There are places that shape you quietly, gradually, in the way that weather shapes stone. And then there are places like Shukrawar Peth — which do not shape you so much as absorb you entirely, until the distinction between self and neighbourhood becomes, frankly, academic.
I was born here. Raised here. And if the name means little to you, consider this: when Pune was still finding its form in the early eighteenth century, being organised ward by ward, market by market, Shukrawar Peth was among the first to be established — named, as so many of the city's old peths were, after a day of the week. Friday, to be precise. It is, in every sense, one of the original bones of this city. Which perhaps explains why it feels so very much like a living thing.
Growing up here meant growing up inside history without ever being conscious of it. The temples, the ancient market buildings, the lanes that have accommodated centuries of footfall — these were not heritage sites to me. They were where you went to buy vegetables, where you took a shortcut when you were running late, where the evenings smelled of incense and frying onions and something else entirely that I still cannot name but would recognise anywhere. Relatives would visit and go quite still in that way people do when confronted with something genuinely old, genuinely significant. I would watch them and feel a mild bewilderment. This? This is just outside.
And that, I have come to understand, is rather the point. To be the custodian of a place is not always a grand, conscious thing. Sometimes it is simply a matter of living in it, daily and unremarkably, so that it continues to feel inhabited rather than preserved.
What most visitors remark upon, before anything else, is the noise. Friends from Shivajinagar — a perfectly pleasant neighbourhood a short distance away — would arrive looking vaguely braced, as though they were about to wade into something. I never heard any of it as noise. It was just the place breathing.
We tested this theory, rather inadvertently, when the family moved briefly to Balaji Nagar near Swargate. It should, by any reasonable measure, have felt louder and more frenetic than what we had left behind. Instead, it felt profoundly, almost eerily, quiet — not peaceful, but quiet in the way that something is quiet when something essential is missing. We lasted a few months before returning. Not a word was said about it. We simply came back, as one does when one has made an error of judgement about where one belongs.
What Shukrawar Peth offers is not merely noise or density but character. The festivals here are genuinely, almost aggressively celebratory, in the way that only a community with deep roots and long memory can manage. People know one another. Greetings are exchanged with the ease of people who have been exchanging them for decades. There is warmth here that no amount of urban development has yet managed to architect out of existence.
The city is changing, of course. It always is. Glass towers inch closer. The old wadas — those magnificent, crumbling courtyard houses — are slowly losing ground to buildings with lifts and parking. Younger residents move on to shinier postcodes. And yet Shukrawar Peth persists, in its noise and its warmth and its absolute refusal to become merely atmospheric. It is still the loudest place I know. It is still, without question, the place that feels most like home.