A post by Chhavi Jangid

In a lot of families there is a town nobody has been to.

It arrives in pieces. A river that was wider then. A school with a tin roof. A neighbour's name still mentioned as if you ought to know it. Somebody left that place once, with two trunks and a ticket, and everything after — the city, the job, this house, you — began on the other side of that journey.

We rarely ask about it properly. It sounds like old talk, and there is always something on the stove.

But that town exists now in one person's telling, and nowhere else.

Which place in your family's story have you only ever heard about, and never seen?