Permanent Address

Every time I fill a form that asks for 'permanent address' I smile at human folly.

Few years before, there was a silence at home when I declared to sale of our existing home and asked my family to shift to "better" home in "better" locality.

I had my own struggle with numbers, adding, subtracting, and circling home loan and FDs. I would break and put a question mark against a few empty spaces in the total.

A house is usually a one time in one life effort so everyone goes all out and makes that one room more than what can be afforded and still finds one room less than what was needed. Javed Akhtar puts it beautifully बम्बई में बस एक ही गम हैं, हरेकके पास एक कमरा कम हे.

My joint family home housed 5 of us from age 1 to 65 years and frequent visitors of same size and age.

Today I watch my old house abandoned and nature taking over the garden my parents used to tend for hours every day. The Guava plants, Neem Plants, Flower plants, a lane full of Ashoka trees and Peepal have survived but all beauty is both transient and fragile and the law of entropy powerful. The lovely flowers of myriad colors are all gone. I wonder what happened to the pigeon's family that came everyday and ate from my moms hand. The Bulbul, the sparrows, the parrots, spotted flycatchers, Cuckoos, a huge troop of monkeys that once in a month would upset the order of the place.

I often go to my old abandoned house and guise the झूला in our compound and could feel the sadness it carry within it. The same झूला had seen all of us growing and was witness of all wonderful memories and celebrations that we had at the home back in those times.

Once people leave, a home becomes a house. Initially I didn't feel like selling and now I don't feel like going to see. Time has taken away all its beauties except the memories and emotions that I still attach to it.

I walk around our neighborhood and see similar fate of so many homes once full of life now replaced or lying still.

Why do we stretch and stress to build houses? In most cases our kids won't need it or worse fight over it. What is this human folly of attempting permanent ownership in a leased life with an uncertain tenure given by a landlord whose terms are non-negotiable and there is no court of appeal.

One day all we have built with love and EMIs will either be demolished, fought over, sold or lie in ruins.

There is a Zen story that an old monk walked into a Kings palace demanding he wanted to spend the night in this Inn and the guards told him, "What Inn, can't you see its a palace?". The monk said "I came here a few decades back someone was staying there, a few years later someone else took the throne from him, then someone else. Any place where the occupant keeps changing is an Inn."

Birds and Animals must be laughing at us humans that give up living in order to build their dream home and in the end depart the Inn they mistook as a permanent residence.

George Carlin says "house is just a place where you keep your stuff as you go out and get more stuff".

As houses get bigger families get smaller. When the house has occupants, we desire privacy and when the nest empties we crave for company.

I had to anyway sign the form for investment by putting present permanent address. I did it with the smile on my face and gave it to the hands of the person with similar smile & similar dreams.