We are house hunting. The contract for our current place is up in December but we already know that our landlord is looking either to sell the place or to raise our rent. Neither suggestion gives us the warm and fuzzies so we have decided to pre-empt an eviction and plan for departure on our own terms.
For several reasons, house hunting is a Bad Thing. Firstly, it’s bad because it means that we are going to leave IndiaBulls Blu: the place we have called home for the past two years; the place where many of Jasper’s friends live; the place where I am a regular participant in the fruit delivery WhatsApp group and the Blu Moms WhatsApp group (a bottomless swap-shop for kitchen utensils, dressing up costumes and electricians); the place where I do my yoga classes twice a week; the place where I understand the sports facility booking system; the address we have given to our banks, our jobs and anyone else who needs to formally identify us; the address we know can be found by food delivery services and Ubers; the place which is equidistant between two almost-acceptable supermarkets; the apartment in which we have just settled Jasper back into a sensible sleeping routine and the place into which we have fitted all our carefully measured and purchased furniture.
It’s bad because it will inevitably end in a need to pack up and move. Even if we use a packing and moving company to take on the challenge physically, I dread the upheaval and the subsequent resettling. The only upside I see is that I might finally relocate the missing bobble hat and small jar of spare buttons that seem to have been absorbed into our apartment during the months we have been living here. It’s a bonus that my sister, Alice, will be conveniently visiting us in November to help with the move. Or maybe to spend some time with Jasper and get some winter sun.
House hunting is also bad because it’s a time-consuming, soul-sucking hassle of a job. I had forgotten just how draining house hunting can be because I didn’t hunt for where we live now. Dylan found this place all on his own. Actually, come to think of it, Dylan found our previous place too, in Star City back when we were in Myanmar. I say ‘found’ … ‘built’ is a more accurate description of his role in the operation. In his then-job, Dylan built the 28 storey residential tower of which we were the sole occupants for the best part of 2 years (the low occupancy had nothing to do with Dylan’s workmanship, he assures me). So, really, the last time I looked for somewhere to live was in 2015, in Yangon, and that search was considerably lower stakes than my current one.
For starters, I only had myself and Dylan to think about. (That’s actually not strictly true, there was another housemate in the beginning, a friend of ours who mysteriously and rather impressively ghosted us while we lived together in the same apartment - but that’s another story entirely!) On top of it being a simpler brief in terms of what we wanted from the apartment, Yangon was also a far smaller city: one which didn’t take 3 hours to traverse in bad traffic and one in which the places of interest were relatively close together. It was in this apartment (which I found) that we built an artisanal gin bar around a serendipitous sink in the corner of the living room but, despite what that might suggest, it was also an apartment in which we didn’t spend an awful lot of time. Neither of us worked from home, there was no small child taking naps in the middle of the afternoon and we were free and willing to socialise outside the home with a far wider circle of friends than we currently possess. This was also the apartment on the stairs of which one security guard stabbed another security guard to death one morning. And yet, that didn’t bother us in the slightest. Like I said, lower stakes.
Practically speaking, my Mumbai search is much easier than my Yangon search was: there are websites and apps and everyone in the luxury real estate game (for that is the game we are playing) seems to speak, at least passable, English. Emotionally speaking, however, it is far harder. The sight of a balcony 40 floors up doesn’t conjure visions of sunset cocktails, it sends my heart plunging down into my lower digestive system at the thought of Jasper throwing something over the edge or, worse still, climbing. A lack of sports facilities makes me feel as though I am robbing him of his athletic potential. A lack of other young people make me worry that he’ll miss out on all his classes and impromptu playdates. Less natural light makes me worry for his eyes, the smell of dust makes me fear for his lungs, wallpapered walls on which we are not allowed to hang pictures make me wonder how a place might ever feel like home to him (and to me, to be honest).
