LIFE IN TRANSIT

Shunali Khullar Shroff recollects a childhood spent constantly on the move as an army kid

- Shunali Khullar Shroff

I was always the new girl at school. A resolutely optimistic new girl, almost always let down by the reality of finding out that my latest school wasn’t grander than my previous one, and that the friends I had left behind were cooler than the ones I was about to make.

Our memories are full of things we shall never experience again. The older we grow, the more we long for that moment irretrievably lost in time. The nostalgia I feel for the life I left behind can best be described as saudade. We are all afflicted with that longing for the past, and the stasis we now find ourselves in has only intensified that yearning. Well, thank god for the ban on travel during the lockdown, but there’s no such moratorium on time travel.

The earliest memory I have of my parents moving town was our posting out of Siliguri. Men in crisp khaki shorts and white singlets packed away our belongings over days and stitched our furniture up in reams of jute. They used stencils to paint my father’s name and the words “From Siliguri To Hyderabad” onto black steel trunks. The trucks arrived, and before we knew it, our belongings were on a 2,000km journey to what was then Andhra Pradesh.