Back in Pune

I'm sitting in the waiting area of Pune's mini-airport, where I am one of two foreigners among a crowd of middle-class Indian businessmen. To me, that's Pune in a nutshell: a small, but perfectly pleasant waiting area frequented by middle-aged men with slight paunches and briefcases, college students sporting tee shirts and dupattas, and the odd whitey. Outside, the sun is shining through the smog. My internet works. There's nothing to complain about.

I was back in Pune this weekend to visit friends, bid my respects to my Sanskrit teachers, and remove a whole bunch of things from my room in my old flat here. When I left Pune two months ago, I took a single black suitcase with me: all my Sanskrit dictionaries and notebooks, some clothes, a yoga mat, a bag of ayurvedic party favors, two pairs of shoes, two shelves of novels, a once-worn sari, and various other items (nail polish remover? empty picture frames?) I had resigned to the dust of my old room, until now.

On Friday, I went out for a gorgeous, fancy lunch with my old roomies, M., G., and S., and their new roommate, D., from France. Unable to part with them so quickly afterward, I returned to our flat later in the evening and spent the rest of the night chatting and gossiping away, sitting around the kitchen table and laughing. I remembered how much of the joy I experienced while living in Pune was born and sustained around that kitchen table. Saturday was a day out with S.: more lunching, more shopping, more sitting around tables and laughing our heads off. On Saturday night, I had a fantastic (and fantastically long) dinner with my father, my Sanskrit teachers, and my Sanskrit classmates. Sunday brought more long lunches, this time Brahmin thalis at the Hotel Shreyas, with the teachers and students. This was followed by more sitting around tables and laughing with M. and S. at a dive on Law College Road. As weekends go, this one was pretty perfect. My dad even got me a bunch of roses for Valentine's Day.

My father and I stayed at a perfectly nice (but characterless) hotel on clogged, popular F.C. Road, but I spent almost all weekend out with the few buddies I picked up during my few months in the city. I never hands-down loved Pune when I was living there, and I still don't: it's the people I knew there who really make the city worth returning to. Over breakfast one morning in the garden of the Vaishali restaurant, also clogged and popular, my dad commented on how nice and pleasant Pune is. It's true: aside from the pollution and traffic, Pune really is an easy place to live. It's incredibly safe, even at night. The rickshaw-wallahs use the meter. The weather is bearable. There are good places to eat, and good apartments to rent. The women wear brightly colored saris and salwar kameez sets.

I tried to explain to my dad what, exactly, I didn't (and don't) like about Pune. The heartless traffic and the crushing pollution are easy offenders -- but Delhi is polluted and smoggy, too, and somehow I don't mind it so much there. Perhaps the very thing I dislike about Pune is something that enchanted me so much when I first started living there: it's just a regular city. The place is filled with students on the one hand, and middle-class Indian families on the other. Both groups, at least in the areas that I frequented, tended to be Hindu. There are flyovers and sweet shops and public buses and shopping malls. The giant banyan trees growing through the concrete are the only clue that Pune has a wild side. It's just a regular city.

I know the place has history and diversity: you'd be hard-pressed to find anyplace in India that doesn't. But to have both of those elements in public space is important to me, and that's one of the reasons I chose to spend the rest of the winter and spring not in Pune, but in Delhi.

Delhi is a Difficult Place, no doubt -- last week's blog rant (see the post "100 and 0") can attest to that -- but it is unbelievably exciting, multifaceted, challenging, mysterious, layered, old. And Delhi is a special place for travelers in a way that Pune isn't: goodness knows I'm an elitist when it comes to tourism (or just an idiot who thinks she can blend in when she's in Delhi, Amman, Paris, whatever), but I've come to appreciate the fact that Delhi has a built-in propensity for foreignness. The city has died and been reborn many, many times at the hands of both "native" and "foreign" rulers. I like living in a place where it might be interesting, but it certainly won't be unusual, to be different. I like living in a city that embraces those differences, throwing them all into the mash and jamble of Delhi's winding alleys and broad boulevards so that they can live together. In that respect, in fact, it's a lot like New York.

Experiencing Delhi's capacity for travelers has become one of the reasons I enjoy Paharganj. Last week I wrote about the clouds in that sky: the large presence of foreign backpackers draws the absolute worst of touts, whistles, peeps, shouts, and all manners of treating normal humans as if they were machines dispensing money, sex, or both. But there is something comforting, too, about living and walking the streets with fellow travelers. I smile when I see *yet another* dreadlocked European backpacker being subjected to the entreaties of *yet another* young Indian man with oiled hair and skin-tight, acid-wash denim bell-bottoms, one hand enthusiastically gesturing at his uncle's bangle store, and one hand (just as enthusiastically) scratching his crotch. I smile, feeling sorry for them both: I'm grateful that I'm not silly enough to wear dreadlocks in a country where they're reserved for paupers and yogis, and I'm grateful that I've been spared the attentions of this particular man in the acid-wash jeans. Those scenes remind me I'm not the only one dealing with cultural misfires every day. They remind me I'm a guest in this country, and that there's no way I could ever blend in. They remind me that sometimes--but just sometimes!--it's okay to be a stupid tourist. They remind me that it's okay to be different.

My plane is about to take off: better shut down my laptop and get on board!