My sister-in-law's arrival has been delayed for two weeks or so. It's still a bit up in the air. There is still an ongoing hurdle remaining in her visa situation. She'd applied for the visa, traveled to Islamabad, and been interviewed and approved. All that was left was having her passport mailed back to her with the completed visa in it. And even that happened - she received it more than two weeks ago. But it had a problem.
You see, my husband and brother in law have weird first names. Not just like, they sounded weird to me when I first heard them (also true) but like actual Pakistanis think "What the hell kind of name is that?" When introducing his brother at a dinner party, I heard a friend tell Mian "Are you kidding me?" thinking Mian was making up the strange name for his brother.
Not Mian so much - his name is pretty uncommon but not unheard of. My brother-in-law, on the other hand, is probably one of a kind. If you google his name, you will only find him. (That's how I found embarrassing photos of him once!) It seems there is no one else named Chachoo in the entire world. But all three of the brothers have similar names - the first three letters of their names are the same. So Mr. Very Uncommon Name Chachoo has been running into the same problem throughout his life that people misspell his name. And apparently the most common mistake is that they call him or spell it like his eldest brother's name instead. My Mian.
This issue has reared its ugly head again a few times in the passing weeks. When one gets married, there's a lot of paperwork to be filled out. It turns out that on a few of these instances of paperwork, it listed the newly married couple as my new sister-in-law married to MY HUSBAND. And when you husband hails from a land that dabbles in polygamy, this can raise a few internal flags!
So Chachoo's poor wife has been anxiously awaiting her visa and when she gets it in the mail, the visa wording says "F-2 visa for Ms. Chachoo, wife of Mr. GoriWife'sHusband. So she mailed it back, hoping to have the error fixed. As the date of her flight came nearer, Chachoo and Ms. Chachoo wondered weather the visa would arrive in time. They waited until the absolute last minute they thought advisable and changed the ticket to a later date a little more than 24 hours before her scheduled departure.
Of course, hours later the visa arrived.
But then it had ANOTHER error! Instead of misspelling her husband's name, they'd left it off altogether. So now she's Ms. Chachoo, wife of BLANK - an F-2 without an F-1. So they sent it back again, and now they wait anxiously again, hoping hoping hoping that it arrives before her departure date. And I have two more weeks to make sure her room is ready for her.
