Where am I from?

There is a question I usually dread answering when I meet new people - no, its not devious attempts to figure out my age :) The question I dread is "Where are you from"? I have trouble coming up with a consistent answer - I usually change my answers depending on who I am talking to. If the person is non mallu, I usually reply that I mostly grew up in Bangalore and end the matter there. If I get to know them more I might add details about me spending my childhood in Kerala and the rest in Bangalore. It is the mallus I have real trouble with though - here are some samples of what those conversations look like..

I  used to answer that I am from "Pala" which is where my father is from. I have no knowledge of the place, except having visited the house a few times. I dont even know how to find my way to his house on my own...And yet I used to feel obliged to say that I was from Pala when someone asked me where I was from... This is how those conversations used to go:

Them: "Where are you from..."?

Me: "Pala..."

Them: "Oh really, where in Pala?"

Me: "Er... near the Holy Family Hospital..."

Them: "Oh, I know the place.. dont you know so and so.. "

Me: "Er... no, I have only visited Pala a few times in my life, and I have never lived there...I grew up mostly in Bangalore "

Them: "Oh.. Bangalore aanalle.." 

and then they look like I just cheated them. So I changed my tactic after a while and started saying that I was from Cochin. This is how those conversations went:

Them: "Where are you from..."?

Me: "Cochin..."

Them: "Oh really, where in Cochin?"

Me: "Er... Thrikkakkara..."

Them: "Oh, I know the place.. near the temple right?.. "

Me: "Yes.."

Them: "You know my cousin lives right there... they have lived there their whole life.."

Me: "Er... I was only there until I was eleven or twelve, after that we moved to Bangalore. Never heard of your cousin.. "

Them: "Oh.. Bangalore aanalle.." 

and then they look like I cheated them, again. So I changed this tactic too, and these days I just tell them I grew up in Bangalore and that my parents are from Kerala. When people really pick on my answers I sometimes divulge that my father is from Pala and that I was in Kerala until I was 12. 

And now that I have spent more than a decade in the US, I have spent roughly the same amount of time in Cochin, Bangalore and Jersey City. When you have lived for just 3.5 decades and spent one decade each in a different city, how do you define where you are "from"?

Home

Each time I land back in Bangalore, I get all nostalgic about what it used to be like. We moved to Bangalore in 1996 - it was quite green at the time. I spent most of my time around the Malleswaram / Yeshwantpur / Mathikere area, so changes to those three regions is what I really take notice of .. Sampige and Margosa roads definitely were lined with trees, perhaps the same trees whose names they have. My entire trip from home to school and back were on roads that were lined with trees on both sides. There were some mom and pop shops and a few eateries on the way, but mostly Malleswaram, which is where my school was, was a nice and quiet residential area. It was easy to simply walk home from school if my auto driver did not show up for some reason. Even a few years later, when I changed schools and joined NPS in Rajajinagar, we could still enjoy a long walk home on relatively uncrowded footpaths that were still tree lined. In fact me and some of my friends used to wait till the last day of school to walk back home on foot so the cramps that came later wouldnt be a problem the next day :)

Twenty years later, things are so drastically different. I would not attempt to walk from where my school sits to where my home used to be anymore - the trees are all gone; there are large shops everywhere, and the number of people who still reside there has reduced vastly - most folks simply sold their houses and moved to flats since it made financial sense.

Even the IISc campus, which is where I used to live, is no longer the same. They have added a lot more buildings, and the trees are all covered in dust from all the construction around them. There used to be an entire field full of trees with yellow flowers on it - it used to be one of my favorite places to walk by. Those trees are all gone, and it is replaced with a bunch of buildings now. Even Bumgalow no 7, where we lived for about twenty years has now changed. The lovely garden than my mother painstakingly made is almost entirely gone - the plants have been almost entirely replaced with cement. All the flowering plants are gone, and only a couple of the big trees we planted remain now. All we have remaining of the place are pictures we took while we were there. Oh, and memories.

I think sometimes about how differently my children are growing up - there are some trees around, but they only have leaves during the summer :(.. we have no garden of our own, so we cant talk about the trees that the children planted. And we certainly dont have any flowers around. Nor do we sit outdoors and read books or play while watering the plants. For the longest time, I was against buying a home - I felt they made no financial sense. After all the interest and mortgage you pay, plus the commute you add, it makes little sense to actually buy, if you are logical about it. But lately I have been wanting to create a sense of being rooted somewhere - of creating a place that we will always think of as home, where we can plant our trees and memories and little family traditions. I guess having a home is an emotional thing. Maybe that is obvious to everyone else. Guess the understanding came to me only now :)