Fiction: Arijit Basu does not know that he has hired an undocumented migrant as a domestic worker

Taking long steps through uncertain light and moist darkness, he walks past the new apartment blocks, surveying the vast expanse of farmland. He has no idea that this ambivalence will one day turn his life upside down, testing the limits of his being.

Over the layer of fog, a mellow mix of blue and white, day sloughs off the slumber. In the hesitation of early morning, Arijit Basu takes in the scene of busy activity: women and children pick tomatoes; men briskly bundle dark green spinach; a tractor trundles up and down a field. Soaked up by the fog and exuberant crops, its noise has lost the harshness – now nothing more than the click of a wall gecko’s tongue: tik tik pat pat tik…

He sees the child – dark, bright-eyed, barely five – limping around his mother. Not to be left behind, the boy picks up a clump of spring onions and walks towards the cart, dragging his weak foot. Throwing them into a pile of vegetables on the cart, he looks at the unshackled beasts, then turns. “Ma!” he shouts triumphantly. A smile swamps his face.

A strange smell, actually a clutter of many smells, floats around: sourness from the ruffled tomato plants, earth being ploughed up, the sharp assault of freshly tugged-out spring onions. Yellow mustard flowers quiver in the low wind. Fat white radishes, pulled out of the ground like a secret treasure, glisten with a soft dusting of morning dew on ivory.

But the scent of late winter, of primeval earth and its brute fertile instincts, does not actually take Arijit deep into the heart of kisan country. Press of hay. Innocence of the buffalo’s unreasoned might.

Walking down the smooth new road, he comes across another construction site. More like a theatre of war. Trucks and rollers and strange-looking Caterpillars have lined up for another day of invasion, incision into virgin territory. Apartment blocks are coming up around a sprawling ground.

He looks at the far side of the ground – an irrigation canal quietly flowing towards the distant villages. On its banks has come up a shantytown of plastic sheets and corrugated tin, of filth and grime. Groups of men and women are coming out of the clusters of zigzag pits. Like rows of ants looking for food. Domestics, rickshaw-wallahs, vegetable vendors… they walk down the dirt to be part of city life. In the daytime.

Arijit sees the women – young, famished – coming across the field in small groups. They chatter and laugh.

One playfully pushes another. ‘That hero in the new TV series – he’s coming to look for you!’ Both of them break into giggles.

“Hey, listen, you beauty queen! That TV star will tie the knot with you after walking seven times round the fire, haan.”

The haggard woman – perhaps still a teenage girl looking older than her years – nudges her friend. The other holds her arm.

“Oh, really?”

“Honestly, if the hero really comes down, holds your arms and asks your name, what will you say?”

“Why, Dimple – I’m your Dimple… Simple, isn’t it? Hahaha…”

They hug, pat each other’s arms, laughing to tears.

Arijit feels awkward on realising his pace has faltered. He consciously walks faster, not wanting to be caught eavesdropping on frivolous girl chatter.

The giant cranes and menacing earthmovers promise to define life in suburbia. The newspapers are full of ads for apartments on sale. On the outskirts of Delhi, this boomtown is where the professionals want to be: executives, IT engineers, airline pilots, doctors. And the new brahmins – yesterday’s expats back from either side of the Atlantic to discover the sobering influence of an ancient civilization.

Arijit hastens his pace further.

He is one of them – the new settlers – discovering life all over again in an improbable place. When he came back to India after decades around the world, he had no idea of such a place, its rules and rituals. For him, it was unfamiliar urban life with hints of cow dung and sugarcane. A mix-up. A new city, and yet, the same Jat farmer, his dream of a good harvest, his sturdy wife with heavy silver anklets shining in the sun – it’s a first-rate hodgepodge, this place. Like its name, Noahda – a slow corruption from the original developer’s vision of Noah’s Dale, whatever that may be. Busy activity on the farm, the newness of the apartments, the lean, chattering women coming out of the warren.

Excerpted with permission from Border Crossers, Bhaskar Roy, Hachette India.