To be born in a small town in Bihar is to know that your birthplace is but a launching pad, that your success will be measured by how far from the homeland you can “establish” yourself. Every town has an entire industry to polish its products for the outside world — English coaching classes, UPSC coaching classes, physics, chemistry, maths coaching, IIT coaching, and bank-exam coaching.
From the day you go to school, you know you have climbed the first rung on the ladder that will take you to a metro, to America, to boardrooms and babudoms. Nostalgia comes pre-baked into all your experiences; you know you will leave behind these lanes, the friendly grocery-store uncles, the sari shops where the kids are given cold drinks and balloons so their mums can browse in peace.
And yet, you love.
You love the town you are already slightly ashamed of, you love the school that is teaching you to leave without looking back, you love the streets where everyone knows your parents.
I grew up twice removed from my immediate surroundings. My dad, from a village in Bihar, worked in Jamshedpur (it was yet to become part of Jharkhand). Jamshedpur is unlike the rest of Bihar; it is the original brave new world in that part of the world, an industrial town where the promise of jobs and the largesse of the Tatas attracted talent from across the country in the early 20th century. Growing up, I knew my city of beautiful parks and clubs and swimming pools, where bright sons lived with their nuclear families, leaving the larger messier khaandan behind, was unlike Muzaffarpur or Bhagalpur or Patna with their inheritances of loss.
But even within Jamshedpur, I lived inside the National Institute of Technology (NIT) campus, cocooned off from the rest of the city. This was a vast, sarkari spread of creaky quarters but huge gardens, hordes of old Sal and jackfruit trees that were rarely pruned, of neighbours living in the exact same houses, bands of people earning the exact same salary.
Also shared was the certainty of eventual exile. We were all raring to go, to make our parents proud, to claim our piece of the India Shining story, to return for festivals laden with gifts and the glitter of having made it. The few campus kids still in residence, who hadn’t done well and were now dependent on their dad’s network for a job, invoked both horror and pity.
Home, thus, was this entire campus, made more comfortable for me because my parents were social, popular people. Childhood was cycling with my best friend till dark, gossiping on her verandah or mine, picnics in the many green empty spots inside the campus, kindly neighbours who treated you like family, the confidence of knowing that you were your father’s daughter in a world that liked both you and him.
Also embedded in every memory are the trees and flowers of the campus. The red silk cotton that bloomed when I was studying for my final exams, the sal seeds that flew down dancing around Durga Puja, the brown leaves that ushered in autumn, the amaltas that softened blazing summer afternoons, the pink trumpet that added colour to the greys of January. The fragrance of wet earth and mint leaves as rain splashed in the garden, the sweet ripe smell of jackfruits and mangoes in the summer. The parrots that ate all our custard apples, the greater coucal with piercing red eyes that stalked the backyard, the sparrows that gathered as our househelp didi chopped vegetables on the kitchen doorstep leading into the backyard.
By the time I was a teenager, impatience crept in. The kindly neighbours could be nosy. The caste and privilege architecture that underpinned our comfort had become obvious to me but not to everyone, which dented the cosy homogeneity. But the trees and the flowers were comforting as ever.
In my rebel phase, after fights with my parents, I went and sobbed to the trees. With the full moon blazing onto the terrace as witness, I swore I would leave and never come back and make everyone sorry. When romantic songs suddenly started making sense, I was quite sure the raat ki raani on my balcony understood and approved, spreading her fragrance as I sang.
When the leave-taking did happen, I carried the NIT campus as a constant within me. Once or twice a year, I would return from all the triumphs and bruises of the big city (Kolkata, then Chennai, then Mumbai, now Delhi), and find a ready welcome in my beautiful campus’s arms. It was my sheet anchor, never-changing, ever-loving, fragrant with its blossoms and my memories.
Of course, I knew Daddy would retire one day. But I never thought of it, just like you never think of your parents growing old.
Now, that great disruption has come to pass. Dad has retired, my parents have packed up 40 years’ worth of life and moved into a flat outside the campus. And I, I no longer know where my anchor is.
To be a Bihari child is to know you will leave your roots behind. But what do you do when your roots are not open to be revisited? Some other family lives in my childhood bedroom now, some other child probably talks to the trees my mum and I tended to. If the witness to your childhood disappears, does the childhood survive? My best friend’s parents are planning to leave Jamshedpur once her dad retires. She and I will no longer have a shared home we come back to. No one will remember that version of me, which still powers and comforts and consoles the present me.
To be the ambitious immigrant child of an ambitious immigrant father is to lose your home twice over. But it is also to carry the strength of generations within you. To have resilience flow in your blood like the Ganga flows through Bihar. It is to suddenly see flashes of a gorgeous, showy, orange-blue-purple sunset over flat grounds as you stare at the high-rise opposite your flat.
It is to learn that home is within you, in your memories, in the secret sources of your strength, in the love you’ve given and received. It is to know that people and places can belong to you, even if you never belong to them.
yashee.s@indianexpress.com
