What do I call Home

When I wanted to buy my own place in a country partially alien to me, I thought back to about two decades back. Having spent only a small part of my early childhood here, I did not know what to expect of the old motherland. But ever since my mind was made up about getting back here, even if it meant a series of unavoidable upheavals, there was little on my mind other than getting a place to call home.

The time I spent here had been all about sunny corridors, running along the said sunny corridors and jumping into tanned arms at the end of sunny corridors. There are bits about being held over basins to brush my teeth, and more rot that festers there but I suppose the sunny corridors bit is entirely about India. I suppose there are a million reasons why I felt the urge to return here. Maybe it was spiritual healing, maybe some isolation, maybe self-discovery. The thing is, chorusing "O Canada!" and having a Canadian citizen status did not quite make me non-Indian.

Then I stepped on a alien homeland! Not that I was not amazed at the change in the people here. Sure, the air is heavily laden with pollution it tags me down with it, and sure, there are a lot more voices and background scores than my sanity had to cope with. Perhaps it bothers me that the people are unreasonably surlier, and more bent on hoodwinking me at every step though they are less discreet than the oil farmers of my land. But, for all my faith in things sorting themselves out, I was unnerved by the cultural shock that awaited me and my accent.

But then I came back.

Pune is not fabulous because it is fabulous. It is fabulous because it works for me. It grew on me, and I am very much in love with what appalled me just a few months ago. Pune is not about a broiling mix of emotional tensions which must erupt on any given day to vent it all in a nice little riot. I know I waited for that bit, but it never came. My friends did help me with my adaptation but I suppose there is only this much that friends can do. I also suppose there is no universal remote to switch myself on or off. There was just a gentle gradient that helped me acclimatize to Pune, and from a feeling of being seasick all day long, I went on to being at one with the world again; which incidentally is what life should be all about.

Now Pune is home, And I am no longer a foreigner to my own motherland. She accepts me as one of her own, and there is no joy greater than being accepted as one being a part of a whole.

Now all I need is a wife.

Nikhil Jay - Writer...Finding himself in Pune...