I missed Pune. I hadn't realised how much till my visit last Sunday. I had forgotten what a lovely place it was. May be meeting Leena and Sonia had made the city feel more beautiful. The rains helped. The rains melt me and turn me into a romantic. And why won't they? Rains are like magicians. They transform the lands they fall on into a canvas with the most beautiful and heartstopping art. They make me turn sixteen and want to fall in love all over again.
I did. Fall in love I mean. With life. I have fallen in love with life, sweeties. The journey from Mumbai to Pune is beautiful in the rains. The hills, the fields and the valleys through misty air and floating clouds look like pictures out of a fairy tale.I have childhood memories of making this journey by train and having Karvande in the halts at the stations in between. Black berries in a cone made of sturdy dried leaves. Karvandes are a trip down memory lane to every person who has been a kid at NDA. The trips through the forests between the grids of roads and bungalows across the golf club to the swimming pool, the treks into the hills and forests around us as if they were play grounds, the protected forests on the roadsides with bushes of karvande and the little boys and girls from the nearby villages who sold these berries during the pitter pattering of non-stop rains, all these memories are firmer because of karvande. The puddles which we splashed while getting ourselves wet in the rains, the parents who never reprimanded us for getting wet and soiled, these are memories of our childhood.
The short quick trip to NDA brought back fierce feelings. We were home and yet couldn't call it home. Like Jumi said, as kids our world began and ended in NDA. Every road, every path was our home. It was so pristine and beautiful, that its beauty had reached the recesses of my memories. I had become so unused to this uncorrupted beauty in my adult life. I realised how fortunate we had been to have grown up in such a place. A childhood we had taken for granted and had never really thought to be thankful for. Until now, when there was no way we could live that life again.
Sonia has a lovely house. Leena thinks Pune is the best place in the world to live in. They should get awards for loyalty or so I thought till I started envying them. For having made this city their home.
Sonia was married when she was Sharan's age. Her daughter seems more mature than her. She hasn't changed and is as cheerful and chirpy as she always was. Leena is the same undercurrent of brains and humour she always was. I love talking to her. It was our childhood, back all over again. Nanne was tall and a man. He picked me up in his BMW. The cute little boy who was always laughing and had his waist length hair open and left to dry after a shampoo every Sunday couldn't be seen. Initially. A little while into talking to him, and I got a glimpse of the boy I knew. Sonia had a most wonderful lunch ready and I was shamelessly licking my fingers at the end of the meal. I didn't know when I would get such dahi curry again and wanted the taste to linger forever.
Sharan was three years old when I had made a visit to Pune and had had a picture clicked with her. Nineteen years later, I have another picture clicked with her. Now and Then, as Leena commented. Now and then indeed. So many years in between. So many events. So many experiences, many of them ugly. But like the seed that is demolished when the sapling breaks through, which is but the manifestation of the same being in a freer and more beautiful form, the devastation of the past are necessary for the freedom and beauty of the present. I am in love with the tender sapling growing out of my destruction. It is beautiful as is the nurturing I am lavished with. I love you my friends.
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