Nomad

Last week, during an email conversation, S said I live like a nomad. A vagabond. She has other reasons for saying so, but even in the physical sense, she’s absolutely right.

For here I am, and I’ve moved… again. For the sixth time in my 10 years in this city. From the rentals first at Graydon Hall (two years) and then at Godstone Road (one year), to the condo at Parkway Forest (four years), sold that, went back into a rental literally across the road at Parkway Forest (six months), returned to another rental at Graydon Hall (two and a half years), and now the tiny condo townhouse up at Leslie and Finch, which I rented at the beginning of this month.

Seems like that’s all I’ve done all my life… moving. From one city or town to another. Or one accommodation to another.

Born in Shillong, taken to Hyderabad and Mysore as a child for a couple of years. Brought back to Shillong. Stayed for six years. Moved to Calcutta. Lived there for a couple of years. Back to Shillong. Stayed three years. Moved down to Guawhati for a year and a half. Lived in a student hostel to start with. Then the Assam student agitation of 1978-79 brought classes to a grinding halt. The student hostel shut down, so I went to live with my Grandmom.

In 1979, moved to Bombay. Lived in two different student hostels over the five years of schooling there.

And then just as I was finishing school in 1984, I started a ridiculous four-year downspiral of moving. From student hostel, to shared paying guest, to single paying guest, to a room in my cousin’s condo, back to a shared student rooming house, an illegal paying guest at Navy Nagar (which smelt funny, but the landlady gave me a cup of tea and a banana each morning, even though it was not part of the deal), another illegal paying guest up north in Ville Parle (which got broken into, and my guitar and coffee machine were stolen, among other things), to a condo in south Bombay that I house-sat for a year, shared a room with a colleague at the company guest house, and so on and so forth… I moved 11 times in four years!

At the end of it, all I had fit into one yellow duffel bag. My only other possession in the whole wide world was my little red motorcycle. That was it.

There were a couple of nights when I couldn’t coordinate move in and move out dates. And, as a result, had no place to sleep. One of those nights were spent on the local train. Around midnight I bought a ticket at Churchgate for Borivili. Got on and fell asleep holding on to my duffel bag. There were other people, but not many. When the train reached Borivili, a cop came around and woke up those of us who had fallen asleep by running his nightstick up and down the metal guard rails on the windows. So I got off and as soon as he had moved on, got into the next bogey and promptly went back to sleep as the train sped back to Churchgate, a run of about 45-50 minutes. At Churchgate, same cop-nightstick-change bogey routine. And back and forth all night between the two stations. In the morning, the security guy at the student hostel where I lived earlier near Churchgate station was nice enough to let me in so I could have a shower and change into fresh(er) clothes and go to work.

And then there was the night, again with no place to sleep, I fell asleep on a bench on Marine Drive while trying to keep a wary eye on a monstrous balding bandicoot that was beginning to show unhealthy interest in my lower extremities. The cops came by at about two in the morning to shoo me off. I stumbled off and waited for them to drive away in their Jeep, went to another bench and went back to sleep. They didn’t come back to bother me. Neither did the bandicoot. At sunrise, I watched the joggers and then went and rousted up my security guy pal at the student hostel, who let me in again for a bath and breakfast.

(And yes, I was working all the time. I made decent money as a copy editor with Business India magazine. But without a passport or some sort of travel document, no hotel in south Bombay would give you a room in the middle of the night. Atleast not in those days. And in any case, they were too expensive.)

And yeah, there were also nights spent in the office... on two desks pulled together, with a bunch of old issues of the magazine substituting for a pillow. Or, if I was lucky, on the couch in the editor's office.

By the end of 1987, things were a little steadier. I was sharing a room with my close pal C at Kemp’s Corner. Around that time, my family put up the dough and I bought a tiny 450 sq ft condo in Lokhandwala complex in the northern end of the city. Moved in there in March 1988 just before I got married. For the first time ever, I set up house. It felt great. But by 1990, for reasons I can't even remember now, we decided to sell and move to Four Bungalows, about 4 or 5 km away.

In 1992, just after our first son was born, I switched jobs. The new company tacked a generous house rent allowance on to my salary that allowed us to rent a beautiful sprawling old apartment at Juhu. A huge lifestyle change.

It felt like we had arrived. Suddenly, we were part of the Juhu set.

But two years later, bringing to an end my longest stint ever in one city—17 years—we threw it all away and moved from Bombay to Toronto.

Much has happened since, not counting the six moves. But the cycle goes on. Moving. Moving on. Gathering no moss.