Shuffling through these manila folders at 2:19 AM, I realize that my kitchen table has become a sort of forensic lab for a life I never actually lived. I’m sneezing. The dust on these copies of copies is aggressive, a physical reminder that time doesn’t just pass; it decays into a fine silt that coats your lungs. I tried to go to bed early, really I did, but the weight of an incomplete OCI application has a way of sitting on your chest like an unpaid debt. It’s the ‘Documentary Evidence’ section. It asks for a reality that doesn’t exist in the physical world, demanding I produce a birth certificate for a man born in 1919 in a village that was swallowed by a border change in 1947 and likely burned to the ground in 1949. To the government, if there is no paper, there was no person. To me, there is just the smell of this dust and the fading memory of a man who spoke three languages but never owned a passport.

This is the paradox of Identity as a Service. We’ve reached a point where our heritage is no longer something we carry in our blood or our stories; it’s something we have to subscribe to, a premium tier of belonging that requires a high-resolution scan of a dead man’s thumbprint. My friend Hayden M.K., who spends 49 hours a week as a professional fragrance evaluator, tells me that identity is the ultimate ‘base note.’ It’s the thing that lingers when everything else evaporates. But Hayden is currently having a crisis because his own papers don’t match the scent of his life. He spends his days identifying the precise molecular weight of bergamot and synthetic musk, yet he can’t prove to a consular officer why his father’s name is spelled with a ‘v’ on a 1969 school record and a ‘w’ on a 1989 marriage certificate.

Nuance Stripped by the Binary Check

Identity, when processed through a bureaucratic lens, is stripped of its nuance. It’s a series of binary checks. Are you Indian? Prove it. Not with your grandmother’s recipes or the way you pronounce ‘dhaba,’ but with a Stamp of Authority from a district magistrate who hasn’t occupied that office in 39 years. It’s a disservice, really. The system forces us to translate a lived, messy heritage into a sterile, digital format. We are asked to curate ourselves. We become the editors of our own history, cutting out the gaps where the records were lost in a monsoon or a fire, trying to stitch together a narrative that satisfies an algorithm designed to find reasons to say ‘no.’

Hayden M.K. once told me about a perfume he was evaluating that was supposed to smell like ‘Rain on Red Earth.’ He said the chemists got the geosmin levels perfectly right-that earthy smell when the first drops hit dry ground-but it felt dead. It lacked the ‘impurities’ that make the real world smell like the real world. That’s what these OCI applications feel like. They are looking for a high-fidelity version of our identity that lacks any of the impurities of real life. They want the geosmin without the mud. They want the heritage without the 79 years of migration, displacement, and lost luggage that define the diaspora.

I spent 19 minutes staring at a blank field on the screen tonight. ‘Place of Birth.’ If I write the name of the village as it is known now, the form might reject it because it doesn’t match the 1959 record. If I write it as it was then, the drop-down menu doesn’t recognize the district. It’s a digital cul-de-sac. You find yourself searching for loopholes in your own existence. It’s a strange feeling, to be an applicant for your own bloodline. You start to feel like a solicitor representing a client who happens to be yourself. You look for evidence. You call distant cousins in 9 different time zones, asking if anyone kept the old trunk in the attic. You become a detective of the mundane.

There is a deep emotional exhaustion that comes with this. It’s not just the hours spent on the website, which inevitably crashes after you’ve uploaded 29 different PDFs. It’s the feeling that your identity is being interrogated. Every ‘Request for Additional Information’ feels like a slight, a suggestion that you are an impostor. We are living in an era where ‘Identity as a Service’ means that your right to belong is a product you have to purchase with a currency of impossible proofs. And if you can’t pay? You remain in a state of perpetual in-between. Not quite a citizen, not quite a stranger. A ghost in the machine.

I remember talking to an official once who told me, with a straight face, that the rules are there to prevent fraud. I understand that. I really do. But when the bar for ‘truth’ is set at a level that only the most privileged or the most meticulously documented can reach, you aren’t just preventing fraud; you are gatekeeping culture. You are saying that the story of the family that fled with nothing but the clothes on their backs is less valid than the story of the family that had the foresight to keep a filing cabinet during a revolution.

It’s a heavy realization. It makes you want to give up, to just accept that the digital version of you is the only one that matters. But then you think about the 199 reasons why you started this process in the first place. It wasn’t just for a visa. It was for a sense of completion. It was a way to tell the world, and yourself, that you belong to a story that started long before you were born. So, you keep digging. You look for professionals who understand the maze, because doing it alone is a recipe for a breakdown. I eventually found that having a guide through the American side of this bureaucratic nightmare was the only thing that kept me sane. For those dealing with the specific hurdles of the US-based process, using a service like

visament can feel like finding a translator in a country where you thought you spoke the language but realized you only knew the slang. They understand the difference between the identity you live and the identity the computer expects.

Hayden M.K. called me at 1:09 AM last night. He had finally found his father’s old passport, tucked behind a copy of a 1979 National Geographic. He sounded like he’d won the lottery. It wasn’t the document itself that made him happy; it was the fact that the state would finally have to admit he was who he said he was. ‘It smells like old cedar and disappointment,’ he said, describing the passport. ‘But it’s got the stamp. The holy 1989 stamp.’ We laughed, but it was a tired laugh. We are two grown men, established in our careers, celebrating a piece of paper like it’s a holy relic.

Is this progress? We’ve digitized our souls and put them behind a paywall of administrative hurdles. We’ve turned the concept of ‘home’ into a subscription service where the Terms and Conditions change every 9 months. I’m looking at the clock now. It’s nearly 3:00 AM. I have 9 more tabs open on my browser, each one a different requirement I need to fulfill. I have to find a way to prove that my mother’s maiden name change wasn’t a subversion of the state, but a standard cultural practice. I have to find a way to explain that a village in 1949 didn’t have a ‘Post Code.’

I think about the fragrance Hayden is trying to create. He wants to call it ‘Lineage.’ He says he wants it to smell like ink, dust, marigolds, and the ozone of a coming storm. He wants it to be a scent that doesn’t need a passport to cross a border. I told him he should include a hint of the smell of a laser printer, just to keep it realistic. He didn’t think that was funny. He’s a purist. He believes that the essence of a thing can’t be captured by a machine.

I’m beginning to think he’s right. The ‘Identity as a Service’ model is a failure because it can only process the data, not the essence. It can see the 19 pages of my application, but it can’t see the way my hands shake when I talk about the grandfather I never met. It can’t see the 999 miles I would travel just to stand in the field where his house used to be. It only sees the mismatch in the dates. It only sees the missing seal.