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CRANK'S CORNER

        I have always felt mildly funny when people say that they are shifting their residence.

        How on earth can you do that, when in reality you are only shifting yourself and not the other way round, I would ask. But that is the usage, isn't, they would counter. And I would laugh away at the imbecility of it all, nodding vaguely at the unconvincing explanation.

        But today I am a changed man.

        Last week I moved to a new place. And I am now wondering whether I have actually.

        'I have got a new address for myself. I want you to make the necessary corrections in your files', I went and told my bank manager, moronically thinking that he would just take the new details and see me off.

        Well, he drawled like Lawrence Oliver would before breaking into a lengthy dialogue, where is the proof? Proof for what, I asked. Proof that you live there. 'I haven't lived there, I have just moved my things last night,' I told him innocently.

        'Okay, Get me your telephone bill', he asked non sequitur. I quickly pulled it out of my bag and he lazily scanned the address and said 'so, this is where you live?' No, this is not where I live. This is where I used to live,' I told him, pointing to the relevant portion in the bill.

        'But why are you giving me this?' he came back at me. 'But you only asked for it,' I went back at him even more strongly. No, no, he waved his chubby fingers. 'Get me the telephone bill with your new address on it'.

        But I don't have a telephone there to have got a bill on it later, I said.

        He didn't obviously answer, but just looked at me with increasing irritation. He began to contort his face in enigmatic geometry as words began to fail him. 'Okay,' he finally conceded, 'go to the telephone department and formally apply to move your telephone to the new address. Get an acknowledgement for that.'

        Like an innocent lamb sent to a slaughter house, I meekly went to the telecom office and asked what should be done to get the phone shifted. A man of imposing girth and an even more imposing moustache, sitting behind what was scrawled boldly as 'help desk', continued to pick his teeth with leisurely gusto. He seemed so involved with the exercise that I thought it was his all-consuming hobby. I repeated what I told him first, just in case he had failed to grapple with what I had said. He began to dig his teeth with even more intensity than his colleagues show while pickaxing the roads avowedly for laying writhing cables. I stood there sheepishly, unable to decide what to do further. Luckily whatever that was struck in the man's teeth must have given way and he deigned to acknowledge my presence as he arched his bushy eyebrows as if to ask what. I went through the entire thing like a silly parrot on overtime. He casually pulled a yellow form from under a sheaf of precariously placed papers, and said: 'Just get it filled and get the attestation of your bank manager'.

        I felt like somebody had slammed shut the phone on me. 'But he was the one who sent me here in the first place', I protested weakly. The man by then had lost all interest in me and switched to a new pass time —picking his nose, leaving me uncared and uncovered like a dug up pit.

        Any way, wherever I went to inform about my address change, the unfailing response was 'where's the proof?'

        Quite simply, I don't have anything to prove that I live in the place where I live. Since I haven't established that, logically, I think, I demonstrate the opposite — my non-existence. If my presence is absent, then my absence is present, nah?

        This breaks new ontological ground.

        I should thank my bank manager and the teeth-and-nose-picking sincere worker of the telecom department for helping me in that.