Labels: brokers in pune, house hunting, tech mahindra
So, i woke up at 0730hrs and spent the next fourteen hours house hunting yesterday.And this is all of that wrapped into a blog entry.
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We were looking for a quiet 2BHK close enough to the main road so it wasn't deserted, in a good society with respectable people where people wouldn't mind two single girls staying.
After going through a just gifted coffee table book of Desperate Housewives (I love the show coz its very realistic about how we're all desperate and how desperation can weaken the strongest of consciences into doing the pettiest of crimes to prove ourselves superior even to people we love..whole other blog post sometime else perhaps!) four hours ago, sleeping for the next three, a banging awoke me. My first thought - i fell asleep without putting my birthday cake in the fridge. A quick taste and a few seconds later, I awake to find a very sleepy girl saying - get ready, let's go. hm, i mumble. half an hour later, fortified enough not to fall asleep at the bus stop by good ol' traditional hostel breakfast of chocolate cake (that phrase is an oxymoron on too many levels!), we were off.
First Stop - a place called Warje off the Bombay-Bangalore highway. My company has a local classifieds' nightmare - a simple plain ol notice board where people who want/want to rent out stuff/furniture/houses just put up their details. These people were shifting out today.So we locate this place which apparently was built by some guy with quite some experience in the business of aliases. It goes by the name of Giridhar Nagar and Popular Nagar. Its not two adjacent places - the board states both names. Did I mention we've never been around this area and every non purposeful stride of a passerby seemed shady to us? Or that we had no mode of transport other than public and no choice but to tell the autowallah that we didn't know our way on the deserted highway?
Locate the place. We look around. Hm. Locality a bit weird. Colony interiors ok. Security guard check. Creepy security guard check. Decent families check. Crying wail of baby from house scarily close to ours check. On confirmation, wail is from the house we're checking out. Fair enough. He leaves when we come. Sweet couple open door. Tell us everything from where they work to the "bai" system to timings of their company. entering bathroom, we note a humongous grayish brown 2 feet x 4 feet x 4 feet tank in the bathroom above the shower area held in place by wooden bars that, judging by a drip, aren't all that well levelled out. Its ok, Ashita, struggle is good. First apartments aren't meant to be enjoyed, they're meant to be laughed at when you're driving down with the same friends in a luxury car some years down the line (looking at current salary, make it quite some years). Its not perfect, but the rent is great. Buut approach is still shady. So naah. Hey, the day is young.
Next up - um, nothing. We sit and have some breakfast, buy a paper. And then, just like a terrible stereotype, we encircle the ads we're interested in with (blue, not red) pen (not thick bold marker). Then we called them. To my left was sitting this extremely white collar looking prim chap in a light very obviously selected for its not too obvious coloured green shirt, some 31-32 i'm guessing, with his pretty fair wife and his daughter. And I was thinking, so where did you start out. Is this me at your age. Is your wife me at her age? a friend of mine once told me I had a career phase and I would get over it by the time my first child came along and get into social work cause that was my calling. Whether he was talking of me of women in general I don't know but sitting at Savera restaurant with a girl who was working only cause she didn't know what else she wanted to do, I wondered how well it was to know at all what you want..
Getting back, we called a million people, recalled the people we had spoken to the previous day, and made some plans. Half an hour later a swank looking chap called Sagar drove his Accent down to a place to show us an apartment.
It was perfect. Clean beautiful white tiled floors, a fantastic natural breeze and sunlight streaming in..you know what i'm talking about. Some houses just feel right. The problem was that's all that was right abouit this deal...too far, too expensive, isolated road blah blah blah. Damn these practicalities. Still it was our best choice so far. Hopeful of finding similar places in more suitable loactions, we moved on to the next broker. And from that point on, it all went downhill.
The next place we saw was above a restaurant 0 and i do mean above - the only entrance was via the restaurant kitchen. Ya, so as if that wasnt enough to unconvince us, it got worse. We climbed 4 thin thin staircases to reach a thin thin door and enter a filthy filthy house. door opens. My eyes fall on a bathroom bang in front of it. Half of the main hall has been used as a dump. The place is dusty with disuse. The bedroom's no better. Wooden panels that i can only imagine belonged to a coherent chair before its dubious demise lie strewn beside a bed with a bare mattress. As I walk towards the other bedroom (actually navigating towards is more like it) I turn to the broker and ask, "So this place hasn't be cleaned up after the previous tenants left?" Pat comes the reply "What madamji, the boys are still living here, see know." I enter the bedroom to see two groggy eyed boys wake up on similar unsheeted mattresses in the other bedroom. " "I see." (I could actually see them. More of them then I'd have liked to.)
So we got out of there fast.
Same chap then showed us a slightly better place in a location that had the vaguest semblance of good middle class neighbourhood respectability. The house was clean, a bit dingy and old but basically livable in. Option 2 located. Rent - a measly 1000 less that the white tiled wonder of two hours ago. So we decided to jump to the next broker - fast.
But wherefore did ever the needs of the human heart turn to substance? Not so piteous the day, nor the brokers for that matter. Another painful round of calls later, we met a lady who took us to a house with - get this - a pentagonal architecture. All the rooms were pentagonal, and not even symmetrically so. No parallel walls. Spacious, but strangely built. But it was bang off the main road very centrally located. Our new option 2.
A not-so -spicy double hot chicken pizza later, we set off for the five longest hours of our life. First no on e was free, then everyone was - at once - and only for the next hour. We shuttled to and fro, up and down the same roads, till another broker showed us the same pentagonal marvel. Screreech..obviously, we were doing something wrong. More cautious and less trusting, mp re weary and less prone to even tune in to what the broker was rambling about by now, the next few hours saw us rejecting houses within seconds, allowing the autowallah who was following our broker to give us his brothers' number (his brother was a broker), giving househunting advice to 3 fathers looking for accommodations for their kids who were joining the same company and seeing two houses we were sure wouldn't be all that great coz the broker was vaguely cute.
At 1900 we were tired irritable had two more brokers to go and still had no option3. And then Jeevan walked in. actually we walked to him. No actually, we took an auto to the new kothrud stand to meet him only to find out that he meant old kothrud depot and sped right up the way we had come to reach the place we had passed 15 min ago. Two houses later, we entered a colony short of the pentagonal marvel and went upto the sixth floor. He opened the front door. As my eyes got accustomed to the darkness I realised the spots i was seeing was actually a view of the lights of the entire city - laid out so beautifully in a dramatic view from the main hall window in front of the front door.
I looked at my fellow journeyer of the day and smiled.
This was it.
It got better. Our checklist was more populated by ticks than in any other house.
Ecstatic, we sleepily switched transport modes thrice. Reaching the hostel, I found the energy to repeat in full my day's finding to my father, discuss the plan of seeing the last brokers' offer adn then finalising the deal and then fell dead asleep on the bed.
It was a hard day's night.
Happy 21st Birthday, Ashita.