As Hectic As It Gets
Pune
picture is a roadside sign in Baner
where i’m staying
a district of the concrete jungle that is Pune
a city of Three Million
with overpasses over overpasses over underpasses
and colossal thrusts of oblique stone
in a wide-stretching hotchpotch of higgledy-piggledy
running for miles yet never quite repeating the same
while seen on hectic motorbike pillion skedaddles
through fevered traffic of buzzing mopeds and blocklike trucks
all a good dynamic shock
after Mahabaleshwar
up in the Western Ghats
that range of mountains
running a thousand miles
down India’s west side
where Mahabaleshwar is
the source of the holy Krishna River
the strawberry capital of India
the centre of a National Park
an ex-colonial British hill station
and a tourist moshpit
in a sea of greenery and strawberry fields
above dramatic steep-sided deep valleys
the ancient rock looking its age
a hundred million
or two
where the mountain cool
was itself a shock
after a hot sunny peaceful seaside month
hopping slowly North up the coast of Maharashtra
where my fixed-minded good idea
of slow and intermittent motion along the Arabian Sea
turned out to be, in fact
a good idea
and where i walked
and took super-dilapidated buses
from village to the village or beach after next
every three days
a neat thing to do
in those places, which clearly, no other tourists go to
seeing how the kids so wavingly, smilingly, wide-eyedly reacted
in my month of sauntering down lush green lanes
through the tightly clustered poor villages
across the dry-brown fields
and up the beaches
where i saw just four white-folks in four weeks
while ambling down the winding trails between the mango groves
struggling over the hot barren uplands
and pacing up and out
or trudging down and back
the long empty sands
while now its
five nights amongst the concrete
with forts
and street of bookshop
and drunk cricket fans
and broken sidewalks
and friendly chai shops
and hectic concrete boulevards
and tightly crammed peopleness
and ...
whatever else this city might throw at me
or my pal Prachi might grinningly take me to
before i make the next big change
and fly to the Andaman Islands
which might just be a paradise
for, regulations permitting
i’ll have ten weeks of jungle and beach
at the Jungle Beach Resort
on Neil Island
yet am, as ever, chiefly planless
so i’ll find out when i get there
…
…
