In 2018, I had won my first grant. I had written it while my dad was in the hospital, pitched it a few days after he died, pitched it again a few days after my mom died and got word of the approval while waiting in the bank submitting his and her death certificates. As part of the "Welcome to the grant family!" process that large grant funders do for their awardees, they requested me to come to Pune for a day-long thing. I landed at the airport and decided to take advantage of the couple of hours in the early morning that I had, found a bus that took me to Aundh, where my mom and I lived after my dad got transferred to Mumbai, and tracked down that house. But I was an emotional mess and I couldn't handle the fact that they weren't around for me to call and let them know all the old places I could recognize in Pune and sobbed throughout the bus ride and the walk to the house. Received a lot of stares, but there are advantages to wearing glasses- you can hide your tears more easily than not.
But it is 2026. I am no longer that weepy mess. And I am back here in Pune for a 3 day conference. Which just so happens to be in a campus very close to that same Aundh house, so I decided that this time, I would try to track down the very first house that the 3 of us ever lived in in Pune. I could recall the names Shivajinagar and Model Colony, but try as I could, the rest of the address was a total blank. No recollection of the apartment name, or the road, but had full and intense clarity on how the road used to look, the sparrows that would chirrup, the green of the trees, the space in front where Appa first taught me how to ride a bike, and play badminton, and made me skip so I could become stronger; the little garden at the back where Amma helped me bury a sparrow and then her chicks after the former was killed flying into our hall fan and the latter starved to death (yeah, grim!), where we would pluck pomogranites and jamuns, where she found "thizhanellu" plant when I had jaundice, and the garage where the apartment ppl would keep a Ganapathi and sing songs during Ganesh Chaturthi. That house. But what was it called? Where was it?
Then in a massive stroke of luck, I found Vaibhav Sweets on the map! Vaibhav Sweets! The place outside which I would stand every day for my school bus and where I first discovered that male and female sparrows look different! Surely it couldn't be the same! But Google pics assured me that it was- the same bright red lights, the same fonts. So I found my way to Vaibhav Sweets and then to the apartment.
The slums opposite the apartment no longer exist, although it is still clearly a lower socioeconomic neighborhood than the earlier part of the road. Sheetal Apartments (I do NOT recall it being Sheeldutt Apts, frankly...) looks a bit tired. Maybe its charms were invisble to me in the fading twilight and yellow street lamps. The wooden board inside with all the names of the owners is the same that hung there in the 1990s with the exact same names... did nobody sell their unit or move out, or has that wooden board become so much a part of the collective consciousness that nobody has thought to replace or update it? Surely there must have been deaths, weddings, births and movements of families... The garden inside has been paved over - no more pomogranate or jamun or thizhanellus from there. I was too jittery to wait for someone to come and ask me what I was doing there, nor did I feel that, if asked, I could conceivably tell people the reason why I came all the way just to see it again.
I then went on the road that led to my Marathi tuition teacher- a big part of my life in that era. For three years, from the time we moved to Pune, I went to Smita aunty's house nearly every single day trying to learn a new language from scratch so that I could survive school and Puneri life, where everyone spoke (and still speaks) only Marathi. Smita aunty, as a newly wed, had come to live with her husband and his elderly mother in a small house with a very large garden and an outbuilding that served as her husband's printing shop. He would print business cards and the like, and set them out to dry one by one before packing them up neatly in little boxes. That outbuilding used to be a place of magic for me- the walk through damp earth and little tiles laid out in a path, the smell of ink, the stacks of empty cards waiting like so much possibility, and then, after being inked, shipped off to all sorts of places in the city and into unknown hands across the globe. Their sight would fill me with yearning- I desperately wanted to work in a place like that. I felt that there could be no higher purpose than being able to print whatever you wanted in your own home. Smita was a lab tech and a painter. She ran biochemistry tests in a hospital called Ratna Memorial, where my mom, a few years later, had a pretty major surgery to remove a tennis ball-sized lump from the side of her spine, the visible sign of her struggle with bone TB. I wonder if Smita recognized my mom's name when her blood tube must have showed up at her lab for pre-op and post-op tests. Never thought about asking her this at the time, of course. Smita's mother-in-law was a Marathi-version of my grandmother. Widowed at an early age, conservative, would wash her own clothes and set them out to dry by hoisting them on a high clothesline inside the house and when dry, would use a stick to move them down to a clean area, untouched by human hands so that it would remain "pure", fluent in multiple languages and possessed of an acerbic sort of humour. She was an avid gardener and it was there in her beautiful, tree-laden, damp garden that I first saw lemons growing on a shrub and have longed to grow in my home ever since (now I have a lemon shrub, but it is, alas, only filled with thorns and has stubbornly refused to fruit, despite using my Ajji's trick of threatening to cut it) I used to feel very close to the elderly lady, of whose name I have no recollection now. I don't recall the husband's name either, for all the hours I spent in their house.
The small house with the large garden no longer exists- it seems to have been converted into a set of flats. But what was astonishing to me was that behind the flat was a garden with an outbuilding! Did Smita and her husband decide to hold on to that space after all? And if so, why? Did he still work out of that space? When did the elderly lady pass away and how?
I wasn't prepared to stick around and ask questions, especially because I don't know any names. How would I even ask and whom would I ask...but more importantly, what would I do with any of this information? It's so random, and kind of pointless, no? It's not like I want to get back in touch with any of them. Is merely satisfying one's curiosity enough to go through the trouble of finding someone to talk to and rehashing all the old times?
Anyway, two points of intrigue: there used to be a small boy, a 6 year old, who had lost his father in a road traffic accident (even in those days!) on the highway between Pune and Mumbai. His father had been a dentist, I think. This kid used to come in my school bus and lived fairly close to Smita's house. The entrance to the road leading to Smita's house now has a large sign board that says Kale Dentistry.... I wonder if it is this kid!
And the second: there used to be a slightly smirky, "cool" kid calle Gaurav Mulchandani- again, living somewhere on or around that road. And there is now a sweet shop (almost exactly opp Vaibhav Sweets) called Mulchand Sweets! Did Smirky Gaurav get into the sweets business? So many points of eyebrow-raising worth!
These are the things I wish I could speak to my parents about. Who else would get any of this adventure? My mom would have totally gotten my need to revisit, we would have gossiped nicely ont the phone and she would have been a fellow detective on my path to discovering the old apartment complex. I think she would have also probably had the courage to go speak to some of the people.
My dad would have remembered names and faces and stories- it wouldn't have been half-baked knowledge like mine. He would have known exactly where I had to go and how. And would have encouraged me to find my way to my old school too.
Being an only child has its pros and cons. But I think the loneliest bits about being one is the fact that once your parents are no longer around, you don't have anyone to share your childhood memories with. And childhood memories are intense and vibrant and matter a lot.
