Home

I was listening to Iqbal Bano the other day, and these lines whirled around my head for a long long time. “Har ek ajnabee se poochhein, jo pataa tha apne ghar ka…”

This is a not a song about being homeless. This is a song about the pain of having a home and then being forced to abandon it. I find the feeling familiar. I have felt this kind of pain, this kind of desperation, this kind of futile longing for a home. My mind has looked for a home and my body has begged for familiarity. Each day I push the feeble old gate to enter my house, I feel impatient. I have to leave this house too. It is not my house, but it has been good to me.

I moved into my locality about three years ago. Before that, I had no clue that such a place existed. I was not well acquainted with the entire area, like I am now. In fact, any place beyond Jadavpur seemed very unfamiliar and strange because I lived in Ballygunge Place. After my parents called it quits, I had to go and spend half the week with my mother at Gangulibagan. Interestingly, this was also a place beyond Jadavpur, but I never knew much about this place because it was a housing complex consisting of many government quarters. Every Monday I entered this complex in a car and every Friday I left in a similar manner. The school bus took me to school from the gate of the complex and dropped me exactly there. I had no chance whatsoever of actually knowing the place.

In my childhood, neither Ballygunge place nor Gangulibagan told me what it was like to have a home. None of them were my para. I never belonged to either place. And there was a strange sense of displacement working within me. I was like a refugee who belonged nowhere. This did not make me wallow in sorrow, no. I was, as a child, somewhat unable to register things. However, I distinctly remember that I had no sense of attachment to any of these places. The houses were just houses. Broken families are a queer thing. Families, in fact, are queer systems. They work fine like machines but when some dismantle, there are certain difficulties which cannot be explained. This sense of displacement might be something which might have nothing to do with family, but I think that somewhere down the line it does have a connection. On one hand, there was the posh neighbourhood of Ballygunge Place. Where the bathrooms have geysers and the living rooms have great mahogany chairs. The house was a beautiful one, yes. Beautiful, and imposing. With old furniture and many old instruments, there was a charm about it. The charm of a lost world of immense grandeur, perhaps. But then, I never thought that it was my house because I had to move away from it every Friday. 

A stark contrast was Gangulibagan. This housing complex was built up initially for refugees who made an appeal to the government for a place to stay. There was a series of four storied buildings where each floor had eight flats. There were Z shaped blocks and L shaped blocks. The folks who had some influence in the party office got hold of two flats in a floor and lived comfortably, paying a rent of fifteen rupees a month to the RR&R Department.

Gangulibagan is turning out to be a great digression, albeit an interesting one. I fear that the detachment from my maternal and paternal neighbourhoods that I was brooding about just a paragraph ago is beginning to break down.

Truly, it turns out that I am still enamoured of Ballygunge Place and intrigued by Gangulibagan. Still, I cannot call them home.

This shuttling between Ballygunge Place and Gangulibagan continued for a freaky seven years. There were many incidents in between, but let me not digress again into them. After these seven years this little incident occured. Some say it was a grand bit of bravado while some cannot get over my stupidity. I cannot decide what it was. Maybe it was a fit of rage, maybe I had seen far too many Hindi movies in my childhood. Whatever it was is not of the slightest importance.

What matters is that this incident resulted in my final exit from Ballygunge Place. I could finally settle down. However, Gangulibagan was not destined to be my place either. The government suddenly decided that the quarters were ‘bipodjonok’. Which means, yes, dangerous. Sounds quite funny in retrospect but at that time, for six hundred refugee families it did not sound remotely funny. There were heart attacks and suicides. The bokultala where a few old men gathered every evening soon withered into wilderness. People were moving out. Although many families had initially decided that they would stand against this decision of the government because it was nothing but a political ploy, each letter from the RR&R Department meant that more and more doors were being sealed. The threat of your family being bulldozed is something which I have seen. It is terrifying. It is terrifying to think that your kid will not be able to go to school the next day, terrifying to try and find a rented house where you will be able to stay and sustain your family. Some took the easy way out. They died. Leaving their families behind. Some went out every evening to look for a rented house. All, however, left. Leaving behind all the Z shaped and the L shaped blocks, the maath, the bokultala… everything.         

My mother was also looking for a place to stay at this point. My grandfather tried his best to persuade a few residents of my block to stand up against this. However, although most of them were willing enough, they were not ready to risk it all. What if the government contractors actually came and demolished the buildings. This impending disaster was too much to bear for a group of seventy year olds who wanted nothing but a bit of peace. One of my mother’s friends assured her that he would find a place for us to stay. Many frantic rickshaw rides later, we finally found a house. This house, the one in which I live right now, is situated in Sree Colony. I did not like the para at first. In fact, I called it B Sree Colony. Bad pun, I know.

Three years have passed since the day I moved into this house. Somehow, things have changed a lot. With one phone call, my neighbourhood chicken seller drops in one kilogram of chicken at my door. Same with milk, eggs, potatoes and everything under the sun. This transition took some time, but it has been one of the most beautiful experiences of my little life. What makes my locality special is the warmth that is within each and every individual here. I feel respected and loved. I believe that you can understand the true character of a locality by looking at the strays that live there. Come to my para, and you will see Dhenu, who is a healthy and completely crazy dog. His friend is Khnora, a dog who lost his forelegs in an accident when he was six months old. Look into his eyes and you will know how happy he is. And how loved. There are many cats that laze around all day and scream their little lungs out if their boiled fish arrives fifteen minutes after the scheduled time. So spoilt rotten they are. 

