Goodbye Gurgaon!

It’s 5:29 AM and I am awake. Actually, I have been for the last hour or so since he left for the airport. The same feeling of ‘now you are in-charge’ envelops me. It’s the ‘mode’ I put on whenever hubby is away. I tell myself, you can easily sleep for one more hour, but no, my brain refuses to oblige. (Before I got married, I was determined not to be like my mother, a little too alert and anxious when my father travelled, especially though a teen’s perspective. But, as time passes I see myself gradually becoming more like her.)

It’s too early to get out of bed, the kids are asleep, the house and the world outside is silent. With my eyes closed and body still (like I am still pretending to sleep) my mind begins to wander. I think new thoughts and bring back old memories. Some memories are easy to find, like they are on the top shelf of my bedside drawer, but others are lying in the bottom shelf, hard to retrieve, dusty and takes time and effort to pull out.

I think about the last ten years of our marriage and even the time before that. All the years I have spent in Gurgaon, right from the time I was a school girl and Gurgaon was like a budding city with a few residential buildings and even fewer corporate offices. Where finding snakes and mongooses was a common phenomenon. Schools and hospitals were numbered and the bus journey to my school in Vasant Kunj took 20 minutes. The construction of the highway had not begun and to travel to Delhi using public transport (Haryana Roadways) was an adventure in itself. Sounds unbelievable, no?

I witnessed how it grew from being the real “gaon” to the “global village” that it is turning out to be with world class schools, offices, restaurants, shopping centres, hospitals (not to mention traffic and pollution levels). Similarly, it watched me grow from a school girl in uniform, to college student, to office goer, to married woman, to becoming a mother-of two. I have called Gurgaon home for more than 18 years. Right from passing out of school, college, university, job, marriage and motherhood, this has been my base.

I would not have been thinking about it as I had never in all these years, for I had taken it for granted. Even the thought of living in another city never crossed my mind…till a few weeks ago. Soon, it will be reality. It will be time to pack our bags and move. This is more unbelievable to me than the transformation of Gurgaon. Nowadays, I look at everything through the lens of ‘What am I going to miss?’ and I see a lot around me that I am going to miss very dearly, including a lot of friends and family.

It’s 6:30 AM, hubby has boarded the flight and the kids have begun to stir….

P.S: Hubby is moving to a role in Ahmedabad and we are moving with him. The city is not alien to me having visited the city several times (and blogged about it) since my in-laws stay there. My mother says, “After 10 years of marriage, you are moving to your sasural.” Indeed, I am.