On not having a "Native" - The difficulty of explaining a nomadic life

 

Most people in India – and maybe around the globe – seem to spend most of their lives, at least the growing up years, in one place. Any moving they do, they seem to do for higher education, or work, and they all seem to have a “native” a village or city where they are ancestrally rooted, have generational history, and some kind of HOME which has been theirs for a generation – usually multiple generations.

It is therefore expectedly difficult to explain to people I meet, online and off, that I have no such thing. No roots, no “hometown”, no single alma mater, and I have lived in 10 cities so far, and hope to live in many more before I die. How can that be? They wonder. Surely one HAS to have some kind of a native place, some ancestral home, some place they grew up! Well, I don’t. and here’s why.

The story starts with my grandparents, both sets, who moved from what was the newly minted East Pakistan, to settle in what was left of India, around the time of the partition. One set ended up in Agartala, Tripura, and the other in Kandi, Murshidabad, West Bengal. Displaced and dislocated as they were, further generations only made the story more complicated.

 My father left Agartala to go do his engineering – in Calcutta – at the tender age of just about 15, while my mother migrated to the same city – and college, coincidentally, for her Master’s degree. Childhood friends who had lost touch, they reconnected, and ended up married by the time dad landed his first job with DRDO, and thence began yet another chapter of the nomadic saga.

The new Bengali couple lived for a short while in Bangalore, before moving to Dehradun, where they had yours truly. So, essentially, my part of the saga begins in Dehradun, then UP, where as a child of Bengali parents who were temporary residents themselves, I didn’t really BELONG. It could have become my hometown, had I grown up there and lived there for the rest of my life, or my parents had “settled” there, but neither of those things happened.

 

Kanpur was a short stint, for 2 years, in the middle of the Dehradun stretch, when dad went to IIT Kanpur, with mom and a 2-year-old me in tow, to do his MTech. Back in Doon after, life seemed settled, with dad in his government job, and us immersed in the small-town life and social milieu. Much as I loved that small town life, and neither knew nor wanted anything else, much as I would have blissfully remained under exposed and over protected for life, however, it wasn’t to be.

Before I was fully 12 years old, my crazy parents decided to leave the cushy “government job, quarters, and colony” life for the stormier seas of the private sector, in far off and totally unknown Madras! So, off we went, claiming another city as home, and adding another to the list of “not hometown”. Five and a half years in Madras added a fourth language to my arsenal, another couple of schools to my already longish list, and sharpened my people skills. It exposed me to a much larger canvas of life, unfamiliar cultures, and strange new foods (which I completely fell in love with). Being the outsider, and the new student in class, also taught me the skills to make friends quickly and adjust and become a part of the group. By the time I had finished my 11^th standard in school, though, we were already on our way to a new place.

Bombay was a revelation! Huge, fast, frenetic, fancy, so very different from the calmer and more laid back Madras. 12^th standard was Junior College, friends were cosmopolitan and multicultural, and life was so much more grown up and non-regimented. Private sector employment for dad also meant that we had considerably more money than before, not to mention endless access to new opportunities, experiences, sounds, tastes, and sights. If the two rounds of post Bari Masjid Demolition riots had not put a huge damper on my time living there, it would have been a pretty golden time. Age had something to do with that, of course, late teenage in a place like Bombay is bound to be something else, especially for someone from an essentially small-town background. But access, and progressive parents added to the overall experience and blossoming.

And yet, I wasn’t fated to live there long either. Come second year of graduation, my own crazy genes kicked in, and I decided to go all the way to small town West Bengal, in order to drop my BSc, and get myself an Honours degree in literature (in 2 years, where the course is actually 3 years of work).  Berhampore, Murshidabad was a huge culture shock! It was the diametric opposite of everything Bombay was! It was tiny, where Bombay was huge, repressed and orthodox and narrow where Bombay was free and open and progressive, nosy and full of interference and restrictions where Bombay was “don’t care”. My two years in Berhampore were hellish in so many ways, that I can write a series of horror novels about them, especially hostel days, and many a treatise on the psychology of the tiny town dweller, though it did give me 2 of the longest lasting friends of my life.

By the time I made my way back “home”(which for our family has always been defined by people and is never a place) after graduation, my parents had been living in Pune for over a year. So, Pune became the next port in my odyssey. And it was a long lasting one. From starting my Master’s to meeting my own childhood friend again, to marrying my still-best friend, to two years after the birth of my child, Pune was probably the place I loved most to live in.

 Even during this time, the parents moved 3 or 4 times, to Hyderabad for a year, and back to Mumbai for a bit, and even to California for a couple of years, before they returned to Pune again. And bhai left Pune for good, just after I married, to move to the US, eventually settling and becoming a citizen. So, Pune was significant, for the whole clan, and well loved by all of us, but not permanent. Wonderfully cosmopolitan without being as fast or frenetic as Bombay, safe and fun, Pune truly was the best combination of small town vibes and big city conveniences. But that’s not hometown either, for me OR my parents.

From about the third month of my pregnancy to just before the monkey turned one, we spent a year and a half in Nagpur. This was a “meh” time overall, what with morning sickness and physical discomfort on the one hand and the basically-nothing-to-do-here small town quality of life on the other. The bits I did love, were the facts that we were living in a “house” after something like 20 years, the garden and the fruit trees, and the quite mumma-baby evening walks in the sleepy mohalla.

 

When baby was 2, we moved again, this time to Kolkata. So far, this has been the last move, but I am sure there will be more. Monkey is already on her own solo journey, beginning at age 17, with moving to go to college. For us too, this is unlikely to be the last place. For one, I am not all that fond of the place, especially by comparison to some of the other places I have lived. For another, being the parents of a single child, and not having any ROOTS to hold us back and tie us to this place, the likelihood of moving to whichever part of the world monkey is in is pretty high.

The rest of the world beckons, new horizons are waiting, , and I, for one, am more than ready!