we're just numbers

I may soon be deported. Well, maybe not soon, because I am not yet done with my senior thesis, but definitely by midterms next semester. Hopefully, the State Department will ship me off via Jet Airways, because they have a wide range of movies and complimentary drinks.

Since I have rarely been carded after turning 21 (though still retain the face of a pre-teen), I have not been constantly looking at my license. It expired the last day of 2009, and I did not notice till the beginning of this week. Scared of local government agencies, I asked my mother to come with me to the DMV in Oakland, and we headed over there before she went to work. Everyone in Oakland was friendly. They smiled as they called me over. They smiled as they took my documents. And they smiled as they rejected me.

Apparently the name on my passport ("Rucha Desai") differs from the name on my expired license ("Rucha A. Desai"); my Social Security card wasn't much help, because it not only read "Rucha Abhay Desai," but also declared me as an immigrant, not valid for employment. They needed all the documents to read the same thing. And they wouldn't base a name change off of a passport; they wanted my naturalization papers.

My old passport claims my name to be "Rucha Abhay Desai." I figured that 3 years ago, when I was applying for my new passport, which excludes my middle name, I was in that phase of trying to find myself, define myself, discover myself, or some other psycho-therapeutic process described in an old volume of O. I guess I wasn't sure with what name I identified myself, and needed to explore the depths of my soul on a government document.


The U.S. government is not so sympathetic to soul-searching. I went back the second day, without my naturalization papers, but with my old passport, in hopes that they would see reason, or at least understand the mid-teen crisis that led to my name change. They rejected me once again, this time without smiles. It was my naturalization papers or nothing.

Funny thing is, it is nothing. My sister was born in the United States. My parents have naturalization certificates. I still have my green card, and a Social Security card that portrays me as an illegal immigrant.

Apparently, when my parents applied for naturalization, I was too young to "elect" citizenship, (yet old enough to rediscover myself) and so they presented various other documents to prove their relation to me in order to get me naturalized. Thus, I don't have these papers. I'm just piggy backing off of their citizenship.

When I was waiting to update my Social Security card, at the Social Security Office in Glen Rock, I found myself among old women, Italian American mobsters, and families. Everyone had a number. No one had a name. The woman talking to her daughter in Russian was a only a few digits different from the man talking to his friend about the Yankees game. The security guard flipping through the Sears catalogue was as anonymous to the U.S. Government as I was. My endeavors to re-identify myself, re-discover myself, surrendered to 8 powerful digits arbitrarily assigned to me years ago. I wasn't human. I was 123-45-678, and even that was compromised by a discrepancy between names.

In order to finish some paperwork and life-altering chores at the DMV, I will not return to Fordham till Tuesday night. The only problem is, I seem to have misplaced my student ID.