one kid’s dreams and a young man’s memories

As you all know, ‘I’m old school.’ I have a cellphone, all it does is makes call and sends messages; I still wear those old clothes and straight jeans and savvy the Yezdi and Royal Enfield over a Bajaj Pulsar. I grew up in Mumbai suburbs and the then untouched parts of Pune during a time when ‘Potli wale baba’ & ‘Alif Laila’ was on TV and my friends and I would play ‘sakli’ & ‘chor police’ running through the fields and hills behind my grandparents’ house, which leads me to the tree house.

When I was a kid my playgrounds were the hills and woods near Kothrud in Pune and in 1998, when I reached the age of 11, I was proficient in the swing of an axe and the grip of a saw. That’s when the creation began. We picked a Gulmohur tree which was half way up the hill. You could only get there by those old grassy farmers’ roads that twine through the straw field along the hill, and for the next 6 months, every spare moment I had, a vision emerged about half-a-km in back of our house.

It was small but grand! At not more than a height of around 10ft above the ground and had two rooms. Old furniture was cut to size to make the walls, and slab wood came from the construction site nearby. No pictures of it exist.

The first room was our living room and the next room was the bedroom which we called the Taj Suite and the very top opened like a hatch door leading to a nest. At this point I had cleared the treetops and had a clear shot at the Gandhi library nearby; which I think is the last of its kind. I even had a rope which hung the tree that you could use to help yourself climb into the tree house. The nights were lit by a kerosene lantern and water and food came from home.

Very few people knew of its existence, except for some summertime friends who lived nearby. The memories are priceless. Before finishing off the vacations in the summer, I actually lived there the entire 3 months of the holiday.

During the time I was at school in Mumbai someone torched the whole hill— deliberately or by accident, who knows. By the time I returned all that remained was ashes to ashes and dust to dust — it had returned to the earth.

I’m now approaching 22 and sometimes catch myself wondering where the time went, but will never forget my summers in Pune. I return when I can and my grandparents still live in Pune and are planning to move back to Mumbai soon.

Sorry if I rambled — thought this story might be an interesting as one kid’s dreams and a young man’s memories