Subir Roy: Shifting out is hard to do

OFFBEAT

There is only one point in favour of changing house. It helps you get rid of the junk you have accumulated but cannot normally bear to throw away. For the rest, it is a wrenching experience. Your home gets into your subconscious by the time you settle down, and relocating things in your subconscious is not easy.

Which is why I always admired Jayanti. She's been changing houses virtually every other year for god knows how long. We met when she moved in to the top floor of the house in Delhi's Nizamuddin where we ourselves had just moved in. But before I knew it, one fine morning she was up and gone, on to a better job and a better flat. On my last visit to Delhi, I had to catch up with her at, it must be obvious, Dwarka.

I hung on to our Nizamuddin flat for almost 10 years, punctuated by periodic tussles during lease renegotiation with my classical Delhi landlord over his notion of fair rent. Then when we finally left, driven by our need to move into our own place acquired courtesy HDFC at the then prevailing exorbitant housing loan interest rates, my landlord didn't know how to react. Despite being as tight-fisted as only a Delhi landlord can be, he and his family threw us a lavish farewell dinner. My mind told me he was counting the thousands more he would make from a new tenant, but my heart told me he and his family had become genuinely fond of us.

If things had gone according to plan we would have remained at Gurgaon's National Media Centre where we had moved till it was time for me to move out altogether. But that was not to be. Bangalore beckoned and I did a really fast one by dashing off early to join work, leaving it to my wife to deal with the packers and make sure our dog travelled well in the hold of the pressurised Indian Airlines jet.

In Bangalore, we settled down faster than most newcomers do, not the least because we quite fortuitously picked the neighbourhood Indiranagar, which was just like Delhi's Nizamuddin "" quite near to the city centre but still peacefully residential and social status-wise bang in the middle of the middle class. I began to think I had a genius for finding cosy corners where I could keep seeing the grass grow in our miniature front lawn until, here I was, facing the horror of having to get to know another landlord and another street well enough so as to be able to get home in whatever be the state of inebriation.

You cannot live in a rented house for ever and over three years is not like yesterday, a neighbour said. It is so disorientating, I replied weakly, not certain he was familiar with the term. My daughter, whose vocabulary is lately getting to be better than mine (her spelling always was) interjected: big deal, you are only changing house; it is not as if Mama is leaving you. All I could do was to ask her not to be frivolous. Couples these days separate by the million. Getting used to another living room was another matter.

When I have come back to our old Kolkata home after long periods, I have been sorry about the state of the house which is far older than I am, but the sheer pleasure of knowing virtually every inch of the sidewalk nearby and being able to negotiate the familiar stairs even blindfolded is unequalled. But considering its age, it is bound to be gone soon, most likely under the blows of a builder's demolition squad. There is no Shangri-La, rented or otherwise.

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