But I have to move away from this place as well. Circumstances are wicked. They tweak things in such a manner that you are left with no alternative but to do what you fear most. I have feared many things. I fear displacement, still. The day I stop fearing this feeling, this nightmare will stop. And I will have a home.        

"dil hii to hai na sang-o-Khisht dard se bhar na aaye kyuu.N

roye.nge ham hazaar baar ko_ii hame.n sataaye kyuu.N

dair nahii.n haram nahii.n dar nahii.n aastaa.N nahii.n

baiThe hai.n rah_guzar pe ham Gair hame.n uThaaye kyuu.N

qaid-e-hayaat-o-band-e-Gam asl me.n dono ek hai.n

maut se pahale aadamii Gam se nijaat paaye kyuu.N

'Ghalib'-e-Khastaa ke baGair kaun se kaam band hai.n

royiye zaar zaar kyaa kiijiye haaye haaye kyuu.N"

Everyone must listen to Begum Akhtar sing this one. Brilliant is an understatement.  

It is almost three o' clock at night and there is definitely something creepy in the air. I am writing because I am very scared. I was doing my content writing work and talking to folks online. After a while, most of them went away. I finished my work about half an hour ago. After sending it over, I had to go the bathroom. My room opens into my grandmother's space. At one thirty in the morning, she looks hardly alive. Her frail body looks pale in the dim light. I have to walk a bit in order to reach the bathroom. the bathroom door stares straight at the gate. Well, it is not much of a gate. And the lock we put on it is a joke of a lock because I can snap it in two any moment. Its weak. And it serves no purpose. This gate is directly opposite the door to my neighbour's home. Its real close. The gate and the door must be at a distance of about one and a half metres. I do not know why I am describing all this but right now I just need to keep on writing. The door opens into a two room flat which houses a ninety something retired physics professor, his son in law, a sixty something man who is immensely curious about everything, his wife and their pet, a spitz, who, unlike those of the same breed, is quite well behaved.   

They are quite a strange family, as all families are. Man and wife have no child. As far as the story goes, each have accused the other of infertility. But I think that the spitz does a good job. She is quite a nice child.    

The woman, as far as I know, had a tough life. She studied for sometime, but something snapped somewhere after she married this man. She learnt music. Purabi Dutta. Good old days, I guess. It is slightly eerie how the stories of many women are the same. How many of them have sacrificed all that they love and all that they like. But then, I know not whether 'sacrifice' is a right word. Just because I have heard it so often does not mean I can use it often. I digress. 

I had no time to know them well. The woman, she behaved very badly with us, for no reason whatsoever. As I said earlier, something had snapped somewhere. An incident about a month or two ago proves just that. A student of mine was going back home after class. Since we live in the second floor, my students get out of my room, switch on the lights and go home. That day, instead of switching on our lights, he switched on the other lights, unfortunately their's. He didn't even understand that it was a problem, because he had done it many times. I couldn't believe it was a problem either, but she actually put out the lights midway. The boy fell down and hurt himself badly. The stairs are dangerous and rough and almost unnavigable. I was startled when I heard the scream and went out. I saw her standing by the door. She looked mortified. And yet she was smiling. My student had hurt himself badly. I couldn't say a word. I dropped him home. Often, we are unaware of the things we do. Often, we have no reason for violence. Often, we want to hurt others just because we are hurt deep inside. There is a part within us which relishes inflicting physical violence. We keep it tucked away but it exists within all of us, I guess. 

I do not know much about her. And after this incident, I felt nothing but a twisted sense of pity and fear. 

She died last week. She suffered a lot. Her husband refused to take her to a doctor. She cried at times. She also came to see my mother when she had fever. She became almost blind. She screamed and said that her insides hurt. And still no doctor. My mother intervened. So did other neighbours. The man just said that she pretended to be ill. And it was all nyakami.

When she was dying, the man went to fetch a doctor. Her old father did not even understand that she passed away. Lying there on the bed beside his. Groaning and crying and looking desperate. Even after an hour, when indifferent relatives started pouring in and smearing vermillion on her forehead, he kept asking us, "Aar nei na?"

With age, I believe, the ability to register emotions fades. The dimming eyesight, perhaps, has something to do with it. He did not cry. He was well acquainted with death. His wife, his son, his parents. And now, his daughter. He understood, perhaps, that death is just about not being. 

But I feel a strange kind of fear. I am not afraid of death. I am not afraid of the dead. Maybe I am afraid of life. I do not know what death will be like. I do not want it to be like this woman's. I will never miss her, because I did not know her. However, I feel happy for her because death is often better than a horrid life. 

It is late at night. I hear a voice. "Aar nei na?"  

PS: Forgive the writing. Fear does not bring out the best in me. 

moo. 

Yes, moo. Any problem?

*Funny Feeling*

Tera husn dast-e-isaa / Teri aag rooh-e-mariam