The House-Hunt Circus

Travel and migration have been and will be salient points of reference while narrating the tale of human kind to future generations. Humans have moved from place to place from time immemorial mostly in search of better livelihood, food and favourable living conditions. The world today is no different from that a thousand years ago; today we move across localities, towns, cities, states, countries, continents and by the looks of it - very soon planets as well for the very same reasons. The first item on a long check-list of any individual making a move is to ensure the presence a roof above his/her head and therein lies the house-hunt circus.

Having had a part to play in this mad circus when I had to move from my initial base in Germany from Hannover to Wolfsburg after I landed up a job there, I imagined it would be comparatively easier to score a place to stay in a country where the population is hardly a fraction of what it is back home. I was probably as mistaken in making that assumption as the Khap leader in Haryana who blamed fast food for the rising number of rapes in his state. So let me break down my experience of house hunting for you in this post.

Having landed in this new city looking for a roof over my head, firstly lead to an onlooker giving me a dirty stare for gaping my mouth so wide open on reading the rent numbers for the different localities. Brushing that aside, I had already made initial contact and fixed up a few appointments for the purposes of 'house seeing' akin to 'bride seeing', probably only more frustrating and cumbersome. Confident that people had asked me to come over to their houses to inspect the said room(s) on offer gave me the hope that my current state of homelessness was about to meet its speedy end. Off I went to inspect the first room - surprise, surprise - I found that I only had to wait in line before 20 other people who were there for the very same room.

After a start like that - the next step was making an impression with owners or leasers of different shapes, sizes and dimensions with varied preferences, likes, expectations from a potential tenant. To compare their expectations from a potential tenant to an intelligence agency scrutinizing an enemy spy for critical information would be a grave travesty.

They wanted to know it all - what I ate, when I ate, when I would use the toilet in the morning, when I would bathe or if I would bathe at all, if I watched porn, if I smoked or drank or did drugs, what my belief system was or if I was an atheist, if I partied or sodomized. The questions were unending and trying to answer them was similar to a scenario of bomb disposal - one wrong snip on the wrong wire and everything was bound to go boom.

The process was all the more overwhelming and confusing at the same time because each experience of inspecting and talking to the owner seemed to be sending out different signals about what the average home owner was expecting in a potential tenant. That compounded with the fact that I was soon to be homeless accelerated the desperation quotient in landing a place to stay even more; after all how long does one stay in a hotel paying through one's nose?

Thankfully after a tortuous fortnight of scanning the internet, browsing the city map, walking the streets, hopping on and off buses, regional trains and underground trams I did find a place to stay and funnily enough the landlord asked me just one question - "Are you from India?" The rest as they say is history - I moved in and have a roof over my head and a place to finally call home.

What is your crazy house-hunting story?