I was born in a small town in Assam called Dhubri. Assam, for those who came in late, is a state that lies to the east of India. While it is flanked by other states on nearly every side, it does border Bangladesh in one corner. That makes Assam a very culturally diverse state. Most Indians that I have met and known have no clear identification with that part of the country – they think it is green and beautiful (which it is) and that people there don’t resemble mainland Indians at all; others are confused about whether civilization exists at all east of Bengal, and if all of us living there are hunter-gatherers foraging in dense jungles. I wish I was exaggerating, but I am not.

I do not remember much of Dhubri, of course. Years later, when I was in school – I believe I was twelve – my mother decided that I should go back and see the place of my birth. We took a bus to the town (a Night Super, as they are called in my part of the world) and stayed there for a few days. The first thing that came to my attention when we got down from the bus was a damp, festering, woody odor. “Matchsticks”, my mother said. “I remember this, it used to be the same so many years ago.” Dhubri is home to the North-East’s only matchstick factory – or was, because ITC closed down their WIMCO factory in 1997, a year or two after I visited it. I crinkled my nose all the way as we boarded a rickshaw. “How do people live with this smell?”, I wondered. By the time it was afternoon, it hardly bothered me anymore. The smell was a part of the town, just like the Sylheti-tinged Axomiya and Bangla in the streets, the bustle of the hand-cart pullers and the ramshackle buses, the tinkling of bicycle and rickshaw bells.

We stayed in the home where my parents lived when I was born, which was very interesting. The landlord still recognized my mother, and there was a lot of laughter, some teary eyes. Old stories came tumbling out later, in the evenings — how my mother would ration money from my father’s meager sub-inspector salary, and how those savings paid off when he had to go visit his family one fine day. How my mother nearly died of tetanus a year before I was born. How some other house in the neighborhood that my parents nearly rented turned out to be haunted, and the newlyweds were rescued from their predicament by this kindly man who took them in, even though he was suspicious of policemen. We met the current tenants of the small, one-bedroom-attached-kitchen place that my parents lived in, the house that had welcomed me from the hospital. I tried to think if I had any memories of the place, an unconscious recognition among the shadowy corners; a chord struck by some angle of the sunlight streaming through the bright windows. I tried to imagine a couple beginning their life together in a place away from their support systems. I now wonder if it was harder for them to move from one end of a state to another than it was for my sister and I to move continents. We have Skype and Whatsapp, they did not have a telephone back then.

We traveled a lot when I was young. It was mostly because my father’s work caused him to be transferred every few years to a remote village, or if we were lucky, a small town. A flood of names of places – Runikhata and Kathaltoli; Hailakandi and Patharkandi; Kokrajhar and Karimganj. They were all based around the lower part of Assam, referred to as the Barak valley. We edged closer to the heartland of Assam when we moved to Tezpur in 1986, and finally, to Guwahati. Most of my mother’s side of the family had moved there by then, including my maternal grandparents. This was when my parents decided that enough was enough, and never mind future transfers, we would stay put in the city, for the sake of everyone’s sanity – most notably our school-work. That was 1988 – I had been rootless for the first 9 years of my life.

You have to understand that rootlessness means different things to different people. Maybe “rootless” is too strong a word to use. For me, at that early stage in my life, it meant that the faces around me, the neighbors, the didis and uncles and kakus, the kids in the neighborhood would all change, all of them would be replaced by an entirely fresh set every few months, and that we all have to be ready to say our good-byes any time, with a fair chance that we would never see them again. I knew that the houses we lived in were not ours; and that how a place was and how friendly it felt was a function of luck and governmental caprice. Some of the names and faces blur into each other now, others have distinct after-images that remain in my brain.

One of the after-effects of growing up in the Barak valley was that my cousins, whom I met every year during summer or winter vacations, were befuddled by the two of us, my sister and I. The Nepali side of the family, who were still in Digboi found it strange that we did not speak their tongue, while the Axomiya cousins in Guwahati found our Bangla-tinged accents hilarious. My sister’s primary language, for the longest time, was Bangla – that was what the little girls who were part-time nannies spoke, as did the neighbors. It took me a while, later in life, to understand and unlearn the Bengali-influenced intonation in my spoken Axomiya.

My earliest tangible memories, though,  are of Hailakandi. I remember that the house we lived in, a government quarter, was quite big. I cannot remember any of the rooms, or what was in the house, or what it looked like. The clearest mental picture I have is that of my father leading me gently, holding my tricycle with one hand and my hand with the other, across a narrow piece of wood that connected the backyard of the house to the main road. I have vague recollections of riding said tricycle – and feeling very happy with myself. My mother tells me that there used to be a neighbor’s son who would come visit me every now and then, cause considerable mayhem among my toys because he was a few months older, and then leave me crying. I do not recollect any of those (no doubt) traumatic episodes.

My most enduring Hailakandi memory remains that of being woken up by my father one morning. I remember that I had a hurried breakfast, and that I was happy, giddily so, because I was going to see my mother after a long time. Did we take a rickshaw that morning? I have no idea. If I did, then I am sure we weren’t alone – the street urchins would run after rickshaws and jump on them from behind, taking joyrides on them. They would put their feet on the rear axle and hold on to the sides, laughing and hollering until they got bored, or the rickshaw puller or the passenger yelled at them, or something bad happened. This is what I saw one day – one of these adventurers caught his foot on the gear-and-chain of the rickshaw, and it bled terribly. There was a lot of howling (the kid) and yelling (everybody else). Obviously, that did not deter future joyride enthusiasts, but did make me want to never attempt this in the future.

But this is the lasting memory from that day – my father pointing at a sleeping baby through glass. “That is your little sister”, he said. Maybe I turned my head to the side to look at her more carefully, thinking she looked just like a doll. “Where did you get her from?”, I asked. “God left her for us under a kosupaat“, my father replied.  For the longest time, I believed that to be true, and every time I saw a kosu patch near the side of the road, I would wonder if there was a baby left under the greenery, waiting to be found.