"Gurgaon is like a pig that grows feeding on its own shit,” Anuj said the moment he spotted me. Not a hello, not a smile, just stark frustration. The space around us was dimly lit, like every other Gurgaon pub, trying to escape the harshness outside by turning a shade darker. Indecipherable pub music played in the background, and the chic crowd punctuated it with sinusoidal waves of laughter that lifted and crashed. Anuj and I were meeting after a whole year, following up on a ritual that we set eight years ago when I left Gurgaon to move to Sweden.
“That’s quite a judgement, don’t you think?” I said, wiping the condensation off the glass of an iced drink.
“Well, for you this must be exotic—the traffic, the dust, no parking space, and this mad rush. Not for those who live it every day.”
I wanted to counteract, for I had spent years in Gurgaon, and I still loyally come back to the city and call it home even after having traded my dark blue passport for a burgundy one. I have experienced the abrasiveness of this city, and the venom it spits out carelessly. I have seen the city grow, and I have grown with it. For one reason or another, my history is conjoined with that of Gurgaon’s like a double helix chromosome. This shared history cannot be disposed with; there is no escaping, perhaps, for life. It is as if the city and I had struggled together in our formative years, and then like a selfish escapist, I had left it behind. Now I felt like owning up to it, calling it my home, despite the embarrassing urban monster it had become. This was too much to verbalise. So I kept quiet, letting Anuj settle down.
I first came to Gurgaon in 2004, fresh from engineering college, for my first job in this upcoming metropolis. The ochre landscape, sparsely marked with a few high rises, carried a vacant look. The dust was still there, rising in whirlpools in the heat and spreading out on the new roads. What I distinctly remember from that time is the traffic, rather the lack of it. One could drive for kilometres without getting caught in a jam.
Public transport was virtually nonexistent, and owning a motorcycle, if not a car, was a necessity. There were only a few malls then, and free slots never seemed to run out in the underground parking lots.
A product of the flat world, Gurgaon was a time machine. On one side were the malls and the futuristic buildings of multinational companies. On the other were the leftovers of bygone times—a world that refused to catch up with its other half. The two parts were cut by NH 8. The side of Gurgaon you lived in defined you. I lived on the correct side of the highway, the one tenanted by the outsiders who strove to make this their home.
What made Gurgaon so attractive then? The opportunity offered by the multinationals. The pay packages offered were impossibly good, and even though I could not explain properly what I did at work to my once-a-nuclear-scientist father, I relished the perplexed nod he gave. Gurgaon offered an opportunity to tag along on its upward ride. I took the bite, and that was the start of our relationship: the city gave me a career and I gave it my hours and money, like a million others, strolling its malls aimlessly, sitting in its young Americanised coffee shops for hours, and mindlessly buying whatever the newly acquired money could get.
As I settled down, the garishness of Gurgaon substituted the overpowering self-importance of Delhi where I had spent four years studying engineering. I had comfortable living space in Gurgaon, thanks to my father who spent his savings to buy a cheap three-bedroom apartment far from the shopping malls. Till date, this apartment has remained my home, my anchor in India.
Instant bonding
Friendships were easy to forge. Everyone was an outsider and looked for company. The pubs that had begun to pop up like grocery stores offered a twisted relief. Gyrating to loud music, vomiting with excess drinking, spending a neat part of your salary every month in the psychedelically-lit rooms fast became a way of life for the rookies. One evening, in one such pub, I met Anuj from IIT-Bombay who had moved here to work for a consultancy firm. A common friend introduced us. Anuj was lonely. So I took it upon myself to show him the city. Only challenge? There was nothing to show in Gurgaon.
A couple of years passed. I graduated to a car and found a girlfriend. So did Anuj. The fortunes of Gurgaon took a turn. The once sleepy city became home to millions. Land prices soared. Abruptly, the city meant business, and with money, crime soared.
One winter evening, Anuj called me. “They stole everything! And hit me with a rod,” he cried into the phone.
I rushed to the decrepit hospital a rickshaw puller had taken him to. Anuj had been mugged in the ATM. That was my first encounter with crime. Gurgaon was no more the innocent city that had lucked out. It was fast becoming a monster with uncontrollable tentacles. Stories of crime became frequent. So did complaints about public transport, rising costs, the woeful infrastructure. Gurgaon struggled to become as important as Delhi, but without the bureaucratic shenanigans of its antediluvian counterpart. And it failed. Nothing improved.
Gurgaon now seemed like an adolescent destined to do great things that had drifted into bad company.
But I stood by, never disclaiming the city. Gurgaon had bought me long ago with its money. I told myself a different story though—that I truly loved the chaos that was this city and how easy it was to glide anonymously through its rippling entropy. I liked driving around on its roads for hours, or roaming the malls amidst a thousand others but still cocooned in myself, or sitting in a pub nursing a single drink. I loved the ease with which I, an introvert, could strike a conversation with a complete stranger. Everyone I met was an immigrant, just like me. I found in Gurgaon the unbarred edginess that I had always desired in my personality—it seemed as if adopting this city as home would give me the licence to claim its traits.
When it was time to leave Gurgaon for Sweden, I told myself I would return in a year. Now, eight years later, although I have still not completely accepted that I will never come back, it has begun to sunk in that the city and I have parted ways.
Anuj, despite hating Gurgaon, had managed to stick around. Now here we were, sitting in a bar nursing our drinks and chatting about life, work and traffic. Around us, Gurgaon pulsated, a living character in our stories, the stories of us millennials.
The author is an adrenaline rush-seeking travel writer who lives in Malmo, Sweden, and hopes to travel the world in a boat.
