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Nine years ago, after thirteen years of living in the Rohini neighbourhood of north Delhi, I moved, and came here, to Judge Colony in Vaishali, just outside the capital Vaishali is considered a ‘posh’ neighbourhood, where the provincial government of Uttar Pradesh had set aside plots of land here reserved for judicial magistrates And it’s in one of the houses built on one of those plots where I now live   The street where my apartment was built is called ‘Justice Way’, though potholes are everywhere and every few feet the road is torn up and littered with pits Builders have strewn piles of bricks, construction sand, asphalt, rebar, and PVC pipes all over the road, and it’s one-way for several stretches Accidents happen daily because of its having become a one-way street The street’s never fixed because the builders and contractors have plenty of cash, and connections that go all the way to the top   The grandson of a retired magistrate, living right here in Judge Colony, was hit by a dump truck and spent three months in the hospital before he died   But the buildings are still going up, and the dump trucks and lorries still come and go ‘Justice Way’ in Vaishali is still full of potholes, rife with accidents, and still one-way   Development in this Judge Colony for VIPs is happening incredibly fast When I first moved here nine years ago, there were only two shopping malls within a two-kilometre radius Now there are twenty-one gigantic, multi-storey shopping malls, two five-star international hotels, car showrooms, shiny and grand, selling every car from Chevrolet to Hyundai to Suzuki, a Haldiram sweet shop, McDonalds, Domino’s Pizza, KFC, Bikanerwala, and hundreds of other fast food and snack joints There’s a restaurant or bar every two feet   In my sixty years, I’ve never seen so many who are more well-drunk than well-fed   There was only forest and farmland when I moved here nine years ago: mustard fields, fields of wheat, and basmati rice paddies Sometimes the whole area would be filled with the fragrance of yellow mustard blossoms or the scent of basmati Around the neighbourhood