It was staring us in the face, during the freak wave of cyclones that hit the city in the pandemic years. While the rich posted swish, rain-soaked photos of dreamy views from their high-rises and sea-facing villas on their Insta feeds, the middle-class Mumbaikar, and the poor and homeless, had to once again find new ways to navigate and survive those increasingly frequent days of incessant rainfall. It was the typical contrast split-screen that one has gotten used to seeing being played out. The ‘spirit of Mumbai’ — the shabbily-used, casually-thrown term emerges around this time across sections of media and the junta who are unable to think of apt, empathetic language to summarise this annual occurrence.

I recall reading a news article by author Amitav Ghosh about Mumbai’s impending climatic headache with cyclones, given that it’s rare for these weather systems to emanate from the Arabian Sea. It wasn’t a good sign, he wrote, and that it should serve as a warning bell for our sea-facing city, which was birthed by reclaiming seven islands. The weather gods’ many signals were, in all likelihood, lost on our lawmakers. That was nearly six years ago.