You probably grew up with one of us, sharing benches and crushes at school. Maybe your best friend was one too. That kid who came to your school two years ago and was leaving because her dad (or mom) had been transferred. It broke you heart (and hers) to lose a partner in recess crime, an after-school buddy. After she left, you made a long-distance call to her once. She wrote back twice. And then you never spoke again until a few years ago when she added you on Facebook.
It's never easy being a transfer kid—that urban nomad with parents working government, bank or other jobs that have them moving homes. You've barely lived in a city for two, maybe three years before it's time to move to the next city, the next school, the next set of friendships, sometimes a new language. I know because I've been that transfer kid.
Moving day
My father's job first with the army and then a nationalised bank meant packing our home into a truck, driving next to it in our Maruti for two days, and then unpacking it all at the new house in a new city. And then waiting for that first day at another new school.
Those mornings would begin with the parents as nervous as me, perhaps more. Mom making sure the new uniform fit, dealing with tantrums along the way. Feeding me answers on what to tell the class teacher about coursework at your old school. Dad helping with the answer to, "What is your father's occupation?". Him promising that I would soon have friends again. Mom reminding that I always did get over it and started liking new schools eventually. Both worrying if the bus-wale bhaiyya would know to pick up the new kid on his route. Meanwhile, lecturing the brother to cycle carefully to his school. A ritual repeated every two to three years. From Ranikhet to Kashipur to Bhopal to Patna to Delhi to Rajkot to Ahmedabad.
It began a few weeks, sometimes months, before moving day, through a promotion or a transfer order. Our first reaction was usually excitement. In the early '90s, Dad got posted to Bombay. Bombay! The magical land of Aamir Khan and EsselWorld. But then new orders came in and he got transferred to Rajkot, in far-off Gujarat. Suddenly, Aamir didn't matter anymore but Ambika and Honey, who I wouldn't be seeing anymore, did. These would later become Amee and Shaylee or sometimes Bhupendra Sir and Shanta Ma'm. And so it would go on…
It has meant that my parents, to this day, dream only of living in their final house in some Delhi suburb.
Moving every few years meant we were never really accumulating much other than memories. It meant not being able to hold on to our favourite magazine issues, although dad's collection of Reader's Digests fought bravely until the very end. It meant giving away clothes we could do without. It meant never owning any furniture, which was provided by the bank along with the house that we would live in for the next few years. It has meant that my parents, to this day, dream only of living in their final house in some Delhi suburb. A house with woodwork of their choice and heavy immovable furniture. The family heirloom kind. They keep postponing this life of settlement while living in places where they have no family and where they are not originally from. The original rootless urban Indians, who parented two globally wandering children.
The only way we held on to old friendships was through letters. The internet was at least half a decade away. And expensive STD calls were limited to a few minutes every week. A blue-inland with a friend's cursive scribble was the high-point of the month, stamped in our memory the way a WhatsApp notification will never be. And a glittery birthday greeting card, stuffed with every bit of the friend's literary and artistic abilities, brought out a smile much wider than a Facebook birthday post ever will.
Catching up, fitting in
My classmate from ninth grade in Ahmedabad, Nikhil Rao, remembers his mom in tears as she packed for their move from Hyderabad to Bombay. Rao was mostly just excited to move to the city of his summer vacations, where most of his cousins lived. But he quickly learnt to scale his expectations and experiences with every move. What worked in one place did not quite work in the other. In Hyderabad, for instance, he topped his class, and did well in sports and extracurriculars. But in Bombay, his ego took a small beating—there were people better than him at everything. He wasn't even the tallest boy in class anymore! To make it worse, he remained somewhat of an outsider for a long time. Right until the end of the academic year, one his teachers still referred to him as "the new boy".
Around the same time, Saurabh Jain was having a hard time fitting in at his new school in Delhi. The child of a railway employee, Jain was born in a small town in West Bengal. His family then moved to Calcutta, Guwahati, Delhi and finally Bombay. Going from a blue-collar Kendriya Vidyalaya in Guwahati to a convent in posh South Delhi as a teenager was one of the most painful moves of his 15-year-old life. In Delhi , his accent was mocked. He didn't have a girlfriend, unlike most boys in his class. "My life's mission became to get a girlfriend instead of cracking the top 100 of the IIT-JEE. But I was quite an introvert, so had trouble fitting in. Getting a girlfriend was a tall order," he told me. So he took up reading to expand his English vocabulary. Maybe if he knew a lot of big words, it wouldn't matter how he said them.
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Setting up, settling down
Sure, travelling and living in different cities as an adult changes you, but when you move so often as a kid, it transforms you. In some ways, it also allows you to reinvent yourself. After Delhi, Saurabh moved to Bhopal, a smaller town where he felt more comfortable. He had shed the extra weight he carried around in Delhi and was more articulate thanks to all the reading he took up to improve his English. And it was in Bhopal where he met his first girlfriend. His years of travel taught him to put more effort into relationships. It has made him more empathetic, and able to relate with people from many different places, an important skill in his sales job with a global tech firm in Singapore.
For Nikhil, being on the move gave him the ability to get excited about his current home, Delhi, the way only a tourist can. He does not take a single concert or a movie screening at the India Habitat Centre for granted, unlike his friends. And like the others, Nikhil also credits his itinerant childhood and the academically laidback city of Ahmedabad for how his life has shaped up. "After super-competitive Bombay, Ahmedabad showed me academics were not all that important. My friends were Marwari and Gujarati kids, who were going to inherit their dad's business and were very secure about scoring 60% marks. I think my personality changed there. I learnt to not stress about academic achievement. If not for Ahmedabad, I would have definitely tried my hand at the IITs or at the very least gotten a tech job and settled down in Dallas," he told me. So, instead of preparing for the IIT, like his friends in Bombay and Hyderabad, Rao spent most of his productive waking hours being curious, reading and honing his guitar fingers—all skills that serve him well as the guitarist with one of India's most enduring bands: Indian Ocean.
As for me, I continue moving and experimenting. From Ahmedabad to Syracuse to Boston to New York to Mumbai. And I blame my dad for it.