I was on my way to see a dentist about six kilometers from where I was staying with my mother, and two kilometers into the ride we started seeing water on the roads and half a kilometer after that the car just broke down because the water was knee-deep across the entire four-lane road and there was no way for the engine to handle it. Some cars were moving slowly and carefully but many of them were just dying in the middle of the road, their drivers getting out and standing in the brown water looking at their phones, and when our car stopped our driver politely asked us to get down, which was the kind of politeness that felt like a performance of dignity in a situation that did not allow for any, and I got my mother out and walked her to the porch of a nearby hotel whose owner came out and graciously offered her a place to sit.

I was more concerned about getting back home, so I stood in the water and opened every ride-hailing app I had. Rapido was the first one that actually found a driver. He came near me, I waded toward the car, and then he saw the water and told me he would not stop the car because opening the door would let the water inside, so he just kept moving past me, and a minute later he called and asked me to cancel the ride because he could not cancel it himself. There is something about technology that makes you perform labor even in your pain, the way it distributes the burden of failure onto the person who is already standing in knee-deep water, and I cancelled the ride and opened all the apps again and started refreshing.

My mother wanted to take her shoes off because they were wet and heavy and hard to walk in, and I told her please walk slowly but do not take the shoes off because I did not know what was in that water, that dirty brown water that had been collecting everything the streets had collected for months, and I did not want her feet touching any of it. So we stood there on the side of the road trying to cross to the other side where we needed to be and no one stopped for us, not a single car, not a single auto, not even the ones that were managing to move through the water because the drivers were focused on keeping their engines alive and they did not have the attention to spare for two people trying to cross a flooded road. About an hour later I finally got a cab on Uber and we started heading back, and the driver told me that the drains which were supposed to have been cleaned in December had only started being cleaned a week ago and now the manholes were becoming pits where people and vehicles were falling in and nobody was counting.

It makes me wonder about all the people who buy those apartments in the gated communities of Gurgaon with their own power backup and their own water tanks and their own sewage treatment plants, what are they even paying for when the city outside the gate does not work, do they intend to stay inside those walls forever and never step out into what the rest of the country has to live with, and I think most of what we try to create in the name of beauty is just an imitation of nature that we have bled dry of anything real. If the goal is to sit inside a room with conditioned air and filtered water and never have to see the water rising on the road outside, then the world has taken the blue pill and is living in its delirium, and the infrastructure that is supposed to hold things together has rotted so thoroughly that even the people who pay for it have given up on it. I do not know where we go from here and this experience taught me one thing which is never go out in the rains, whatever happens.

Tell me about the last time the city failed you. I am @troysk704.