The landing card asked for my address, and for a long moment, I was hovering the pen above the paper, I was no longer entitled to write down that address which I called home. At that moment I also realized that there is no sadness in abandoning this address as it had anyway ceased to be my identity for many years now.

Home, as I understood it for my formative years and as my parents and grandparents had known for their entire lifetimes constituted a fulfilling and intimate geography of deeply meaningful associations with familiar people and places. The neighbors, the local bus stop, simple aesthetically pleasing homes, the laundry man on our lane whose coal burner would send spirals of smoke early morning all contributed to my identity.

Back then, you would have met a Mrs. Chatterjee, who lived across from us and taught English her presence as constant as the schoolbooks under her arm. Her father-in-law sitting in the balcony sipping cups of tea all day oblivious to the fact that in years the scene would drastically stand altered.

Every evening, the neighbor’s piano notes would announce supper time whilst at six, the auspicious sound of the conch shells had already announced the arrival of evening. Back then my extended family lived in close proximity and we all had shared joys and sorrows and it just became one colossal identity.

Our social landscape was shaped as much by these quotidian presences as by the discerning neighbors we knew affectionately through their pet names. Our address carried its own quiet prestige, we often identified our residence by its proximity to a legendary freedom fighter’s house and also close to that of a renowned regional film director committed to soulful art.

This communal geography transcended mere physical location, they constituted the coordinates which was our home not merely just letters and numbers.

Every home on my street belonged to a small community that complained in chorus and rejoiced in unison, bound together by the ordinary dramas of daily life. You could have migrated from any part of the country, but if you had lived in this city for eighty years and raised three generations here, you did not merely live at that address you became one.

As I stepped into adolescence, the street began to change, the distinct old began to give away to obnoxious new. The buildings grew vertically overpowering the space where my guardian angels sat watching over us.

What stands today are towers of concrete and the quiet outlines of trees and small storey houses that were forced into oblivion. The ancient souls of the place moved away in distress, displaced by a restless, rebellious version of the city that no longer recognised them. Some of us, like me, clung to our memories within the four familiar walls, even as the world outside underwent a harsh metamorphosis into something loud, intrusive, and strangely repellent. Everything familiar felt different and it all vanished leaving behind no trace.

As I continue to arrive at a new destination and the immigration form requests an address, I know that it is a space that is interchangeable, a temporary marker that shifts with circumstance. The line I inscribe now carries little significance; the words are dead, and the address does not exist. Recently, returning to my mother’s embrace, I rediscovered a sense of orientation through my father’s recollections that my identity lives within me.

Today I own a modest address in a distant land, and in that home I am carefully composing the familiar elements which will go on to form my daughter’s identity. My hope is that, long after its walls have altered or disappeared, her address will be her identity which will transcend beyond mere coordinates.