Growing Up Between Indian Army Stations: The Childhood of a Fauji Kid

If you hesitate, smile awkwardly, or take a breath before answering the question “Where are you from?”, chances are you’re a Fauji kid. Growing up in a defence family means living in more cities in eighteen years than most people do in a lifetime. Each posting adds a pin to the map; each move, another version of home.

So when someone asks where you’re from, you’re left weighing your answers—do you name the city on your birth certificate, the place you stayed the longest, or the town your family is currently living in? None of them feels entirely right. All of them feel a little true.

You learn early that home is not a permanent address. Home is where your parents are, where your trunk is unpacked, where your evenings begin to feel familiar again. Home travels with you. For many, this sounds confusing, even unsettling. But for a Fauji kid, it isn’t an identity crisis, it’s a quiet kind of freedom.

Moving to new cities meant being the New Kid—again. A new classroom, new teachers struggling with your surname, and that familiar first day of sitting quietly, waiting for someone to ask your name. The drill repeated itself every few years; you know it way too well.

But it also meant this: a best friend for every school, every station. The kind of friendships that formed fast over shared tiffins, borrowed notebooks, and stories of having lived in similar stations. You learned how to open up quickly, how to belong without hesitation, because time was always limited.

Each school left behind memories and added names to your Facebook friend list. Some friendships faded into profile pictures and birthday wishes, while others survived distance, transfers, and time. And though people say such friendships are fleeting, Fauji kids know better. They are intense, real, and forever tied to a place that once felt like home.

Living in the cantonment meant waking up according to your Fauji parents’ PT time. This was not a choice. This was forced participation. Mornings began with the sounds of whistles, running shoes hitting the road, and parents already dressed in PT gear while we fought sleep with half-open eyes.

The only thing making it sufferable? You weren’t alone. Your friends lived the same life, dragged out at the same ungodly hour. And on the rare morning someone didn’t show up, it was immediately assumed they’d won the cycle—they escaped the matrix.

But somewhere between school years and growing up, that compulsion turned into a lifestyle. We became adults who wake up early for no reason, feel mildly guilty sleeping in, and secretly enjoy morning walks. The PT we never signed up for followed us well into life—and honestly, we’re still not sure how to opt out.

We live in cities now where you barely know your neighbour. But that’s not how we grew up. Our childhoods were measured in casual announcements like, “Mummy, Nithiya k ghar jaa rahi hu” (Mother, I am going to Nithiya’s house), usually said when we didn’t want to eat at home and were craving idli-sambar/paranthas/or anything that we didn’t cook at home. Doors were always open, kitchens even more so, and no one ever questioned an extra plate on the table. Your neighbourhood was just one big happy family.

We grew up listening to music in languages we didn’t speak fluently, celebrating festivals that weren’t technically “ours,” and learning traditions simply by being present. One day it was Diwali, the next it was Onam, Eid, Christmas, or Lohri, and everything was celebrated with equal enthusiasm.

In a place where a Sarva Dharma Sthal stood quietly, reminding us that faith could coexist, how could we grow up any other way? Growing up in a cantonment didn’t just give us friends from everywhere—it turned us into a cultural kaleidoscope.

If you think having a big, happy family is all good, think again. It also meant that whatever our fun-filled hearts and adventurous minds got up to would inevitably find its way back home. In a cantonment, there were no secrets—because everyone knew your parents.

A missed class, an extra kulfi, cycling a little too far, or laughing a little too loudly at the wrong place and time, someone always saw, and someone always reported. Not out of spite, but out of a strange, collective sense of responsibility. The neighbourhood watched over you the way a family does: closely, constantly, and with opinions.

Privacy was a luxury, but accountability was a given. The cantonment didn’t need surveillance cameras or strict rules; we had the fear of “the eyes”, which made us behave, mostly. Mischief found its way through the cracks, as it always does.

Big Brother had nothing on a cantonment. It saw all.

I often wonder about the girl I met in ninth standard, whose father got posted somewhere else in the middle of the session. She moved away, just like that, and I never met her again.

Being a Fauji kid meant being okay with goodbyes. It meant learning to let go before you were ever ready. Friendships were formed quickly and deeply, with the unspoken knowledge that they came with an expiry date. You learned not to ask when someone was leaving, only where they were headed next. And to carry the hope that you’d meet again, at some station.

Goodbyes weren’t dramatic; they were routine. A last walk home, a hurried exchange of addresses, promises to write and call, that slowly faded into memory. And yet, each farewell left its mark, teaching us resilience, adaptability, and a strange kind of courage—the courage to open your heart again, knowing it might soon have to close.

Growing up as a Fauji kid meant learning early that life rarely stays still. Homes changed, schools changed, friends came and went, and yet something steady remained within us. We learned how to arrive, how to belong, and how to leave—again and again—without losing ourselves in the process. The cantonments we grew up in may now exist only in memory, but they shaped our values, our resilience, and our way of loving people and places. We grew up between stations, yes—but we also grew up carrying home wherever we went.

Also Read: Bada Khana Explained: The Army Tradition Behind a Familiar Phrase