There Is an Agent for Everything. Find Yours.
The debit card arrived a few weeks after she opened the account, and the name printed on it was not my wife's.
It read Janvi Rumit Kanakia. My name, inserted into the middle of hers, where her own family name should have been.
Janvi had taken the name Janvi Gandhi Kanakia when we married and she became a US citizen, keeping the name she was born with as her middle name. It is the most ordinary arrangement in the world; Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Anushka Sharma Kohli have the same one. But she was opening the salary account her new employer required, and the person across the counter kept returning to one question: what is your husband's name. Her Aadhaar card, sitting right there, said otherwise. I asked why only film stars were allowed to decide what they are called. The woman was unmoved, and the card came as it came.
Janvi has a doctorate and was about to start teaching as an assistant professor. Her salary would be paid into an account that had my name where hers should have been. She said little about it at the time, which is its own kind of comment.
We laughed about it eventually. Then we began the process of having it corrected, which required, naturally, another set of documents.
What the first year is made ofA story like that reads as a complaint about India, and it is easy to file it there.
What it actually illustrates is the thing most returnees underestimate: a life here has to be actively operated, and the manual you arrived with was written for a different country.
This matters more than it sounds, because the decision and the daily life get judged together, and the daily life is louder. You can get the big questions right, the job, the money, the school, the conversations with your parents, and still spend your first year exhausted and quietly furious, wondering whether you made a mistake, when what is happening is that you are running a complicated household with no team and the wrong instincts.
Banking is where I still feel it, nine years in. We have held accounts, deposits, demat holdings and loans with these institutions for years, and it still takes an astonishing amount of time to get anything done. Relationship managers rotate through like musical chairs, so the one person whose whole job is continuity is the thing least likely to continue. Converting our accounts from the non-resident structures we arrived with into ordinary resident ones took months of queues and escalations. And the paperwork never accumulates into anything. Between them, our banks and insurers must hold a small library of our KYC documents, the know your customer file every institution is required to keep. Self-attested copies of Aadhaar cards, PAN cards, passports, OCI cards and utility bills, signed afresh across the front each time. Every new application asks for the whole set again. An electronic version of the same record exists and can be pulled up in seconds. Nobody at the counter can explain why it will not do. Nobody at the counter set the rule.
The status no form has a box forIf you have taken another citizenship, you are a foreign national resident in India. You are not an NRI.
This is the one piece worth knowing before you land, because almost nobody tells you. A Non-Resident Indian is an Indian citizen living abroad, the opposite of your situation on both counts. The distinction is basic, and it defeats a startling number of banks, insurers and investment firms, whose forms offer a menu of statuses with no box shaped like you.
The part to watch is what that gap invites. The correct classification triggers more work for whoever is processing you, foreign tax declarations a domestic file avoids, so the path of least resistance is to quietly tick the wrong box. It happened to us again recently, on an insurance policy for our daughter, where the agent had recorded us as Indian citizens. If you hold US citizenship, you must declare the United States as your country of tax residence on those forms even though you live here, and every financial institution in India is required to collect that declaration. [1] An agent who files you as something you are not has not saved you a form. He has put a false statement in your name, on a document you signed, and it is your signature that carries it.
So read what is being submitted in your name, and ask which status has been recorded. Nobody at these counters is trying to catch you out. They are working through a queue with a form that was never designed for someone in your position, and the person best placed to notice that is you. It is a small habit, it costs nothing but attention, and it will spare you a year of unpicking something later.
What actually solves itHere is what I got wrong, for longer than I would like to admit.
I kept trying to solve these problems the way I would have solved them abroad, treating each one as a process to be understood and then executed correctly by me. Read the rules, follow them, expect the outcome.
I had a law degree and two decades of navigating complicated institutions in another country, and I assumed that would carry me. It did the opposite for a while. Competence of that kind arrives with a certain confidence, and the confidence kept me arguing at counters where arguing has never once worked, then going home angry and mistaking the frustration for effort. It fails slowly and expensively, and hardest on people who have never worked in India as adults.
What works is people. India runs on a vast, informal economy of specialists whose whole livelihood is knowing which counter, which form, which call, and which order to do them in. There is an agent at the transport office who converts foreign licences all day, and people who exist to get documents apostilled across two countries. I have found agents for appliance parts nobody stocks any more. When we once needed a living room turned into a celebration at a few hours’ notice, there was a man for that too, and he arrived with balloons and streamers before the afternoon was out. This is the texture of daily life here rather than a workaround at its edges, and the returnees who do well stop resisting it in month three instead of month thirty.
