Forbidding City

India's rapid urbanisation and digital saturation amplify the paradox of people hyper-connected online but isolated in their real-life contexts of proximity without intimacy

- Divya Tiwari

THE stink was overwhelming. It came from inside an apartment in Sector 29 of Noida (New Okhla Industrial Development Authority), the suburban sprawl in Uttar Pradesh’s Gautam Buddha Nagar district that had been conceived as an extension of southeast Delhi's industrial corridor across the Yamuna. When the neighbours finally called for help and the police broke open the door, they found two women in an emaciated, disoriented state, their lives hanging by a thread.

It was in April 2011 that news of the Behl sisters, who had been locked inside that flat for over seven months, unseen by a city that kept moving around them, made headlines. With the water supply cut off and electricity disconnected, Anuradha and Sonali Behl had barely survived the inhumane conditions of isolation and privation. Anuradha, the elder sister who was found in an unconscious state, died of cardiac arrest the following morning in a hospital, while the younger one, Sonali, was kept under critical care for weeks.

The sisters, who held stable jobs, were surely not destitute. After the loss of their parents and a quiet estrangement from their only brother, however, they withdrew from the world. What began as mourning turned into retreat, and then into quiet disappearance. Neighbours said they had tried knocking, once or twice, before they eventually stopped.