Home Town

“Now, please turn to the next form”, thundered Mr. Bannerjee. “You have to fill up details of your Home Town and Home Address in it”. Mr. Rathindra Kumar Bannerjee, a huge and extremely overbearing man, was the official from the Human Resources Department getting a whole sheaf of forms filled up by us, a group of fresh recruits joining one of the nationalized banks.

Everybody obediently started filling up his or her respective form. There was a little hubbub as some peaked to see his / her neighbour’s “Home Town”. Other than that, there was little confusion in the room as this seemed to be a fairly straightforward requirement, compared to the myriad forms we had been filling up in the post-lunch session of our first day of induction.

But this simple request from Mr. Banerjee left me quite perplexed. Meanwhile, Mr. Bannerjee kept on issuing a stream of interjections at a steady pace on the need for filling up this form, the considerations one should keep in mind in deciding on which place should be designated as the “Home Town”, and the implications this particular piece of bureaucratic record would have on our future bright career in the bank.

This seemingly simple requirement left me in profound dilemma. I ultimately very politely raised my hand and asked, “Sir, I do not have a Home Town. May I leave this form blank?” There suddenly was pin-drop silence in a room full of people with their heads fixed backwards, as everyone looked back (I was sitting in the last row as usual) to get a look at someone who asked such silly questions. Meanwhile, Mr. Bannerjee’s eyes popped out and he opened and closed his mouth wordlessly a couple of times.

“Well, your Home Town”, he finally managed to croak.

“But Sir, I do not have such a place which I could call as my Home Town”, I countered helplessly.

The fact being that there was no particular place I could call my “Home Town”. Strange as it may sound to most people, this was my case. I knew I was ethnically a Bihari but beyond that had no affinity to any place. I had lived all my life till then (and also subsequently) hopping around from place to place, from one town to another every two or three years. And so had my father and grandfather, both having been in transferable jobs. My grandfather had migrated from his native village (Village Kumbhaila, PO & Thana Piro, District Arrah) sometime early in the last century and rarely visited that place thereafter. The last time anyone from our immediate family had visited our ancestral village was over forty-five years prior to the date of this incident. I would later visit ‘my” village once, for a few hours, but that is another story.

Finally, after deep thought, Mr. Bannerjee asked me to fill up the place where my parents lived currently. This also failed to solve my predicament. My father was dead and my mother lived with my elder siblings, rotating from one to another. At that moment she was visiting my brother who had migrated to the US and settled there. Could I fill up as my “Home Town” a city in a country that I had never visited and had no connection whatsoever?