Pondy Shondy I: The Retreat

Pondy’s like poetry: everyone reads it differently. Every time. Sitting at the granite top study table by the window, as I pen the first impressions about my second visit to Pondicherry (Puducherry I’m still not quite comfy with and they’re not too bent upon it), a roaring tumultuous monsoon sea and a fishing boat risking a session at some distance, with a road and an adjoining ten-foot pavement with an occasional motor vehicle and pedestrians on this sunny morning keep nudging me to look up from my notebook and out towards them all.

A series of seven posts cover some aspects that most appealed to me and kept me preoccupied during the last five days.

There are few things about which one can say they are, as you left them. The Retreat at Pondicherry’s Goubert Avenue is one of them. Dressed just like the Sea side Guest House a couple of blocks away, where I put up last year on my birthday, this new extension of the older Shri Aurobindo Society guest house is a replica. And while same-same predictable has always put me off, the comfort of returning to The Retreat’s familiar white-and-rosewood, simple elegance is more than worth its 11:15 pm deadline. (I hear the scoffs already)

The basic layout and furniture apart, they even managed to find more from where the old fittings and frames came from! Door knobs to electricals and the back garden – it is much like taking off from where I had left.