Trepidations…

One day is never the same as the other in life, am sure everyone that walks the world will agree with me on this. We can plan and plan and device ways and means to minimize the effects sudden rumblers we encounter but we cannot totally avoid the mild discomfort while passing through one.

I have understood this with experience. For someone who has never lived away from home the short stint in Pune due to a job transfer brought in with it both opportunities and apprehensions galore. Will I be able to survive in an alien land? Will I adapt myself to the food style there? Will I manage living on my own? There were so many questions lurking in my mind. In some dark corner of my mind I was afraid of going to live in a land with no friends.

However when the appointed time came I pulled up my socks and tread the new path with confidence in my mind. My heart yet filled with trepidations unanswered.

My first contact in Pune, Poonam, who later went on to become my room mate was warm and courteous & boisterous. She went out of her way to help me. I moved in to stay in a house on my own for the first month of life in this new place and she made sure she shared with me even a mattress from her home to make me comfortable and settle me down. Shortly I began settling into work and since it was a new, yet to open hotel, there was work and loads of fun alongside. A month passed in the city with me alone in a single bedroom house in which I don’t ever remember using the living room and kitchen.

Before long we had a second batch of people joining our team and I was introduced to this soft spoken, gentle girl, our training manager, Neha. We hit it off instantly and life at work got better with more laughs and merrymaking. Soon Neha and I decided to move into together, we saw only one house and fell in love with it and for the period I was there this was our party zone.

It was a different thing setting up a house without anyone around you. Signing a contract, moving in with your belongings, getting that gas connection, buying the sundry items for the house, it was all loads of fun. We had a three bedroom house, a football ground of a living room, bare with hardly two pieces of furniture and a TV that came in much later. The only well stocked area was the kitchen. For the first month of staying in that house we used only one bedroom, Neha and I chatting late into the night and falling asleep.

Poo as Poonam began being called moved in with us. As she walked in the door, she came in with a smallish suitcase. Neha and I assumed that’s all she did have; little did we know she had come with a truckload of stuff. An entire evening she unloaded things and set it up in the smallest of the bedrooms that did not have an attached wash room.

Gradually we settled in and our home (yes that’s what it became for us by now) became the hub for all get togethers and parties. No occasion was too small for us to celebrate. Someone coming from Bombay, to someone winning an award, to birthdays to just like that surprises, to weekends, every little thing called for a celebration.

Our first party though is momentous. There we were some 10 -12 of us eating Pizza ordered from Pizza Hut and drinking (liquor and coke) out of steel glasses since we did not have glassware. From there the progress to the most happening party place was thanks to Poo’s truckload in which apart from other things she also had glassware for every kind of drink.

I remember it being a bright and chirpy spring day, exactly a year ago when we picked up this guy on the way to take him to the hotel. We were introduced to him and told that he was Palash our new restaurant manager.

In a couple of days Palash along with a few more guys from the hotel found a house just behind ours in a complex called 5 gardens and settled in. By the way we lived in Element 5. Five was the synergy. And within a short period of time we became as thick as thieves. We spent all the evening together, Palash & I making dinner and the rest of the guys (Preety Preetam, Aadheer, Shiraz, George, Yadhu, Muthu, Poo and Neha) talking to the dozen, teasing each other, playing cards and going nuts.

When I left the city I was sure of one thing, I had made friends for a lifetime.

As I sit back today and reminisce the days in Pune and the trepidations I had before I went there I feel I was foolish and yet as a new saga unfolds before me, the trepidations show up again….