In a muddy lane in Gurugram, I approach a speed breaker that is half a metre high. I am not being figurative; it really is half a metre high. It’s not a mound or any other natural feature of the ground; it is a man-made speed breaker on which a low-clearing Ferrari can become a seesaw. My heart aches in fondness watching its primordial bearing.
Some minutes later, I see a road sign in English that has been nailed inverted. I feel the tug of home. Another day, I see a tough rustic man, his towel masking his face, enter the porch of my villa and fiddle with something. He is from the electricity board—no badge, no uniform, no ringing-the-bell, he goes where he wants to. I feel like a villager whose porch belongs to the whole village.
I am suddenly in love with Gurugram.
People who take psychology seriously may say I have developed ‘Stockholm Syndrome,’ a condition in which a victim has a crush on the tormentor. I don’t have that, as it’s a bogus phenomenon in my view, like many popular ‘syndromes,’ invented by a police psychiatrist after a 1973 hostage crisis to diminish a woman who had accused the police of endangering her life more than her captor had.
I am enjoying Gurugram, finally, because I am quitting it. I am done.
A domestic compulsion has eased and I can now live where I want, in clean air, running through nature, walking through urban beauty, living in private austerity and public splendour. This means I have to leave India. Because most of the country is a mofussil hellhole in the smog.
Bengaluru is as much an urban catastrophe as Gurugram. Also, that city belies the myth that south Indians are peace-loving darlings. Bengaluru is an aggressive place today, especially if you challenge a local guy driving on the wrong side. It has some lakes here and there, especially on the fringes, where I can run, but should such a simple task be such a trek?
The insufferable way that locals go on about Cubbon Park, you would think it is a great urban masterstroke like New York’s Central Park or London’s Hyde Park. Yes, it has some trees, but its fame is yet another creation of the poor standards of Indians.
Mumbai was once a truly great city, not liveable but great, but Maharashtrian politicians have successfully converted it to a giant small town. A great city has the right to torment us because it offers something no other place can. But Mumbai has not been that for decades.
I can live in South Mumbai, though. I used to live there, and it is the only urban centre in India where life has actually improved. But at those house-rents, it is overpriced compared to Mediterranean havens.
Escaping India within India is now more expensive than escaping it by leaving it.
The creeping pestilence that Indian politicians call “development” has infested mountains too, unless I find some isolated cliff. I haven’t come across a more overrated place than Manali, and that is not just because the mid-Himalayas are filled with a monoculture of pine trees.
‘Development’ in India is a form of introducing hardship to a place where life was better before. My well-meaning friends who point to this city or that, especially Hyderabad, are people whose standards have been lowered by living in India for too long.
I cannot move to Kerala, not because there are too many relatives there. I never take their calls. It has many things I respect; it has beauty and clean air and its locals live in dignity. But it is a boring place. It does not get the idea of modernity. It is a republic against fun.
I know youth there who live in expansive homes, in the midst of great natural beauty and a whole street that loves them, but they cannot wait to leave for some messy Indian metropolis like Bengaluru.
It is not only to escape the spy network of the Malayalee family, which is an army of underemployed relations in every town informing parents of the sightings of their children, but also because Kerala is too judgemental to let the young be.
I do not need fun but I need to be in a place where other people are having fun, where people ingest ethanol and saturated fat late into the night and dance, so that I can safely experience city life without doing much of any of it.
Another reason I cannot move to Kerala is that I am much younger than I look; I cannot retire. I have to be in the thick of things, in a place that may not influence the future but at least lives in the present.
That leaves Goa, probably the most ‘cosmopolitan’ part of India. But if you don’t count its beaches in the north and south, there is nothing it offers that makes my life remarkably better than in Gurugram.
Still, I can devise a life there that is more enjoyable than anywhere else in India. I can live in a small place by the beach, run barefoot on clean beaches, venture out to meet Goa’s drinkers only once a month or so in an overpriced unionized cab. But then, living in Goa would be inferior even to a beachside suburb of Bangkok. For just as much, or a bit more, I could live in Valencia in Spain.
So, the next few months, I will just wander around the world in cold deserted places where I look like their delivery guy. No one would keep me for more than a few months on a visitor’s visa. That’s another thing about India. It never makes it easy to escape either. The rupee is so weak, the price of even coffee in London looks comical. And my passport is one of the weakest.
So I must reassure any immigration officer reading this, I fully plan to return home, which is any place with broken roads and no pavements, and vehicles in the smog driving on the wrong side.
The author is a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. His latest book is ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us.’