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.
