Subir Roy: May you shift endlessly

OFFBEAT

To all the choicest curses that you can hurl at anyone, without crossing the boundaries of polite language, I have discovered you can add one more: May you shift house every year. This will not make you fall foul of the law of libel by a long chalk, but your enemy will surely rue the day he short-changed you.

I effectively lived at one Kolkata address for the first four decades of my life. The prime advantage of it was that I could cover the last bit of sidewalk to it blindfolded. Then in Delhi we stayed put up at one address for nine years. The landlord, who was as stingy as Delhi landlord can be, so came to adore us that he hosted an unbelievably lavish farewell dinner when we left for our own home in Gurgaon. There we luxuriated for six years, until Bangalore beckoned.

In Bangalore I thought I was keeping up my record by getting to know the sidewalks of our first address as well as to take care of the inebriation that the city is famous for, until there I was, packing and shifting in under four years. And sorrow of sorrows, here I am, again trying to find out in under one year where the local presswalla sits or stands with his heavy iron smoothening out the wrinkles that crease our lives.

I have nothing against shifting house but I resent my wife calling my fond collection of valueless stuff "junk which we will luckily leave behind". If there had to be a price tag to everything valuable then that would surely be the end of collecting memorabilia from the most mundane of things primarily because each one of them reminds you of something. Just as vegetation luxuriates almost by the hour in the equatorial jungles, junk, as all discerning collectors of it know, grows and what is even more serious, grows on you.

Shifting is painful first because you have to cut your roots and leave. It becomes doubly so because you have to simultaneously down roots in a sterile, faceless new address which will acquire an identity only over time. What greets you at the new address is as antiseptic as the freshly painted walls, when what you had got used to in the old place was every room having its own odour. Gone are all traces of the unwashed sports shoes of our son or of the particular perfume that our daughter has got used to as she has grown up.

The additional crisis that we have had to overcome this time is the colour of the walls at our new apartment. Somehow we have always had them off white and our ever expanding collection of framed prints, our children's dabbling with colours and the few originals have happily sat against that neutral background. But this time we find that the hall has been distempered a shade of pearl grey which looks rather nice on its own but does no good to our hotchpotch collection.

You can't ask the landlord to repaint what he has just had painted well meaningfully at some additional cost. Neither can you load the walls of the smaller rooms which are plain off white with what you have hitherto proudly displayed in your main hall. What do we do, asked the wife, at a loss for a solution. Let's go back, I said with all the irrational stubbornness I could command.

sub@business-standard.com