A Day In The Life: Moving - 1

It was 5° C in the morning today. I didn’t believe Appa when he told me, but then at 10:00 am the thermometer outside said 8°C and there was no denying it.

Yahin itni thand ho rahi hai toh Jammu hi na chale jaayen?

The transfer order was long due. We moved to Lucknow in 1996. The first posting that made Appa move away, and made us a “split establishment” (which is what Amma says when she’s talking about buying home-supplies, groceries) was a transfer to Ranikhet. Baba’s board exams that year. I was in Class 8, so close enough to my own first boards for the folks to not want the kids to change schools. That was in 2000.
Since then Appa has had a series of postings in Inspection and Management Audit, which made his travelling light even more spartan than usual. These were postings of a few months each, sometimes even a few weeks only, taking him upto Trivandrum and back as far north as Kufri; from Calcutta to Surat and everywhere in between.
Last Sunday, he had nothing to do. Rare, since when he’d come home between assignments there’d usually be some repairs or the other to be done, some pending doctor’s appointment of my grandfather to attend to, car insurance payments; the list is long. Last Sunday, he made lunch early, called the car, and took out one of the older model airplanes, a Cessna, to go flying.

Chalo, chalte hain.

He and I drove to Butchery Ground which is on the way to the airport; in between he says, pithily,

Hum yahaan ’82 se aa rahe hain. Yeh sab chhod ke kahin aur chale jaayen?

I was walking around in the mall yesterday, desperately looking for a familiar face. What does Lucknow still have that holds me, like a promise cracked already, about to be broken? There are no reasons, perhaps; at least none stronger than the irrational love that one can have for the smell of the fog.
Kohre ki khushbu, if you can call it that, I’m told.

The other day V came over. We started counting the years; with V now so much of the leap that my heart makes every time I see him (even days when I want to see no one, least of all someone like him, whom I can no longer talk to) is the sheer childish joy that comes from seeing a memory, alive. He counted up to 12, and we were suitably impressed with ourselves. I cannot talk to him like I can talk to my friends in the hostel, but this is of course stating the obvious. Even if our meetings are now a mixture of excavations into a shared past (which sentiment is turning apocryphal) and a floundering attempt to understand the divergent, alien present, my heart still leaps.

The long overdue transfer order has come;
Chandigarh Circle, it says.
Where in the circle? we ask.

Jammu.