When I moved into a 1BHK in Bandra West at 25, people looked at me like “I’d made it”. The flat was 1000 square feet with a real balcony, the kind you could sit on and pretend to read or do yoga, where if you spread your arms, you wouldn’t touch the walls or railings, and a quiet patch of green spilled in from one side like an afterthought.
I hadn’t found it through some house-hunting hustle but rather through a corporate lease, the kind of perk that places you just adjacent to aspiration. The flat was fully furnished, though the furniture had clearly seen other decades and tenants. There was an old bookcase, and huge windows that let in floods of natural light, where everything felt slightly borrowed, even the view.
The building sat squarely on a main road, nestled in Bandra’s high-functioning chaos: Gold’s Gym next door, Geetanjali Salon, and a string of designer stores across the street. A leafy backyard softened the noise, but the front remained wide open to honking, sunlight, and the gaze of anyone who knew exactly what a flat in that location cost.
My next-door neighbours were a Catholic family of five: A household that had lived in the same apartment since before India’s Independence. The matriarch had been there through it all. We shared the same square footage, but not the same lives. I lived alone, with one shelf of crockery and a private bathroom I couldn’t imagine sharing. They had five people sharing one bathroom, their routines choreographed precisely around water tank timings and generational habit.
“You’ll be living here alone?” the matriarch asked, watching me carry boxes through the stairwell. There was unmistakable incredulity in her voice, the kind of disbelief reserved for something slightly unnatural.
A few days later, just as I was heading out one morning, she stopped me. “Just don’t pay the cook too much,” she said with a half-smile. The message was unmistakable: Don’t upset the delicate balance that kept things running smoothly. In this building, domestic work was a shared economy; everyone relied on the same maids and cooks, and if one tenant raised their wages, the others would soon feel the pressure to follow. It was a quiet reminder that even small changes could ripple through the community and disrupt long-established rhythms.
The building was old. Developers had apparently been circling it for years, dangling crores, promising stilt parking and gated dreams. But nothing ever moved. As I later learned, one man in the society had been blocking the sale for years. His name came up often, always with a sigh or an eyeroll. A kind of local lore had grown around him, tales of womanising, unpaid dues, shouted phone calls in the stairwell, water taps left running, and a lifetime of non-cooperation. The building remained frozen by one man, many grudges, and a city’s habit of refusing to let go.
One evening, the door to my apartment jammed shut. No dramatic lockout, just stubborn hardware, and my bad luck. The older man, the matriarch’s husband, came over and helped me with the stubborn latch without a word. It was a small kindness, quietly offered.
I lent them an extension cord once. They borrowed phone chargers another time. We exchanged sweets through partly open doors during festivals. But the silence of my apartment stood in sharp contrast to the noise and bustle spilling from theirs — cooking smells, laughter, a child’s cries, the clatter of dishes. Two lives, side by side but never quite overlapping.
The matriarch’s gaze never faltered. She kept a close watch on everything: How long my maid stayed, how much I tipped the delivery boy, how late I returned. It wasn’t suspicion exactly, but a watchfulness born out of habit. Sometimes, I wonder what she made of this Bandra of today, with its cafes, sleek new apartments, and yoga studios, compared to the neighbourhood she grew up in, when the city was still Bombay and independence was a recent memory.
This wasn’t, of course, just a Bandra story. You could walk through Crown Heights or Hackney or any gentrified pocket of a big city and hear the same quiet friction: Newcomers and long-timers sharing walls, breathing the same air, living in different economies. A younger tenant arrives, armed with new crockery, fresh furniture, and design ideas, into a building held together by habit and compromise. The old tenants look on. Not unkindly. But alert.
Gentrification doesn’t always come with cranes and concrete. In my case, it arrived with subsidised rent, a slightly too-generous cook’s salary, and a balcony I still haven’t properly used.
The man who won’t sell still hasn’t sold. The building leans gently into its own decline. The sun hits the backyard at exactly 4 pm. The matriarch still watches. And I still live six feet from a family that doesn’t quite understand me, but who, when it mattered, opened their door and helped without hesitation.
The writer is a consultant at AON
