Indian elephant

I’m back eating dinner at the Leela Kempinski again, overlooking the Gurgaon toll, that winking 32-lane monument to Indian prosperity. Two things are different this time (see earlier post). First, I’m not reading Rosemary Sutcliff (though I did watch the film of The Eagle on a miserably small screen on the way out and ended up feeling irritated that BA can’t provide better quality viewing). Second, my room faces away from the city and overlooks a large tract of woods and farmland, maybe a mile square, that could be anywhere in rural India.

This afternoon I had a meeting in my sixth-floor room. One of my Indian visitors stood at the window and pointed down to where an ancient tractor was slowly ploughing a strip of field.

‘That chap’s probably sitting on twenty million,’ he said.

In hindsight, I’m not sure whether he meant rupees or dollars. But even if it was the former, that would be close to £300,000, a fortune for a small farmer. Only twenty-five years ago, most of modern Gurgaon was like that – open farmland. Fifteen miles from Delhi, there was an ancient town here, but nothing resembling a city.

Today Gurgaon has 1.5 million inhabitants and in the course of a single week you can practically see the skyline change as cranes swing to and fro and new business centres, apartment blocks or ‘convenience malls’ inch upwards. It’s the second biggest city in Haryana province and the first Indian city to have distributed electricity to every household. It has the third highest per capita income in the country and would be far higher than eleventh in the national ‘life-after-work’ index were it not for its abysmal roads and public transport system (and that despite being at the end of the new Delhi metro line).

But this is India, and the statistics take on a comically different perspective when you emerge from a meeting in a gleaming new corporate headquarters, pass through the security lodge, step out onto the street and trip over a pig.

Though I’ve yet to see an elephant here, I can’t help feeling Ganesha must be smiling on Gurgaon. I’ve always felt an affinity for the jolly, pot-bellied mono-tusker. There’s something irresistibly life-affirming about him. He makes me want to pat his fat tummy and tweak his trunk. I also like the fact that in some representations he’s holding a pen, though I didn’t know until today (99 Thoughts on Ganesha is my Gurgaon reading this time) that at the request of the sage Vyasa, he wrote down the whole of the Mahabharata in a single day. Respect, Ganesha!

He’s also the embodiment of prosperity and material auspiciousness. It must have been an inkling of this that sent me searching for a little silver statue of him on the last afternoon of an earlier trip to Delhi, a holiday that time, of which I later wrote:

You could have gone your own way

In search of silk or bolts of cotton

But on that final frantic afternoon

You followed me without complaint

In and out of shops and stalls

Where swarthy men drank tea

And proffered trays of stones

Agate, lapis lazuli, cornelian

Until at last we found him

Thumb-high, smiling

Pot-bellied, pen-wielding

Merriment with a trunk

I brought him home

And sat him on my desk

My little silver one-tusk

Fragment of the east, fellow scribe

Bringer of wealth, so they say

Though when I think about him now

It isn’t earthly riches that I see

But your patient hand in mine

That last hot Delhi afternoon

   Now, five years on, I can’t help wondering whether perhaps he himself has had a hand in my return to India, in the new and bountiful relationship I’m enjoying with this flourishing, infuriating and utterly captivating country.