about a phone call (for lack of a better topic)

vandy, my friend in pune, is getting married next february. much to the surprise of some, but, somehow, not to me, it will be an arranged marriage. she'd called me up yesterday night to invite me. i've asked for an engraved invitation card before i consider going. both of us know i'm just playing around. i won't miss something like this for the world. heh.
once our 18min conversation got over, i spent the better part of the next hour reminiscing (ruminating?) over my pune days, specially the 1st 2 years which can be summed up with one word....F1. Our lives back then were totally inseparable from that house...its airy, large ceilinged rooms, quentin's comp upstairs, the room below the stairs where rahul had his den, the backyard where we played frisbee, cricket, football....
WE, in my previous sentence, comprises so many people, in and out, that its mind boggling....harsha and sarathy, quentin, aaruna and sallu, zaheer(for a little while), rahul and abhay, harsh, kavish, prerana, vandana (vandy) and vandana, kavita, geetali, rohan et al., payal, pranjal (one night), me (more nights/days than i'd care to name), sunny, manish, tanu and anu....the original pune anime people...vedant, ishaan, amit, dan, shanky, kapil, sheetal, deepti...then there was siby and aarti (one a cousin, another the sister of harsha), and kamalika and satpal (the reds maniac)....the list can go on endlessly...this is just me scratching the surface.
that was a time of high morals and carefree living...we laughed, cried, ate, slept, lived, died, played, fought, sang...all together....life seemed so simple....
classes...and bunking classes...basketball court, long walks, congress bhavan, noodles and pasta (we were frequently broke)...open space and ice golas, fc road and fc hill, dorabjee...all fragments of colourful pictures, or smells, or tastes, or just indescribable feelings...they are still so real, just beyond a closed eyelid or at my fingertips, they aren't just feelings...they are something much, much more....the world moves on, life moves on...we've moved on, gone our ways and liveing our lives, but i'm sure everybody still remembers F1 much more than i do, and probably more than me...it defined us...those years will forever be an anchor in our lives from now on, where we'll look back to at the unlikeliest moments and wish we could walk in those rooms again and hear the echo of our own laughter and live that life again....

i suddenly miss pune like i've never missed the city before....