Adios, Pune.
city of my dreams
When I passed my 12th, I had the kind of grades that could’ve gotten me into engineering through some of the most decent colleges in my locality. That was the plan, actually. Simple. Safe. Stay back, study, settle. Most of my friends did that. And even my parents expected me to do the same.
Then I went to Pune to give my JEE-Mains.
I don’t even remember the exam that well, yeah, because it sucked. What I remember is the people and the overall impact the city had on me even when I returned to my hometown. Kids my own age, walking around with a kind of confidence I had never seen back home. And don’t take me wrong; it’s not that they were far more intelligent than me or anything. It was just that they could frame whatever utter bullshit they used to think in a very good and composed English. I decided right then that I wanted to move there. Not for the degree. But for whatever that was.
I knew I wouldn’t get into any good engineering college in Pune with what I had. So I did the only thing that made sense to a seventeen-year-old chasing a feeling instead of a plan. I switched to Arts.
I have lived in Pune for more than a decade now. And I loved every second of it. Every. Single. Second.
But somewhere in the last year, Pune changed. Not the city. The city is still exactly where I left it, with the same traffic, same chai stalls and cafes, and same posh localities smelling like money and weekend brunches. I changed. Or rather, what happened to me there changed how the city sits inside me.
Now the city oozes memories from every corner. The kind I so want to surgically remove from every inch of my brain. The smell of those same urban roads, the same posh localities I once felt lucky to even walk through, now make me want to throw up.
I don’t think I can ever go back to Pune again. Yes, this is the moral of this blog. I feel so teary when I write this.
And that’s the part that actually scares me. Not the leaving. The fact that a city I chased at seventeen, that I built an entire decade of my life around, is now a place I have to actively avoid. What was once my biggest dream is now my biggest discomfort.
I don’t know what you do with that. I don’t think anyone really tells you what to do when the place that made you also becomes the place you can’t stand to be in. I just know I’m not going back. Not yet. Maybe not ever.