Day Eleven: Size Matters (In Sentences)

Today’s Prompt: Where did you live when you were 12 years old?Which town, city, and country? Was it a house or an apartment? A boarding school or foster home? An airstream or an RV? Who lived there with you?

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Wow! That was quite a call. Having grown up with a father in the Indian Armed Forces, we changed homes almost a dozen times. The last house change was when I got married. I’ve never moved house after that. Moving house was fun though: sometimes we had to change because the job demanded we did so.  At other times, we changed because my father got a promotion or was transferred to another place. Luckily we didn’t have too many geographical shifts but I can distinctly remember spending a large amount of my childhood helping my mother pack up the boxes to be carted from one house to another.

When I was twelve, we stayed in a cluster of houses called “Separated Family Quarters”, at the bottom of a road oddly called Victoria Road. The Cantonment part of Pune where the house was situated was full of these British names in those days.   At that  time, I had no idea why my parents’ civilian friends sniggered when they heard our address, but now as an adult, I can understand why. There was a bunch of six double storeyed buildings of four flats each. The buildings were standard government accommodation meant for officers of a particular rank. In the military rank is all that matters. So these ugly squat buildings with are replicated throughout the length and breadth of the country – uninspiring but practical. Each flat came with standard issue furniture, had ample storage space, an attached garage and an open verandah. This group of semi-detached bungalows was built around an arid field meant for us to play in, but it had more stones than grass and was home to several stray dogs that would bark whenever the trains went past. And since the railway tracks went just past our compound, they barked most of the night. The dogs also enjoyed special residential privileges as they stayed longer than the residents of the flats.

I stayed in one such flat with my younger brother and my mother. We also had a white Pomeranian and a live-in maid who preferred to stay in the flat with us rather than the adjoining  accommodation that was provided for her at the back of the house.

Our neighbouring flat was allotted to an officer who was allowed to stay there, to guard the other women who were without their husbands. I don’t think he did such a good job because the lady in the house across from ours had a new lover every night. The family who lived above us had three daughter. They came down to play with use from time to time. The lady who lived on the last flat in our block was crazy. She would call my mom up for a drink every evening while she read out her husband’s latest love letters aloud. She also had a mother-in-law who insisted on going for a traction so that her spine got straightened out.

There was nothing remarkable about that house and would have been yet another  in a series of  houses that I grew up in except for the fact that our dog died while we were staying there.