Before Moving to Town

Moving out of your ancestral house when you’ve just started developing consciousness is a huge deal. I did not know what it would be like in the town – it was my version of moving out to the city. Parents decided they did not want a joint family anymore so they would construct a house in the town. Nobody asked my opinion of course; I was merely 11 years old. I remember the day I left home to go live in a very small rented house in the town. I cried. A lot. They said we would be back here every other week. I knew it wasn’t true. And my pre-teen intuition was right. It did not. We visited, sometimes. But it was never the same. My friends from the village looked at me as if I have come from some alien land. I went to the ground to play with them but it wasn’t the same. Both sides tried to pretend it was all okay; it was normal. It wasn’t. I wasn’t one of them anymore. I was someone from “the town”.

We moved a few months after my dad’s younger sister got married. She and I used to sleep in her room, a small, stuffy room with one small window. It was our space, our very personal, comfort space. I used to stay up reading late and she used to scold me for it, every day. I specifically remember reading the Assamese translation of The Diary of Anne Frank with her in that room. After she went away, that room was taken over by my uncle and his newlywed wife. My aunt’s stuff was taken out, so was mine. My 11-year-old mind could not comprehend or tolerate that. I was displaced – I did not like sleeping with my mother in another room. I did not think things could get any worse.

But my world was turned upside down when I left for that 2-roomed rented house. I had to stay with my parents, sleep beside my mother, and did not have friends. I knew nobody around. I did not know what to do on the days I did not have school – whom to play with, what to play in that tiny space. I hated every minute of it. I had lost the comfort of the village home, the huge front-yard, the cozy rooms, my own space. Every moment for the next few months all I wanted was to go back home. I hated that my parents started constructing a new house in the town, I had no interest in going there to watch it being built brick by brick. It took me a good one year or so to get over my homesickness. This very day I had a realization that perhaps, I am still not over that displacement. I just wanted things to go back to as they were – I wanted my house back, I wanted my room back, I wanted my aunt back, I wanted my friends back. Perhaps in some corner of my mind, I still do.

We’ll just skip to three years later. 10^th standard came, after that 12^th. Visits to my house (now, my uncle’s house) waned as the years passed. I started missing the festivals in the village as well. Bihus, Rakhs, Bhaunas, everything. I just realized; it’s been a good 7 years I have not seen a bhauna in my village. This time, when Ishita came to visit, I took her out to see the raas-leela (rakh). And it felt so alien. I had participated in it as a kid. I had danced around the whole night with my friends. We used to practice for a full week before the event in the nearby naam-ghar. I used to be jealous of the person who played Krishna because she would always get preferential treatment compared to us ‘gopis’; and always longed to be her. It’s horrifying how it all sounds like a dream like it took place in another life. It was only when I tried doing a few steps (in some hidden corner of the house) and dressed my brother up that all of it started creeping back – the memories buried so deep it might just as well be a dream. I remember the girls I used to go out to dance with, all of them married at this point. I have not seen them for a good couple of years. I think I am speaking like a 60-year-old, but hear me out. I have shifted so many places and houses, it all feels like a dream now, sitting in what will hopefully be my permanent address for the rest of my life, and remembering this stuff.

It is surreal, how the human mind keeps so many little things buried so deep inside. As I write this, I remember the cobbler’s house in the village. My mother used to make me walk to the end of the village to his house to get my shoes mended. My tiny feet were exhausted after the distance. I absolutely hated it. I still remember his house, the kuccha hut with like two rooms, and the hand pump behind it. It’s foggy and I remember no faces but once I went to a wedding at his place only to come back to my parents having a huge fight at home later.

So what I’m trying to say is, moving out of my house when very young f****d me up big time. To word it better, I wish they had not made me move. Better, I wish I had not repressed those memories this deep down to help myself cope. Or even better, learned to deal with the displacement like a normal person. I wish I had therapy at that point because God knows my pre-adolescent mind needed it. I am still learning to process how to deal with these heavily repressed memories and what to do with them. Hopefully, I’ll figure it out eventually. Or not. We’ll see.