care and be careful of American women,” as if I was James Bond and he was Q, warning me not to get distracted on my mission. I laughed it off but skipped that part of the story when I recounted the tale of my USCIS trip to the woman I was dating, whom I would break up with a month later.