Nostalgia

I had to post this because it's so well-written and reminded me of some old times ...

DIL PUKARE, AAREY AAREY AAREY by Paromita Vohra

Now, when the weather turns hot and still, making the wisp that is the Bombay winter a faint memory and the decision to buy a top floor house feel like a mistake, I head for Aarey.

I have robust friends, hardy hearties who said they walked in Aarey everyday. This I put down to wholesome extremism. As far as I knew Aarey Milk Colony (what was it anyway? A toy town made of bulging milk packets?) was somewhere in the wilds. Old people used to go there for that arcane entertainment – picnics. Going so far to take a walk? Why not pool in for a community treadmill?

Then I discovered the word pagdandi – the mud path near Fantasy Land which led to a broken wall – when you slipped through it you were…where were you? What was this place where the temperature dropped by a couple degrees and there was nothing but creepers, trees and the odd lazy dog (no, not me, a real dog)?

I approached Aarey gingerly, walking along the edges, keeping the distant line of buildings always in sight, unlike my friends who “walked till New Zealand”, which I assumed was some esoteric walkers metaphor. The roads sloped up and down, lined by prehistorically dense thickets, a moist and mysterious green. There were carpets of yellow summer flowers on the path, orange rashes of gulmohars in the sky. Supposedly, there was a lake somewhere, a café on the hill to the right but I was ok not adventuring that far in.

Soon the silence and the beauty seduced me. The criss-cross lanes, the abandoned buildings, the regular walkers with their fractional nods of acknowledgment became familiar, reassured me into going deeper till I reached New Zealand – the New Zealand Hostel for students of something dairy. It marked a sort of mid-point. Past that you were heading to Goregaon.

Aarey was a huge pool at the heart of the pavementless suburbs, us on one bank, our Sai Baba complex friends on the other. A big apple you could take chunky bites of at will, roaming randomly on a different route each day.

For a while the less intrepid stopped going, because we were scared of panthers. But perhaps the panthers and us need to fear the same people.

Now Aarey has a busy arterial road and a film studio so we have to enjoy it in sections like an orange. Febrile developers nibble illegally at its edges. Some ministers would like to make a meal of it – sell the whole lot off to solve the city’s fiscal problems.

While we can, we trudge through this secret wonderland, this enchanted wood which softens the city summer, quiets the troubled city heart.

The link is at - http://www.parodevi.com/?p=119