1. Madhapur, 2010

The Amaravati University cohort of five friends settled into Madhapur the way young tech-savvy tourists settle into a city that is, in 2010, still in the noisy middle of becoming itself. Half the buildings were beautifully constructed as iconic buildings — especially Cyber Towers, Cyber Gateway, and Vanenburg Park. The other half were sites with buildings under construction at various heights. The roads were torn at the edges as roads get torn when fiber-optic cable is being laid by three different telecommunications companies on the same Tuesday, none of whom have told the other two. The new buildings — Cyber Towers and Mindspace and several glass cubes along the road in front of them, and the half-finished tower across from the Westin Hyderabad Mindspace where Tirumala had taken, for the cohort, five connected-room serviced suites with a common area on the eighteenth floor — were so new that the developers had not, in some of them, yet decided what the lobby chandeliers would look like, and the lifts moved randomly between floors trying to figure out the optimum resting floor from which to reach customers fastest. The old buildings on the same streets were so old, and sat so low against the newly constructed and reconstructed roads — one road laid on top of the other, elevating the whole street and probably enriching the well-connected pockets along the way — that they remembered, in their stone, when this stretch of Hyderabad had been a stretch of nothing at all.

Hyderabad was, in January 2010, a city out of breath in a very particular way. The country had spent the previous eighteen months being told that the world was, in 2008, on fire.