Life Under Transfer

Transfer is an essential evil of a transferable job, irrespective of the sentiments swimming across one whichever way. Moving from the known to the unknown.

Every three or four years, we dismantle the world which we create around us with love and passion, just to pack and move to a new destination, where we have to set up another world of our own with new sets of colleagues and neighbours, new home, new city with unknown roads and markets, new schools and colleges for children and what not.

Unpacking and rearranging kitchen and rooms take at least one week. Gas connection and school admission go concurrently. Only after two to three months, the life returns to normal.

But after staying in a house for the next three or four years, a natural affiliation develops for the same. It is torturous to leave a house, where we come across some really memorable events of life.

After marriage, when I landed at the house at Indore, where I was staying as a bachelor, the way my landlady welcomed my wife with love and affection cannot be forgotten. My wife felt as if she was being received in her sasural (in-laws’ house). It’s just indelible. Even now she considers that house as her sasural.

When I was transferred once again to Indore, we had two sons, who mingled and played with grandchildren of the landlord, and started calling him Nana (mother’s father). The landlady also showered my wife with her love as if she was her own daughter. That house is still the peehar or mayka (parental house) for my wife.

With sentiments running so high, especially on the day luggage is loaded on the truck, it gives a strange experience that is simply indecipherable.

The house gets empty like the day we had entered. We make it a point to clean the house after loading, and to stay overnight there by sleeping on the floor using bedsheets, due to sheer attachment. That night our eyes get moist, and also when finally we leave the house, the next morning.

Our world shifts to a truck for a week or so until it reaches the new destination. Despite taking all precautions, breakages and damages can’t be overruled. Once truck reaches, a new story starts unfolding.

Physically and emotionally, these transfers may be horrible, but in the process, we chance upon opportunities to meet and befriend new people and to familiarise with new places of interest. There are always two sides of the coin.


–Kaushal Kishore