Built heritage, forever fluid.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

The house must have had two storeys. But the upper storey rooms seem to be gone, except for a few leftover walls. A pair of labourers are standing up there, relentlessly hammering on the floor, right beside their feet. The building is meanwhile cloaked in a thin layer of dust. Yet another residence is being pulled down. Greetings from Sushant Lok.

As things stand, many stand-alone houses in the so-called Millennium City of Gurugram have been replaced by sleek apartment complexes. Some old single-storey bungalows continue to survive though. A few of these survivors lie deserted in a ruinous state, probably waiting for their turn to be erased from the face of earth—so as to give way to new edifices. A vacant bungalow near the town’s bus stand, for instance, is overrun with weedy bushes. Elements of the interiors continue to be partly visible through collapsed portions of the building (yes, that thing inside does look like a fireplace!). Similarly, a deserted bungalow on a sleepy Sadar Bazar lane has its entrance choked by knee-high wild grass.

As for those seven identical white houses that stood along a straight row, near the town’s railway station? They were demolished some years ago.

One afternoon, in another season, this reporter had sighted an old bungalow in the Jacobpura neighbourhood, bearing beautiful arches and wooden doors. It was being dismantled by a demolition team comprising of migrant labourers from zila Jhansi in UP. The roof of the house was already disposed of. Still intact were the walls that made up the house’s individual rooms. A cream shirt hanging from a hook belonged to one of the labourers at work, but the cooking cylinder stood unclaimed. It was probably abandoned by the house’s last inhabitants.

Returning to the aforementioned building being dismantled in Sushant Lok, it has to be said that the posh locality continues to be crammed neatly with very many stand-alone houses. These bungalows are not patterned after the bungalows of the past. Which means that they don’t tend to be a single-storey home. Their architecture instead adheres to the needs and aesthetics of the current times, and quite a few of these look stylish and elegant. Indeed, in a restless Gurugram, even as something is being lost, something is also being gained.