Our Home in Pune

I am in Pune now, the city where I spent four forgettable years in engineering college. But even as my disenchantment with the degree course grew over those four years, so did my fondness for the city. I have been coming here since I was child. My grandparents built their post-retirement home here, which was incidentally completed two months after I was born. There is a photo of me when I was about a year old sitting on the garage porch with my sister and booth of us have wide smiles on our faces. Mine is toothless, of course, and hers is missing a few teeth. For some reason, I am wearing white polka-dotted tights with a frilly waist, which it later occurred to me was a hand-me-down from my sister.
I realized how much I liked my grandparents' home only after my parents built another home on the adjacent plot that used to be the garden, and my grandparents moved into the new building. The old building oozed character from every nook. It had a hall with a high ceiling and a ceiling fan with a stem that was about eight-feet tall. Both bedrooms looked out into the hall and there was a winding staircase too. And of course there was a good-sized lawn at the back which was filled with fruit trees. Perfect for a little boy to ramble in.
Pune, back then, was known as a pensioner's paradise and the suburb where my grandparents lived was even quieter than the rest of the city. It was a haven from the heat, dust and noise of Bombay.
Over the years, all  that has changed. Pune is now an IT hub and as our luck would have it, the mammoth IT park is not very far from my grandparents' place. It is no more a pensioners paradise--it is teeming with young IT workers and no one even their wildest dreams would liken it to a paradise. But is still feels like a semi-haven at least. The pace of life is not as fast as in Bombay, it has a slightly rural feel to it, there is a lot more space and the weather is better than Bombay, which is not saying much. And, my grandmother lives here so I am always happy to visit.