My father passed away in 2005, and my mother signed off seven-and-a-half years later. For nearly a decade and a half, my sister and I have been custodians of an inheritance of anecdotes that bear witness to their capacity to embrace surprises and not play by the book. We find ourselves retreating into these memories, particularly during moments when nostalgia seems to be a balm against shrinking spaces and the gradual erosion of the free spirit.One of these accounts goes back more than 50 years. One evening, the two had hopped onto a “four seater” — World War II Harleys converted into taxi bikes — that would take them from their workplace in Mandi House in New Delhi to Karol Bagh. The refugee settlement was undergoing a transformation of sorts. Punjabis displaced by Partition were beginning to put their bad days behind them and turn their modest dwellings into income-generating properties.AdvertisementAlso Read | Who’s my neighbour | From village streets to Delhi flats: I am a citizen without a neighbourhoodThe prospective landlord had laid down one condition before renting out the one-room second-floor tenement: No fish or meat. The restriction, he had said, was meant to honour the scruples of the family with whom my parents were to share the floor. Eager to set up their home, the soon-to-be-married couple agreed.Their first neighbours turned out to be a couple from Tamil Nadu, part of a steady stream of administrators, teachers, entrepreneurs, doctors, clerks and artists who had made Delhi their home in the decades after Independence. They struck an immediate chord with my father, who had left his Lucknow home for work. My mother was a natural at forging friendships anyway. But it took the two sets of neighbours a few months to break bread.One day, the Tamilians asked a question that caught my parents off guard: “Why did you two give up eating meat?” And my parents were certainly not prepared for what came next. Their neighbours admitted, somewhat sheepishly, to eating mutton occasionally. “We aren’t upper-caste Hindus, you see, but the landlord had said that you are strict vegetarians,” they explained.AdvertisementTurned out, the house owner had tried to hoodwink the two couples into following the taboos of his family. He had failed. Like their neighbours, my parents too were cooking meat on the sly.That shared secret over food said something about the Delhi that was taking shape in the 1970s — a city where migrants negotiated differences with humour and sometimes even dismantled stereotypes. My mother was born in the city, but her parents, too, were once newlywed migrants in the then-young capital of British India. An upbringing in a neighbourhood of people who had moved in from Bengal and areas that are today Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat — Hindus, Muslims, Christians — was perhaps one reason for her instinctive preference for conviviality over conformity.So it was a bit of a surprise to my father that when a colony for people displaced from East Pakistan — Chittaranjan Park today — was coming up in the southern parts of Delhi, my mother asked him to apply for a plot. My paternal grandparents had left their ancestral homes long before Partition, but their siblings were refugees. My mother, therefore, believed that a certificate might still have been arranged. But the idea was nipped in the bud.“Who wants to stay in a Bengali ghetto?” Baba responded with the gentle firmness Ma had come to expect. She let the matter drop. After all, the two had chosen the unpredictable companionship of a diverse neighbourhood over the familiarity of a cultural enclave.We would not acquire a house of our own for a long time and, on more than one occasion, had to move residence almost as soon as we had settled into one. Even then, I — and I am sure my sister — look back at those experiences with a smile. They meant growing up amid the aromas of many kitchens, hearing different languages in the housing complexes we lived in, and listening to my parents and their friends reminisce about the generosity of a Punjabi headmaster who had once allowed Durga Puja celebrations in the playgrounds of his school. They also involved watching in hushed silence as my father and the uncleji next door spoke of standing guard outside the houses of Sikhs when Congress hooligans were running amok after the assassination of Indira Gandhi.Above all, such experiences meant that cultural practices were not markers of difference but invitations to understand our neighbours better. During one of those years of near-peripatetic existence, our Shia neighbours held a majlis during Muharram, when our living room became an extension of theirs. Doors were kept open so that guests mourning the martyrdom of Imam Hussain could move in and out freely. My sister and I were too young to grasp the theological significance of what was happening. All we understood was that we had to be sombre when our neighbours were grieving, just as we shared their joys on Eid. Not to forget, I was at their house a few months before the majlis, with my friend, giving vent to our anger against Javed Miandad after he had extinguished India’s hopes of victory at a Sharjah tournament with a famous last-ball six.you may likeToday, the language of suspicion clouds narratives on migration. Government policy and even public discourse are frequently animated by rhetoric about “outsiders”. My father’s remark on “the Bengali ghetto” returns to me at a time when “Bangladeshi” has become a pejorative loosely directed at Bengalis in general. I find myself wondering: Would I give up the chance to live in an enclave of like-minded people? Algorithms, after all, increasingly shepherd us into online neighbourhoods of our own preference. Would retreating into a physical sanctuary behove the custodian of my parents’ memories?I am struggling for answers. I wish I were as clear-headed as my parents.The writer is senior associate editor, The Indian Express. kaushik.dasgupta@expressindia.com