The house i presently occupy is my tenth place of residence. In the four plus decades of my existance , variety has been the house of life for me.
My parents tell me that when I was born, they shifted from the staff quarters of RBI to the officers one. A9 , in RBI quarters , Santa Cruz was my home for the first decade of my life.
I remember vividly the huge housing colony, the ground floor home, the wooden slide in a sand pit and the wonderful ground that the colony had. It was a typical colony that celebrated festivals together. There were movies screened every Diwali and Christmas. Every building had four floors and every house was accessible. There was one telephone in someone's home. The entire colony would get their calls at that home. A staff bus would take all employees to office daily morning and bring them back home every evening. This was the place where I learnt how to cycle, fell down on the water tank and broke my teeth( the repercussion of which I am facing till date...thats a wholly different story!)
Every evening all children would come down to play. We would play till late evening. Moms would come out to chit chat while we continued with games under the srreet lights. I would alide down banisters all the way down from the fourth floor.
One of the strongest memories of this house was me getting locked up in one of the bedrooms. Appa had to climb in through the ventilator and rescue me. Till date he hates closed doors!
From here in 1982 we shifted to Vile Parle. Many members of the society were the same as the new one Snehadhara was a residential self owned colony of RBI employees. Yet the feeling was not the same. Snehadhara was scattered, the dynamics were different and people shifted in at different times. The magic of the staff quarters was never replicated. They tried to host programs and recreate Santacruz in Snehadhara , but the leaky buildings and the varied infrastructural issues caused more turmoil in Ashrudhara as people began calling it.
Wadala tatha shifted in with us. He was old and sick and in pain. He spent his last days in this house. Soon after his death we moved cities and went to Trivandrum.
Trivandrum was a wholly different experience. On one side there was the excitement of getting to live in a bungalow. The only other bungalow in my life was that of my Poona tatha and paati where I spent my vacations.
We shifted into this double storied house which had a huge terrace in a quaint place called Kuruvankonam. The house was located on a slope. It had a cocoa bean tree and a champakai tree. The champakai fruit became one of my favourites ever since I tasted them there. A few months into our stay in Kuruvankonam, I was bedridden with a bout of chicken pox. The reason I fell sick was the adventure Pushpa and me decided to emabark on , while comjneg back from school one day. We saw a lovely green patch of grass and were lured towards it. We stepped into what unfortunately was a deceptive puddle of slush. Both of us developed rashes and fever and mine developed into the pox. Amma decided we need to move near the school, so that such adventures or rather misadventures could be avoided!
We moved into Smrithi at Pattom, which later on became so popular at the Post office that just Smrithi, Pattom Trivandrum was enough for any letter to reach us. This was thanks to the daily correspondence that Appa kept with his circle. Smrithi housed us for the rest of our tenure in Trivandrum. It was a small little bungalow, with a lovely garden , that was developed by Amma. We spent a happy time , watching Malayalam movies at theatres near by, going to the zoo regularly and the rose show at Kowdiar palace. School was a stone's throw away and we walked everywhere.
In 1991, I shifted to Mysore and in 92 the rest of the family came back to Mumbai. Appa had got himself transfered back to Mumbai. The higher officals in RBI had forgotted he needed to return and he had to jolt them back to awareness.
In May 1992, we flew back from Trivandrum to Bombay for good. Snehadhara became my vacation home for three years.
Ganga hostel at the Regional College of Education was my home for four years. Room no:160 in the first year and 64 in the next three have so many memories in them. Years later when I revisted the hostel and entered Room no: 64, I burst out into tears scaring the present inmates of the room. I would travel from Mysore to Bombay twice a year. Bombay trips meant shopping, replenishing stocks of achar, thogayal podi and other snacks that would last atleast a month ahead. I used to shop not just for myself, but also for friends who wanted clothes from Bombay.
In 1995, I came back to Snehadhara. But I was not destined to live in that house for long Groom hunting had begun and in 1996, post marriage I shifted into tiny Kulsum Mahal. I have thanked every single day in Ganga Hostel which helped me adjust in the small house with my husband and his family. Seven years and two babies later , we bought our first house in Kalina.
Four years later, when the children were growing up,Gopal and me decided to buy the present house that I reside in. Since 2010 I have been in the present house ! But whether this will be my last house is destiny's call. After all I am the one with erratachuzhi on my head...the one who can never be in the same place.
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