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I was travelling on work when on June 30 the giant pointy teeth of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) monster started chomping away at family peace. I arrived back in Delhi in mid-July to a terse WhatsApp message from my sister, with the number of my Booth Level Officer (BLO). Do it now, she wrote. Deadline is July 29. We have to map to 2002 rolls. The SIR was here! I was jolted into panic.

We knew what had happened in Bihar and West Bengal. Repressed words – notice, verification, appeal, hearing, tribunal – floated into heightened awareness.

EPIC cards were dusted off. And 24-year-old memory vaults were jimmied. They were rusty with age. It seemed a lifetime ago. A quarter of a century in which we’ve raised kids, lost jobs, found purpose, and gained weight.

And so, it began. A hunt for the past.

Farha or Farah: A rose by any other name… is a logical discrepancy?

My enumeration form was procured after two days of calls to my overworked BLO in Mehrauli (No, he did not do house-to-house visits). His location shifted every day, sometimes every few hours. 11 am here and 4 pm there. It began to feel like a bad dream sequence. Like chasing a floating love letter from a lost paramour, slipping out of grasp each time until it finally drifts over the edge of a ravine, the declaration unsaid, doomed lives changed forever.

My partner finally took a day off from office to track him down. The form arrived home dog-eared, stained and ripped in one corner. Just one copy, not the two that the ECI promises. ‘Copy karwa lena’ we were told. I put whitener on the brown stains, scotch taped the torn corner, and stared at this talisman for a long time. Then got 2 copies made. Front and back.

The left side of the form wanted me to find (map) myself in 2002, and the right side allowed listing a ‘mapped’ relative. The left side was the winning play. I knew my address in 2002, and we found me easily – Farah Naqvi Father – all coordinates in order. I was an early cartographical success.

There was just one wrinkle. For as long as I can remember my EPIC card has recorded my first name as Farha instead of Farah. A mistake I never bothered to correct. In an earlier India it felt like Sanjiv/Sanjeev or Pooja/Puja – hardly earth shattering. But in Naya Bharat with my kind of name it could be considered a logical discrepancy! We had read about any number of Mohammads, Mohds., Mohammeds who never made the cut in West Bengal because of this. ‘And there has been absolute terror there about losing everything from property to business,’ my sister had helpfully added. I refused to let this disquiet steal the thunder from my headline story – I was self-mapped to 2002. (Self-mapping is apparently the best kind there is).

I shared this news with the rest of my ‘unmapped’ family. ‘Wow’ ‘Yeah’ and ‘Maybe now we can all map ourselves to you?’ If only.

My parents could not be found. We had their old address and constituency but a name search drew a blank. We tried every possible spelling. Naqvi has limited permutations – change Q to a K (Nakvi?), change V to U (Naqui?). Nothing. My partner had tracked his deceased parents to 2002 by fluke – not in the polling part of their old residence but in a random place further away. He suggested widening the search for my parents. Declaring wisely that this system had only madness and no method, he reeled off phrases from middle school English grammar – nose to the grindstone, needle in haystack, luck of the draw. His idiomatic pronouncements meant scanning PDFs of 145 electoral rolls in their constituency in 2002. We used........

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