Announcement Time

Digressing from the travel series, I have a big news to share. It is probably too early to announce at this point in time but I am extremely excited and want to record it for posterity. We are going to get a house built for ourselves to call it our own home. We have signed the deal with a land developer and a builder. The entire process of getting the land registered and building construction getting completed will take at least a year. But at the end of it, we will be able to move into our own place. It is a huge deal for us and a dream that we have been nurturing for the longest time.

Abbas and I have always lived in a flat and once we moved out of Kolkata we were always in a rented one. Due to several circumstances we were never able to invest in a property. It took me a very long time to convince Abbas to enter into a mortgage. He is too psyched by all the jobs getting redundant around us in Sydney. But my funda is, even if you are not paying mortgage you would still have to work to pay your rent because you would certainly be living under a roof. After a lot of discussions, arguments, coaxing, pestering and nagging, he had to finally give in.

Once we had decided that we would buy a property, then came the confusion of whether to go for a unit (flat in Aussie lingo) or home and should we go for a new one or old? All of us wanted a home so getting a unit was ruled out in the initial stage itself. We were happy to go for an already built house if we could get one close to the area that we currently live in. We simply love it. But no house around this area costs less than a million and completely out of our budget. We had to move out of this suburb which brought us to think that if we had to move out of this area anyway, then let’s buy a land and get a house built as per our liking. Most of the new suburbs where block of lands are being released are far away from the city. My only criteria were that there should be a train station and it should not take more than an hour to reach the Sydney CBD. Luckily this place has a station and it takes 55 mins from there to CBD and Abbas should take about 15-20 mins to drive to his workplace from there.

It was a stressful last one month. We had been saving money the entire last year but we spent a lot of money on the trip. When we returned we had about 5% of property value in our account. We had to save another 5% to seal the deal. We always keep Mantam aware of the situation without sugar coating anything. They too could sense that Mom and Dad were struggling to arrange the money for deposit. Tammu comes up to us “Mumma Baba, we understand that we are now meant to spend only what is required. We will live the same way that we did when you both were looking for jobs!” Mannu, whose fav place to visit is Kmart with Abbas every single week and buy some trifle things for a dollar or two, says “Baba Mumma, let’s stop going to Kmart. If we go there, we’ll buy. It’s better we don’t go”. We have always been proud of them for being so understanding.

Luckily we did a split contract and didn’t have to pay the entire 10% together. We got some time on hand and things worked out in our stride. Now that the money matters are very much in control, the next step would be different appointments to select so many things around the house like colour, bricks, tiles, walls, kitchen, electrical details etc etc. We are already confused with so many options available but equally excited with the whole process. It makes us feel that we have taken the right decision. Most of our acquaintances say that they took 5-6 months to finalise on what they wanted by going around different suburbs every weekend and doing a lot of research. But Abbas and I took the decision within a day or two. That’s how we have always been. I think we are the living examples of what Ratan Tata said “I don’t believe in taking the right decision. I believe in making the decision that I took right”

The day we signed the contract, we went out for dinner to our favourite restaurant and had our favourite dishes. When we came out and walked towards Black Beauty (our car) there was such amazing and soothing cold breeze that we just stood out there and enjoyed the nature’s celebration of our happiness. Tammu started feeling cold and she suggested sitting in the car with the windows open. We sat in the car, opened the windows and the sun roof, played some favourite songs, stretched our seats backwards, gazed at the stars in the sky for quite some time. It was so beautiful. The music player sang “Gun gunaati hai yeh hawaayein, muskuraata hai gagan, gaa raha hai ye saara aalam, zoobi dooooo paa ram pum” 😀