I have never seen Sikander awake. Dusty beige and well-fed, he sleeps unruffled despite the heat, the hustle, the noise of rickshaw drivers calling out to potential customers and the footsteps of thousands marching past. Inevitably, a bit of his tongue manages to escape his mouth and it seems like, in his own way, not only is Sikander uninterested in the lives of the people stepping over him, he is actually pulling a face at them. I call him Sikander because, for the last few months, every morning I have found his supine form outside the Sikanderpur Metro station. A fortnight ago though, Sikander went missing. After failing to spot him all week, and increasingly worried about what might have happened to him, I asked the parking guy if he’d seen him. He hadn’t either. Every morning I’d hold my breath and scan for him. He wasn’t visible anywhere. It was unsettling.

Sikander isn’t my dog, but in many ways he feels mine. In the nomadic urban life that a lot of us lead, it becomes imperative to clutch on to some symbols of non-transience. Living in a city you just happened to move to — to which you have no linguistic, cultural or familial roots — there is so little that you can lay claim to, that you grab whatever you get. I don’t mean for this to invoke pity, because rootlessness is great. You are neither drawn by nostalgia nor tied down by tradition. The rootless are free to soar.

There are two difficulties though. And both involve answers to questions. I have now lived in Gurgaon and worked in Delhi for six years. I lived in Mumbai for seven years before that. Belfast before that. Noida for a short while before that, after two years in business school in Mumbai. A year in Ahmedabad before that. And three years in Chennai before that. The hardest question I am asked is where I am from. I used to answer it with a longwinded “Well, originally I am from Kerala, but I…” and by the time I reach Chennai or Ahmedabad, I realise that I have brought the questioner to glassy-eyed regret and all he is wishing for is the ability to go back in time and not ask that question. My answer wasn’t long because I intended to confound. It was long because I wasn’t sure where exactly I was from. It is mystifying, this business of belonging somewhere. Now when people ask where I am from, I just answer with “here”.

The other difficulty is in filling forms. Whether it is for a passport or PAN number, government agencies are obsessed with the notion of capturing your permanent address. I look at the box for Permanent Address in bafflement. Do I fill it with the address of the house my parents have but have never lived in? Or that of the apartment I bought in Mumbai thinking it was forever, but did not know at the time that forever would be four years? Is it a place where I can permanently be found? Why is it important? Permanent Address always reminds me of death.

I am not the only one who has this problem. I now find myself in a community of people who are from everywhere and are, right now, here. Ours is the society whose permanent address is here and now. And it is important, this society. For how else will we manage to work, travel and raise children without the support of grandparents and relatives?

I moved houses a couple of months ago. The rent is higher in the new place and the area smaller. You don’t need to be an economist to understand that that is not a good deal. But I had no choice. Our back-up parents in the old place were moving cities and we had back-up parents available in the new.

For those who are well-rooted and wondering how this works, here’s the explanation. It is sort of like the TV show Friends , but with children and minus the cheesiness and the sex. Back-up parents must fulfil certain criteria — they must have kids around the same age as yours and, more importantly, the kids must be friends; and they must have the same open-door policy as you and a similar value system, as it were. It’s a set-up where it is perfectly acceptable to message the WhatsApp group of other parents in the evening and ask, “Have any of you seen my child today?” And inevitably, she would have been fed, entertained and generally looked after. It used to take a village to raise a child. For the rootless, it takes a gated community to raise a child.

Yet, despite this closeness, these friendships too are transient. People change jobs, move cities, and you are left to find other friends and other parents.

I do see that this is the human equivalent of a mongrel existence. And I cherish its cultural vacuum. Not because it does not impose much on you, but because you can fill it up with what you like. And it is perhaps this fraternity of the mongrels that draws me to Sikander. Who, I am happy to report, was discovered fast asleep at 10pm on Wednesday night. His schedule seems to have changed. Perhaps he’s with different friends now.

(Veena Venugopal is editor BLink and author of Would You Like Some Bread with that Book . Follow her on Twitter >@veenavenugopal )

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