None of this was new to my family, only to me. My father has spent his working life as an agent himself, representing pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturers from other countries and building their markets here. The same principle runs at every scale in this country, from a decorator with a car full of balloons to a multinational looking for a way in. Somebody who knows the ground stands between you and the thing you are trying to reach.
The higher-value version of the same principle is the small set of professionals holding your actual affairs. An insurance agent who understands what you are rather than what the form expects. A wealth advisor who has met a US citizen resident in India before. A chartered accountant who has filed for somebody in your exact position. A banking relationship manager who stays, and who earns an unreasonable loyalty when you find one. That set is infrastructure, and you assemble it slowly, by asking the people whose judgement you already trust who they use. Give it a year, and ask more often than feels polite. People are generally pleased to be asked, and the good ones get named again and again by people who have no reason to flatter them
The people in your homeThe other half of your team lives closer.
Full-time domestic help is one of the real transformations of moving back, and the arithmetic startles people: a household with proper support here often costs less than childcare alone did where you came from. The best of it comes through references rather than platforms, so in your first weeks, ask everybody.
For most returnees, though, the harder part arrives before any of that. Managing the support is learnable. Making peace with it is another matter. When you have spent twenty years doing your own cooking and driving, the sudden presence of staff, and the class distance underneath it, can sit badly. That discomfort deserves listening to rather than arguing away, because it points at something true. The affordability that puts help within reach rests on an income gap that is nothing to celebrate, and no amount of warmth inside the arrangement makes the arrangement itself fair. The privilege is real, and it is yours.
What you get to decide is who you are inside it. I found early on that I was doing this differently from how I had watched it done growing up, speaking to the people who work in our home the way I would speak to anyone, which unsettled them at first. Our cook has worked for my parents since 2008 and now cooks for both our households. What stays with me is how much heavier the ordinary machinery of life is for her than for us, so we take on the parts where our position costs us little and saves her a great deal: a utility bill that would otherwise mean a morning lost to a queue across town, an interest-free loan for a child's schooling, a word with the school, a fare home to the village. At Diwali there is a month's salary on top of the gifts my mother picks out for each of them herself. It is less generosity than a small correction to an imbalance we did not create and do benefit from.
What comes back is not anything you could ask for. In 2020, when the lockdowns closed the city, we kept paying her although there was no work to do and no way for her to reach us. She began making rotis at home and leaving them in our lobby, since the protocols meant we could not so much as open a door to her. Diya was six weeks old that summer. My mother was recovering from a fractured vertebra, Janvi was newly post-partum, and I was carrying more than I could hold. When Diya was forty-five days old, she quarantined a fortnight in a room in our house and then stayed five months, apart from her husband, her son, her daughter and a small grandchild, so that she could be with our family through it.
For ten years in California, the people who worked in my life were people I paid for a service, and I could not have told you what any of them carried home at night. That was the only register I knew. There is another available here, to anyone willing to meet people in it.
Which is what I most want to say about the operational side of this move. Every problem in this essay was eventually solved by a person, and I found almost all of them by asking somebody else.
There is an agent for everything. Find yours. The people who navigate this well are never the ones who figure it out alone. They are the ones who build the right team.
Where to startThe Six-Month Move Planner is built for the stretch when the decision is behind you and the doing is ahead. It asks seven questions, including where you are moving from, because leaving Dubai and leaving California are different jobs with different paperwork, and lays out a phase-by-phase sequence across the months either side of the landing. It covers closing out the country you are in as well as standing up a life in this one, and it starts with the things that have long, invisible lead times, so they get begun early rather than discovered late. About five minutes.
And if what you are carrying feels less like a sequencing problem and more like a question of whether you can hold all of this at once, that conversation is the work I do. A discovery call is free, and usually the fastest way to find out.
The rest of the territoryThis essay is one argument from a much larger map.
Module 6 of the India Life Blueprint is the operating manual: standing up a home from an empty flat, the utilities and the digital stack and the lead times that catch people out, what domestic help costs by role and city, and how to manage it fairly, including the harder truths about a sector running largely without insurance or job security. It covers the ground this essay could not, from getting things built and repaired without losing your mind, to housing societies and the politics of building life, to the infrastructure realities of a metro that will occasionally switch the water off without warning.
Next week we turn to health, and to the patterns we carry across every border. Until then, a question to carry with you: What are you still trying to do alone?
In honest company,
— Rumit-
FATCA/CRS self-certification requirements under Rules 114F to 114H of the Income Tax Rules. Every Indian financial institution is required to collect a self-declaration of tax residency from every account holder, and US citizens must declare the United States as a country of tax residence irrespective of their residential status in India.