When Dad decided to leave the Army in 1999, money was tight. The Indian Army was never the generous paymaster that it now is and our savings were negligible, if any at all.

Being the youngest child in the Home, oblivion to this fact was only natural, given how sheltered and protected I was. My sister Wendy and I grew up without any sense of want and It was only when Dad levelled with us a few years ago that we realised how tight things were back then.

For the 22 years that Dad served with the military, owning a house or a car even, was a distant dream left for summer days when family-friends or relatives would drive us somewhere for a picnic or an outing. It never occurred to me that Dad’s mind wandered as he sat in the co-driver’s seat with my sister or me casually in his lap. That in his dreams he saw himself driving his family around in his own car, returning to a place we could all one day call our Home.

When I think about it now, I never saw much of my father growing up. The Army kept him away for the most bit, with exercises and deployments throughout the year and long tiring days when he did happen to be at ‘home’. Towards the end of his military career when we were finally posted in Bombay, he went to night school after work for his MBA, extending his already long days yet never missing his 5 am roll call the next morning.

My mother, the angelic force that she was, never allowed us to feel any lack of a father or even perceive any sense of his absence.

Dad was always relentlessly looking forward. He knew that the transition from the Army to Corporate wouldn’t be a smooth one and the prospect of turning into a meagre Head of Security for an MNC as most Army retirees often do, never appealed to him. So upskill he did. With no savings, whenever he did need to make the move, he knew he had to hit the ground running. At 43, with a wife and two children to support, he still had dreams that needed fulfilling.

Unlike for him and my Mum, leaving the Army was a seamless transition for us kids. Being used to moving around every 2 or 3 years, changing schools and making new friends, his move to Corporate in Hyderabad felt like any other Army posting.

To prove his mettle in the Private sector, till he retired in 2016, Dad regularly worked 14 – 16 hour days, oftentimes weekends too.

I wish now I noticed how much my Dad and Mum worked for us, that every time I broke a hand or wasn’t faring well in school, what his making time for me meant for his career. What each silly thing my sister Wendy and I would request for our birthdays (that we always got) really cost. How each holiday was a careful calculation of time and money, a masterclass of budgeting on my mother’s part and how through it all, us kids never had a clue.

Despite all this, a few years later, Dad and Mum saved up enough money to secure a loan for a car and yes, our Home.

Being hardly 10 years old at the time, I have some vague memories of Dad signing some papers near the house that day, Mum seemed to be happy too. I never understood what the big deal was.

Kudos to Mum for my ignorance, every one of the almost 15+ houses we lived in over the years always felt effortlessly like Home. So why was this one different? Why did this one become our Home? What made it ours? What did it mean that we owned it?

For those of you who may not know, you never really own anything in the Army. There is not much need for it. Accommodation, furniture and food even to a large extent, are provided for. Besides some utensils, linen, an old Bajaj scooter and the clothes on our backs, our possessions were few. I guess this is by design perhaps, to be able to relocate at a moment’s notice, is an integral feature of being an Army family.

If you’ve ever had the privilege of visiting a Military Officer’s residence, usually a palatial old colonial bungalow, know now that all the grandeur and opulence you may have admired was never owned, only borrowed.

In this context, what does it mean to own a home for the first time? To experience a permanent residence? To sit on furniture that is yours? To be sheltered from the rain in a place of your choosing? To dictate the colours of the walls? To drill a hole anywhere you want even?

What made it ours? Was it the piece of paper that said we purchased it? That we could decide what we wanted to do with our rooms? That this was the place we lived in longest till then? Or simply the fact that it was the last time we truly felt like a family?

So many questions.

For one thing, It was the first of many. The first time we had family friends who Dad didn’t work with. The first time Wendy and I had ‘long-term’ friends. The first time my grandmother (Nana) came to live with us permanently. Our first car and with it the regular post-dinner family drives to get ice cream. How Dad managed the energy for it after his long workdays I still don’t know.

Each one of us was happy. Dad and Mum with their social circle of family and friends and Wendy and I with ours. Regular family vacations, almost always with us in the car, Dad, Mum, Nana, Wendy, I and our dachshund Jhun Jhun on long inter-state drives. Each vacation, each trip to get ice cream, each day back from school or work, we all came Home, to our Home.

It’s funny to think now that all this life we lived there in Hyderabad, all the happy memories we created, our time in our first Home only lasted a meagre 4-5 years.

In 2004 owing to Wendy’s and my need for further education, Dad and Mum moved the family to Poona where we have continued to live for the last 20 years. Leaving our first Home and our happiest memories as a family behind, we travelled onward and upward to new horizons, with never a regret in sight.

Much life has transpired since then, a new sense of Home, a new sense of family and a new sense of happiness and sadness.

While peppered by many pleasant memories, a few years after moving to Poona, we lost our daschund Jhun Jhun, some years later my Grandmum and two years after that, my dear Mum too.

Much grieving and many years later, the sentiment of holding on to our first Home diminished considerably. Neither of us had visited Hyderabad in that 20 years or had any plans of ever going back. So decide to sell we did!

A few months ago Dad, Wendy and I, the three remaining of our family of six (counting Mum, Nana and Jhun Jhun), returned to our Home in Hyderabad. This time to sell what was once ours, what all of us, once owned apparently.

I still remember that hot Hyderabad summer evening, after sundown, when we visited our house before we signed the papers the next day. The last time visiting it, yet also the first time since we, what remained of our once beautiful family, were in that now sacred space, some 20 years hence.

Deep breaths, pursed lips and moist eyes as all of us, each in our own trance, walked like zombies through the empty house. It was a lot smaller now, or was I just bigger?

Flashes of birthdays and anniversaries long gone, trying to remember exactly where everything used to be. The absence of country music that always seemed to be playing in the background. The kitchen and garden my mother once loved. Memories of times we never could quite relive in Poona no matter how hard we seemed to try.

Thoughts like ‘Should we have stayed back in Hyderabad?’, ‘What would it have been like?’ Silenced quickly by ‘No no, everything happens for the best!’ played on and on like a loop in each of our heads.

Every now and then one of us would quip up almost in turn, ‘Remember when this happened?’, ‘Remember that’s where that used to be?’ ‘Remember when that person came over ’, desperately trying to break the silence that screamed of how alone each of us felt individually and ironically, even together.

Eventually, we left. It was bittersweet, bitter in the realization that what once was would never be again and sweet in realizing that we could still be grateful for all the memories we forgot we had. Saying goodbye to the house wasn’t just saying goodbye to the house. It was also saying goodbye to the family we lost along the way, that made that house a Home. Our Home.

I still feel that ideally, everyone should have been present for that sale — Mum, Nana and Jhun Jhun. In their own way, I hope they were.

To sell a Home, to truly let go if it I mean, is in a way — the intentional surrender of a once safe place. I guess It’s only through real hard growing up that one comes to realize how rare and valuable safe places are and how hard you have to work to create and maintain them.

You can sell a house for sure but you can never sell that, only silently experience your sense of what was once Home, once Safe, slowly dissipate as ink stains dry upon some line in a cramped poorly ventilated Government office.