No other city is like Gurugram—‘so mismanaged, yet so highly spoken of’

For days now, Gurugram’s society WhatsApp groups and Reddit forums have buzzed with a slow-rising panic. The domestic workers have vanished. The cooks, the nannies, the food delivery executives, the sanitation workers—the invisible army that keeps Gurugram functioning—have fled in terror of the crackdown on “illegal” Bangladeshi immigrants. As kitchen countertops remain dirty and impromptu garbage dumps appear on abandoned plots, the city’s residents are discovering what their gleaming towers are actually worth, in the absence of the people who have summarily been branded as threats.