The House My Father Built

Soon after my parents got married on the second day of 1951, my father built a small house in our ancestral village in a south Indian state. The one-bedroom dwelling with a mini-courtyard (actually two, in both front and back) and an open kitchen was built in a corner of my paternal grandfather’s property. In those days that house stood like a laser among candles. Ironically, my parents never lived in that house.

I suspect the decision to informally abandon that house was partly the result of the time my parents spent on a long vacation that followed their wedding. It was sort of an extended honeymoon, for several months in New Delhi, the nation’s capital, more than 1150 miles north of our village. India just became a Republic a year before and what followed was a mass exodus of people from the educated south to the capital city in the north seeking suitable employments in the several newly created government departments. I recall my parents telling us that they stayed in Karol Bagh, a migrant hub in Delhi, sort of like the Queens in New York City. (My mother also used to tell us the one incident in which they witnessed the grand Republic Day parade sitting just a few rows behind the then prime minister Nehru under the same tent.) I am sure my father seriously considered migrating but must have been severely handicapped as there were zero prospects to gain any meaningful employment with the only skill he had, which was farming. That didn’t deter him to continue in his quest to migrate, which he explored over the next several years. While keeping the migration dream alive, my parents temporarily settled in the town next to our village, during which time my mother gave birth to three children.

Human migration is a very contentious issue. My parents strongly believed in the disruptive power of migration. Their long-sought opportunity came to fruition six years after I was born. They migrated to the northern-most remote corner of the newly created state/province, about 250 miles away. My father sold the farms he inherited and bought agricultural lands at the faraway village. That was not the end of it. After seven years in that village, he had to relocate to the nearby town to enroll my elder brother in college. Subsequently, my parents, in their late 50s, had to move to the city to be with my elder brother’s family to help raise the two granddaughters.

As I look back at my father’s migration saga, I see parallels between my migration/relocation and of my parents’. I migrated to the US seeking research opportunities and settled here. We moved/relocated to different places (in and around NYC) successively to enroll our eldest son in elementary, middle, and high schools. Just one more relocation is on the table for Jaya and me to help support raising the grandkids. (Dear youngest, don’t yell, it's been like that in most families for generations; it may be unfair, but that is the way it is.)

Until the time I started my graduate studies, visiting our ancestral village was an annual ritual during summer vacations. The house my father built remained unoccupied for most of the time as no one found a great use for it. But we used to gather in the empty house and sit in its courtyards. For decades, as we were intermittently moving from place to place, we had no abode of our own that we could proudly call home; in our minds and souls, the house my father built was the home.  Our family ceased visiting the ancestral village after my grandmother’s death. Forty-five years later, two years ago, in Feb 2019, I visited the village with Jaya, my brother, and sister-in-law. To our wonder and amazement, although lost its luster as the surrounding houses were more modern than at the time it was built, the house my father built still remained intact. The man knew how to lay a strong foundation, not just for a home, but in terms of family values, so we stayed intact through the itinerant journeys of migrants.

GPS coordinates: 16.420103717276653, 80.75652572146471

Map link:  https://www.google.com/maps/place/16%C2%B025'12.4%22N+80%C2%B045'23.5%22E/@16.4201603,80.7565793,219m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x0!8m2!3d16.4201037!4d80.7565257