Memory Map: Pune

A field report built from conversations with family members about their memories of Pune and how the city has changed over time. Told through the form of a personal essay, it brings together recollections, observations, and reflections to trace a changing landscape through the people who have lived alongside it.

The resplendent sights of Pune still illuminate my eyes as I revisit memories that are too pure to ever be forgotten. Pune is my second home not just because of the architectural and culinary marvels it withholds, but the sense of community that runs through its very fabric. You look around and are greeted by gleaming smiles from strangers you may not know but yet, cherish. The city stands as a fortress for my family history, many of my ancestors having paved their path through this very city. As I heard tales of my grandfather’s days here as a teenager or my mother’s various adventures here during her time in college, or my aunt’s current life there, I am always left mesmerised. But yet, amidst these incandescent tales I began to recognise the discrepancies between what I was told and what I saw. Like many cities in the developing country of India, Pune is truly transitioning into a city that fits the volatile environment of today’s world. In witnessing this transformation, I realised that my bond with Pune lies not only in its history but in its capacity to evolve, propelling me to write this piece. 

Conducting these interviews felt less like research and more like trespassing, gently, into rooms I had only ever heard described second hand. There was a particular quality to the pauses, my grandfather searching for a word before landing on "air-conditioned," my mother answering "green and happy" without a second's hesitation, as though the image had been waiting, fully formed, for someone to ask. My aunt spoke differently altogether, quicker, more clipped, the fondness in her voice. I found myself taking fewer notes than I expected and listening more than I planned to, aware that I was being handed not facts but the shape of how three people had chosen to hold onto a place across three different decades.

Yet the Pune conjured in these conversations feels increasingly like a memory fighting to survive its own city. Narrow streets once wound past rain trees and scooties, carrying a population of students and retirees who moved, as my family remembers it, at an unhurried and almost deliberate pace. Now, a "hotchpotch" of flyovers and metro pillars stands in their place, an "urban jungle" mushed into what was once a well laid-out, happy stretch bordered by MG Road, Boatclub Road, and the Mulamutha river. The “quiet money” of old Pune, the “gray hairs and green hedges”, has been drowned out by something louder: young professionals, affluent cars, a city that no longer recognises the intimacy it once wore so effortlessly.

When my grandfather talks about the Pune he first knew, he doesn't reach for buildings or roads, he reaches for temperature. Fans were barely needed then, he tells me; the whole town felt "sort of an air-conditioned city," sparsely populated enough that stillness itself was the defining feature. My mother's Pune, thirty years younger, still carries that same unhurried air; scooties over cars, students crowding café tables, streets she still describes, without needing to search for the word, as simply "green and happy." My aunt is the only one of the three who still lives there, and hers is the account without nostalgia's soft edges. She describes a 60:40 ratio of Maharashtrians to migrants filling the offices and restaurants near her home, a demographic shift she narrates almost like a spreadsheet; precise, unsentimental, aware. 

What emerges most from these accounts isn't simply nostalgia for how things looked, but grief for a character that seems to be dissolving, an identity built on narrow roads and neighbourly familiarity now straining under the weight of its own ambition. And yet, what is more troubling than the change itself is the sense that it wasn't handled with any real intention. Pune's transformation, accelerated by the IT boom that swept through after 2008, brought undeniable opportunity, but the infrastructure meant to hold that growth never arrived, leaving behind a city caught between the “small-town soul” it's proud of and the cosmopolitan sprawl it never quite planned for.

What I wish for Pune, then, is not preservation in the way a museum preserves; glass cases and frozen dust, but growth that remembers where it came from. For it to grow into a city that can widen its roads without narrowing its warmth. I want Pune to grow like a person, expanding its capacity while staying true to its heart and protecting its beliefs. 

Conducting this research has been a beautiful and veritably enriching experience. Along this journey, I have felt myself return to being the little girl who sat mesmerised by stories, except they were once told to me, and now I am the one narrating them. Every conversation unearthed something I hadn't expected, how memories soften a pothole into a landmark. I came looking for a city's history and left, instead, with an inheritance.

Meet Ira:

I am Ira, a 14 year old writer. I have always been the child found tucked away in a nook, enthralled with a book, and gradually that passion for reading built my love for writing. There's a particular quiet I feel when a sentence finally sits right, that feeling is most of why I keep writing. I love the slowness of it; sitting with an idea until it stops being vague, following a thought further than I meant to, discovering what I actually think only by trying to say it. Through my writing, I try to reach something pure, to make a reader feel less alone in their thoughts or to make an ordinary detail suddenly worth noticing.