This waterfall of worries aside, there are a couple of ways in which house hunting or, to be more specific, house hunting right now, is a good thing. At the top of this list is the weather: we are currently in the monsoon season. This might seem counterintuitive but I want to see these places at their worst. I want to see them lashed by the rain and whipped by the wind. ‘Why?’, you might well ask. I want to know if the endless bustle of busy bears (Jasper’s word for any kind of blue collar worker) trudging barefoot through our living room on a daily basis is going to follow us to our new home.
Over the past few weeks, since the rains finally started (later than usual this year), it has been monsooning indoors in our house. We noticed the issue towards the end of the last rainy season, when Jasper almost slip-slid his way across the floor as he rushed out to play with his toys one morning, but were assured by 2022’s raggle-taggle of busy bears that they had fixed it. Apparently, they had not. Less than 24 hours into a 4 month monsoon season we had collected and emptied about 10 washing up bowls worth of water which came dolloping down from the top of the window, bringing rust and plasterwork with it. To his credit, our landlord had a maintenance team in to take a look within hours. To his discredit, however, he is the architect for the building.
Some days the leak seems fixed, other days not so much. Some days it’s calm enough for the facade team to send a hoist down the outside of the building safely, other days it is most definitely not. Yesterday, I watched someone climb out of the hoist and into our living room, through a window, 21 storeys up. He was, at least, attached to something by a rope around his waist. Then I watched someone else do the reverse - minus the rope. I do not have the stomach (or the time) for this. Needless to say, I am on the lookout for damp patches in the apartments I am viewing.
The other reason that my house hunt is timely is that rents are sky-rocketing in IndiaBulls Blu. Dylan and I have a theory that a contributing factor might be that the agents all seem to own and live in the compound, so they are busy driving up the value of their own assets. Whatever it is, IndiaBulls Blu appears to be top dog and hot property. While we would pay something for the convenience of staying put, we are not willing to pay double our current rent which, despite the aforementioned seasonal water features, our landlord seems convinced is appropriate. A slight increase would be understandable and worth negotiating; the number he’s floated with us is laughable and makes it a conversation not even worth entering into. We know this apartment better than he does and its skeletons are definitely not worth paying more for.
So, house hunting is undoubtedly a bad thing, albeit one which has come at a good time. But being bad doesn’t stop it from being enlightening. I have always seen house hunting as a rite of passage and have judged expats who land in a place and move directly into a house found and set up by their employer. That’s not real expat-ing! That’s too easy, and expat-ing is not meant to be easy. That skips you right through the exploration of your new city: it doesn’t let you build your own mental map of the place; it doesn’t let you discover pockets of personality that your day-to-day life will lead you straight past; it doesn’t let you form your own opinion of what merits which price tag; it doesn’t require you to evaluate and prioritise and ultimately surprise yourself with something you never thought you’d accept, let alone like; it doesn’t require you to sit in standing traffic wondering if there is any apartment in the world good enough to make you overlook the commute; it doesn’t test your patience; it doesn’t hone your ability to spot nearby lifelines like coffee shops and fruit vendors and pavement cobblers. All of this, I skipped in my own entry into Mumbai. Which might explain why I am feeling fairly upbeat about my house hunt at present.
When house hunting, (in a foreign country, at least) real estate agents are a necessary evil. They are supposedly there to guide your search and to surface the most suitable properties, but in truth they are there to collect the fee which is set to a standard of one month’s rent - another reason it’s not exactly a renters’ market. As I mentioned, some of the ‘agents’ are living in the compounds they are representing which, in some cases, suggests they don’t exactly need to work in such a hard-hustling job. But then, if there is one truism which sums up Mumbai, it’s that this city is all about the hustle: say yes now, work out the details later.
