I left my home in Santacruz West, a suburb of Bombay, in 1976. The anticipation of moving to Kerala did not diminish the pangs of saying goodbye to the only home I had known. For my mother, who had moved to Bombay with my father, this would be a homecoming. For me, it would be a series of temporary spaces till I found a place to call home again.
Three years later, I returned to study creative writing at Sophia’s College in South Bombay. In the years I was away, I had carried a mental map of home and the immediate neighbourhood with me: Main Avenue and its arterial side lanes; Khar, where my old lending library stood; Bandra, with its shops and theatres; Juhu, where we spent summers on the beach.
