“So, what is your
hometown?” I’m asked every now and then, and I always end up tongue-tied. How
do I do justice to the question without making the response sound like a
tedious monologue, where I try to package thirty-five years of family history into
a thirty-five second capsule? The fact is, I don’t have a hometown in the
conventional sense. The places I’ve spent fractions of my growing years at look
nothing more than brief stopovers in a long backpacking trip. To reproduce what
I usually present to an inquisitive stranger, my roots lie in Uttar Pradesh but
my father moved out soon after finishing college to work for different paper
manufacturing units across the country and my sisters and I, thus, grew up in
four different states. “Which all?” a few choose to prod further and I excitedly
enumerate ‘Odisha’, ‘Punjab’, ‘Madhya Pradesh’ and ‘Delhi’. “And, you see,
that’s why I don’t really have a hometown,” I add, in an attempt to provide a
finishing touch.
Many people find the
description exciting and remark that it’s wonderful to have grown up with such
a diverse cultural exposure. I usually agree, feeling smug. And, then, I
stumble across someone who pledges an undying love for his city of origin, calling
it his home – the place where he spent his childhood, journeyed into
adolescence, learned to be an adult – and leaves me to wonder if I’d have
preferred having a similar story to narrate?
I have known many homes
and I belong to all of them. They have all shaped me into who I am. Of all
these places, Delhi is where I’ve felt the happiest. While I hadn’t shifted
base here till about eight months back, I’d frequented it as a child, year
after year, with my parents, as this was where my father’s siblings had finally
settled. To my puerile eyes, Delhi looked immense and enigmatic. The broad
roads, the incessant flow of traffic, the well-dressed, confident people and
their busy, exciting life! I wanted to
partake of all of it. I wanted to be one with this vibrant, chaotic city! But I
had to wait for years before this could happen.
I don’t claim to know my
place of birth – my ancestral town – inside out. Many miles off the Grand Trunk
Road, ensconced between the better known Agra and Aligarh, lies a town called
Kasganj. Full of narrow lanes and cul-de-sacs criss-crossing into each other,
Kasganj is a crowded, lively place, famous for its sweetmeats. This is where my
great grandfather built a house about a hundred years ago. My grandfather was
an adopted child. He was married early and was barely thirty-six when he
expired, leaving behind a widowed wife and six children. He was forever on the
move, struggling to find a stable livelihood, and died poor and lonely, away
from his family. My father and his siblings grew up away from each other, depending
on my grandmother’s meager income and help from the relatives to complete their
respective education.
The family kept
returning to Kasganj, their home but nobody could stay put. At twenty-one, my father moved to Odisha to work for a paper
manufacturing unit there. This was in the late seventies. It used to take forty
hours to travel from Kasganj to Koraput, where the factory was. The mainstream
had so little exposure to Odisha that it appeared to be almost a different
country. The people spoke in an inscrutable language, the job looked cheerless
and the superior quite hostile. The newness of it all intimidated my father so
much that he rushed back within the first ten days. Once back home, he was
chastised by my grandmother for this frivolous act and asked to return. His worldly
wise uncle advised him not to be wary of the place but embrace it and, with it,
the opportunity to learn and enrich himself and to make friends. He returned to
Odisha, willing to take another shot at it. It worked for him and, thus, began the
journey of finding homes in the most unlikely of places; a journey that shaped
the destinies for all of us.
My parents got married
three years later and my mother, too, went to live in Odisha, facing the same
bafflement as my father. Eventually, she, too, learned to like the place. The
residential colony where the employees of the paper mill lived was a little
town in itself, very cosmopolitan and vibrant. It was very easy to fall in love
with it and its people and that’s where she learned to live away from where you
belong to and yet create a microcosm of your hometown, alive with the rich colors
of one’s ethnicity, within the confines of your house. In the past thirty-two
years, she has changed as many as ten houses, turning them into her home with
the same love and alacrity that she had employed all those years ago, as a twenty-one-year-old
bride.
My parents remind me of
Ashok and Ashima Ganguly, the central characters of Jhumpa Lahiri’s celebrated
novel, ‘The Namesake’ (Houghton Mifflin, 2003). The Ganguly couple, too, moves
from India to the US in search of a better life, bringing with them memories of
the past that have shaped their present, hopeful of using them to create a
beautiful future for themselves and their children. Theirs is an endearing
story of leaving one home in search of another, struggling to hold on to their
roots as they attempt to find a footing in the new land. Their sense of unease
translates into confusion about their origins as it travels down to their
children who have grown up away from India and don’t know what country to call
their home. It is reminiscent of my parents’ journey and the slightly disoriented
opinion that I have about my hometown.
So, the bottom line is
that I don’t have a hometown. Or maybe I have too many of them! I can’t disassociate
myself with any of the places I’ve lived in because doing that will take a
little bit of my existence away from me. I know that I will go on to make many
more homes and continue to delight in the sense of belongingness they will all
exude. I will live many lives and they will all collate to form the story that
is me.
