Time Travel : Small Town India in 1998

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Time Travel : Small Town India in 1998

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Exactly twenty years ago, my father died of a heart attack
in a remote village in what was then the backwater town of Gurgaon and looking back at the past twenty
years, one can only marvel at the change that has taken place. My father died
some where the village
of Manesar where today
the facility of the National Security Guards (NSG) stands. The NSG was set up
following the assassination of Indira Gandhi and in 1988 was still finding its
feet.

I used to live in a remote village by the name of
Muhammadpur which used to be served by two Haryana Roadways buses on a good day
and the transportation to the nearest town of Tauru was very literally by a bullock cart.
No buses plied on that route and the bullock cart took an hour to travel the 10
km distance and was an extremely enjoyable ride on a winter afternoon.
Traveling from Delhi,
to get to Muhammadpur, you had to first hop on to a bus at the Kashmere Gate
ISBT or Dhaula Kuan, alight at
Gurgaon and then change into the Haryana Roadways bus for Muhammadpur. If that
bus was not running, then there were plenty plying down the National Highway 8,
but they would drop you on the Highway and from there my village was a two hour
long brisk walk. I remember making those treks often, usually after a Sunday
spent in Delhi
and then discovering in the evening that the Roadways bus wasn’t on road that
particular day.

If for some reason you got stuck in Gurgaon, there wasn’t a
place to stay. Between the Maruti factory, land for which had been acquired way
back in Sanjay Gandhi’s time but had just started functioning a few years
earlier and the main town, which began a little before the bus stand, there was
nothing but wilderness. The only lodging place I ever discovered was the Ex
Serviceman’s Rest House set up by the Haryana Government to provide a facility
for retired soldiers from the villages needing to come to town, usually to
collect their monthly pension. If it was and it usually was, then for a nominal
amount, the care taker would give you a charpoy
and a razai and put you up in the
dormitory. There were a couple of rooms meant for officers too, but you
wouldn’t want to stay there. They would remain occupied for long periods, cost
more but always had a lingering musty odor. The dormitory only had the buzz of
mosquitoes.

There were no shopping malls and the buzz of the town was
the string of shops on Railway
Road. Gurgaon has always had a railway station on
the Delhi-Jaipur route but the station lay on the edge of the town and wasn’t
very popular. The bus stand which had an appropriately named restaurant called”
Wheels” was the hub of town and most of the important offices, banks and shops
were in that area. There were no proper hospitals either. On the day of my
father’s heart attack, I remember in a memorable experience, driving down all
the way to Delhi,
because the option in Gurgaon that any one knew about was the local civil
hospital, an option of no one’s choice. He died on the way.

The Gurgaon I am writing of is the late eighties, when the
labor pains that would eventually birth India’s release from socialism and
the beginning of the transformation into a free market economy but it wasn’t
there yet. More specifically, I am writing about a part of Gurgaon where I
lived called Mewat and the story of Mewat and Gurgaon put together is the story
of India
that is half here and half still there. As I dodge the call centre vehicles
screeching past my house, pass the shiny malls and the high rises and read
pejorative comments about sleepy old
Gurgaon town, I wonder at the Gurgaon of two decades ago and whose roots
according to local lore went back to the Guru Dronacharya of the Mahabharata.

Unfortunately the call centre vehicles don’t travel much
further beyond the modern complexes developed by Unitech, DLF and the other
builders. If they did, they would find that a couple of Kilometers off the
National Highway 8, the description of the previous paragraphs still holds
true. Bullock carts still ply between Muhammadpur and Tauru. As they do in many
other places in India
presenting the contrast between the eternal India
and the emerging India.
And that is Incredible India.