It was a two day journey from Madurai with two of my college mates. I could feel the scenery and the weather change as I headed up north. The omnipresent thorn bushes of Tamil Nadu, were being replaced by lush green flora and the scorching heat by dark clouds. It was the fall of 2011.
We reached the Railway Terminal at Delhi on a Sunday morning. We met up with another friend who was also going to work with us. There was a little problem. None of us knew to speak Hindi. So we had to take the cab to Gurgaon without bargaining, with the “little” hindi we knew. The cab driver charged us with 500 INR. It seemed a fair enough price for a thirty kilometer drive.
One more problem. We had nowhere to go. We asked the cab driver to drop us in sector 22(Designers of Gurgaon city were not creative enough to come up with names for areas, so they numbered them from one to I-don’t-know-how-many ). It happens to be near our work place according to Google Maps. It was 8 am and all of us were starving. None of us had had breakfast and we had to find a place to keep our bags.
We called a PG whose number we got from one of our college seniors who used to live there. I must explain what a PG is at this moment. PGs(short for Paying Guest) are a thriving business in Gurgaon. There is a slight digression of the concept of PG here in Gurgaon. You don’t stay as a paying guest, in one of the rooms where a family lives. Houses are built exclusively for this purpose. There are 7-8 rooms, a living room, dining room and kitchen. In each room, two to four people live together. Each pays a sum of Five thousand to Seven Thousand a month which includes their rent, utility bills, food, etc..
Now that you know what a “PG” is, let me continue the story of my life. We carried and rolled our massively large luggage to the nearest PG and enquired about the rooms. There were four of us. There were vacancies, but all of us had to stay in different rooms. We disliked this idea. We were sitting in the living room of that PG, when two of us went searching for rooms.
It was 2 pm and still no luck. Most of the PGs were either full or not good or too expensive for the facilities they provide. We still did not have our breakfast or lunch. The few biscuits we had were getting digested and left our stomachs craving more.
We were desperate. So we walked around the neighborhood calling PG numbers from flyers stuck on walls and trees. We called a few and I did not understand most of what was being said. No one would speak in English. My friend called one number and he spoke to a PG owner. He did not understand. He handed the phone to me. I did not understand. He did not use a single English word in his pure Hindi and was speaking at 250 words per minute.
We were losing hope of finding a place to stay and were going to stay in a lodge or the company guest house which would charge us exorbitantly. We called the number of that guy again and this time I understood a little of what he spoke; understood enough to know that he had vacant rooms where we all could stay in the same room.
We saw the rooms there and it was love at first sight; light at the end of the tunnel; the silver lining. It was at this stage where construction was about to be complete and the rooms were brand new. I phoned my dad(who speaks Hindi) and made him talk with the owner about the terms and conditions. We had to pay Three thousand as advance and five thousand five hundred as rent. The rooms had TV, a balcony, beds, cupboards, Air Cooler, etc. Breakfast and dinner would be provided on weekdays and lunch also on weekends and holidays and on days we take leave.
We decided to take the rooms. There were six of us now. Two were coming that evening. So we booked two rooms, three in each. One in the first floor and one on top. Our bags were still in the PG we first saw. So we went back to that place. We checked to see if the coast was clear and one by one we sneaked out, one by one and we finally made it to our home away from home. We are thankful to the first PG for taking care of our bags.
We refreshed ourselves and satisfied our grumbling stomachs by indulging ourselves in a restaurant for lunch. We watched TV and for dinner the Nepali cooks/caretakers made us rotis. Rotis I tells ya. From then on I’ve had 5 rotis every night. 5 months= 150 days = 150 x 5 = 750 rotis – 50(days when I had food outside)= 650 rotis approximately.
Hasta La Vista Baby
P.S This post was not checked for grammatical errors or typos
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