So far, the agents I have dealt with have been a mixed bag. Compared to Yangon, where they will show you absolutely anything just to get their foot in the door of an otherwise locked apartment, to take photos for the next person who is actually asking for a 6 bedroom house, or a studio with no windows, they are positively discerning in what they choose to show. Of course, as a veteran of the city now, I am able to give them very clear directions on the location, size, amenities and budget which makes my job much easier than Dylan’s was 2 years ago. But this doesn’t stop the agents from being a source of intrigue for me.
My first agent, to whom some neighbours introduced me, was very conservative and more than a little bit deaf. Not only could he not find anything within our budget, but he also couldn’t find anywhere which would accept ‘non-veg’ tenants. Being asked for my dietary specifics as part of a house hunt is certainly a first for me. Someone has suggested this might indicate that most of the owners on this agent’s books are Jains. Jainism is a religion not dissimilar to Hinduism in many ways but which demands its followers adhere to a far more restrictive diet including not being allowed to eat anything which grows in the ground as well as being full-veg (no egg). And then there was his refusal to take on board my concerns over a 40th floor balcony onto which every room in the house opened - including what would be Jasper’s room. Every time I said ‘Hmmm, I know there are great views of the racecourse and of my husband’s project, but this balcony is a little scary for me’, his response was, ‘No.’ And then the elaboration of ‘Your child can’t throw anything over,’ to which of course I just raised my eyebrows in a ‘you haven’t met my son’ look.
My second agent was a player. Not only of the luxury real estate game but of the social game too. As we walked from apartment to apartment in a complex boasting 4 different towers, he greeted people to our left and right with a secret fist-bump-handshake and a ‘Hey, bro - see you at the gym later?’ or a ‘Hey boss. How’s things? Gym tonight?’. In between his catch-ups I tried to ask him about the facility booking system to which he responded ‘Oh, I don’t know about squash. I only use the gym.’ And I when I commented on the lack of space for an oven and microwave in the so-called modular kitchen he humphed and said ‘ Oh, you can’t just put it on the counter? I don’t really know about that, I don’t cook.’ I was on the verge of pointing out to him that I wasn’t here for the Kingshuk (his name) Lifestyle Tour but was actually here to assess it as a potential residence for me when he disappeared off to take some calls/ do some deals/ get some rare monsoon sun. The colleague who he left me with turned out to be far more aware of his role and very perceptive as to what it was I was actually looking for. We still saw some oddities, but more because they’d been lined up by Kingshuk or because I had specified that I wanted to see these places in order to rule them out definitively. Like the tower with the lobby so dark I felt as though I was in an airport lounge in the middle of the night and had to resist the urge to set off truffling for a warm glass of champagne and a stale bread roll. Or the unit with the rooms so irregular and angled that I felt unsteady on my feet. Or the place that smelt of dogs. Or the one so infested with flies that I couldn’t really take in the ‘oversized master bedroom’ and ‘rare dual-access crockery cupboard’.
I find the other residents of a place as noteworthy as the apartments themselves. At the entrance to one very high end tower block (home to the dizzyingly angular labyrinth) on a visit Dylan and I made together, he called out a ‘two nannies, one baby’ imbalance (something we find boggling) with a hanger-on who can only have been the mother. This was right before we were almost tripped up by a Jasper-sized toddler, running excitedly through the lobby, followed by his very relaxed-looking parents and a little way behind, an enormous Hamley’s-wrapping-papered box, on legs, struggling to keep up. As we passed the box, we saw it was held up by a rattled-looking nanny also weighed down by two backpacks - neither of which looked like they were hers. Even before we’d seen the apartments we ruled out this building as overpriced.
Still, I have high hopes. My new agent seems to understand the brief and what’s more, he has advised us to look closer to the time we really want to move rather than trying to talk me into taking a place which isn’t quite what I want, at the wrong price and months earlier than I want it. What’s more, this guy has offered to negotiate down the price of whichever place I like. In case the absence of an air of entitlement around him didn’t communicate this clearly enough, this tells me that he does not live in the building.
We still have some time and I now have confidence that we will find somewhere that will very quickly feel like home.
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