Moving experiences...

Shifting house, or "moving", can be a rather moving exercise. So here I am, on Sunday night, typing away from my new house. Shifted to Bandra (East) from the heart of South Mumbai - Breach Candy. Felt like a culture shock the other day. Breach Candy looks like a car parking lot, because every house has at least three cars -- "one for the master, one for the dame, and one for the little boy...". Well, certainly not for the boy who lives down the lane, but there is no dearth of takers for that one extra car anyday.

I remember Pushkar mentioning in one of his posts about never underestimating the importance of home food and free laundry. Now home food is something that I have almost forgotten. I have learnt to live on pizzas, burgers, and strange oily veg curries from restaurants whose only identity I have with me, is their phone number. But free laundry, that's a different story. A PG acco can spoil your habits. And so it was with me in my last house. Clothes were washed and ironed and placed neatly near the bed every day. I guess those days are over. As I struggled with the washing machine and the erratic Municipal water supply today, and walked in the rain to pick up clothes for ironing, I once again realized the number of things we take for granted every day. Or as Joni Mitchell said in "Big yellow taxi", "Don't it always seem to go, That you don't know what you've got, Till its gone..."

My room doesn't have a curtain yet (another thing that most people take for granted). I can see everything that's on the other side. Obviously the same holds true for the onlookers on whose other side I happen to be. But with my room being on the third floor, there's not too much peeping that people on the road can do. Though frankly, there's nothing in me or my room that's worth peeping at anyways...

And of course, in all this flurry of facts and emotions, let me not forget my house-mate. He left for Uncle Sam's hometown the day I landed in this house (in case I haven't mentioned it yet, it was the last day of September 2006). And so the first evening was spent in what I call the "Discovery Walk". I do that whenever I land in a new place. It is a process by which a person, by randomly walking for a couple of hours, finds the eco-system necessary for survival. Places such as the local grocery store, the chemist, the roadside vada-pav joints, the bus stop, and similar places of tourist interest. Though as a custom, such a walk requires the participant to take any turn that catches his/her fancy with no regard to consequences. The net result being that I usually forget where I started from after two hours of such a session of brownian motion.

Needless to say, forgetting the road to home can be a rather moving feeling...