Everytime it rains too much, Mumbai gets split in two — on one side are untouched SoBoites and on the other are suburbanites who struggle through flooded roads, stalled public transport and leaking homes
Paru and Pankaj Waghela sit in their home in darkness in Kurla keeping their feet out of the water, afraid of encountering snakes from the water of the Mithi River that had flooded their homes. Pic/By Special Arrangement
My heart sank when I read about residents of Ambedkar Nagar in BKC and Kranti Nagar in Kurla West living in fear of snakes entering their homes on account of the rising swell of the Mithi River. Torrential rain in Mumbai always manages to successfully reveal the gross disparities and inequalities seeded into the city’s infrastructure. The Mithi River is not an abstract entity to me. Its putrid stench and tar-like colour are ingrained in my memory. There’s always the smell of burning rubber around the banks—perhaps to ward off mosquitoes, I’m unsure. It’s the dreariest part of Kurla in my imagination, because it has always, ever since I was a child, felt like the living embodiment of the apocalypse. It always seemed dead, polluted to the point where it seems unsalvageable, and yet, life has been compelled to exist around it. I’ve watched in bewilderment fruit sellers displaying their chopped wares tantalisingly, along tea stalls and bhajiya and vada pav stalls. You would have to totally wall off the river to be spared a sighting. My sister and I often wondered whether it was home to mutant life forms. Reading the mid-day report about how the area’s inhabitants have been disproportionately affected by waterlogging brought home the reality of the disparity that has become the norm in a teeming metropolis like Mumbai.
We’ve settled for so little in terms of civic administration. No functional body is ever prepared for the yearly onslaught. The people who contribute to the city the most in terms of their physical labour are left shortchanged by every system, forced to endure living conditions that no one deserves. In fair weather, they fear being bulldozed out of their living spaces. In the mayhem of monsoon, they are exposed to the risk of floods, the fear of losing all their possessions. Especially in Mumbai, one never gets the feeling of being ‘in this together.’ If we did, then all offices with an HR department would issue circulars to employees advising them to work from home on days when a deluge has been forecast. I remember a time when I was working with a magazine in Ballard Estate and it was peak monsoon. Those who, like me, lived in the suburbs, kept waiting for an elusive message that would offer them respite from anxiety, a simple notification permitting them to return home before trains came to a standstill. If they left on their own, they’d risk a pay cut. This felt oppressive and lacking in empathy.
When we were growing up, our family had a saying—if you could live in Mumbai, you could live anywhere in the world. It was our way of acknowledging the fact that there was nothing easy about our day-to-day lives, especially when it came to jostling for space or staying safe in extremely crowded situations. When I began commuting to St. Xavier’s in Fort, I confronted these situations daily, but what I realised quickly was that there was a large fraction of other students who were, so to speak, in the same boat as me — our post-college rituals bound by train timings — and there were many who lived highly privileged lives who went to fancy schools with boards that were non-SSC. Some of them grew up having their own rooms. Some drove their own cars and some had cars with drivers who picked and dropped them off. I don’t think I invited any of these ‘cool kids’ to our apartment in Kurla. I couldn’t really identify their lives and struggled to imagine them identifying with mine.
This time around, as the rain wreaked havoc on the city, I followed through social media and was both amused and alarmed by the range of memes and reels made by people in the midst of the flooding. Where ten years ago the narrative was all about the spirit of Mumbai, this time I found an absurdist undertone to all the videos. A person in a spiderman suit, another in a raft and countless others like them revealing the extent of the flooding. I felt like I was reliving walking through knee-deep water wondering when I would get home and if there would be running water for a shower. I don’t think I will ever again live through that kind of precarity. I think you have to be extremely privileged to feel nostalgia for it. I still cannot wrap my head around how, when the part of Mumbai I lived in would be swimming in flood waters, we’d see images of people at Marine Drive eating bhutta and strolling around the Queen’s necklace. That’s when it would really hit that there weren’t even two Mumbais — the city was splintered and sectioned into so many different ghettoes that one area could be so divorced from another. The divisions have only grown in the last ten years as more buildings have been redeveloped and the logic of segregation has become an architectural feature, enabled through facilities like service lifts and food taboos. Somewhere along the way, between wanting to be like Shanghai or Tokyo or New York, Mumbai seems to have forgotten its soul. Even though its people embody the values of community living, one sees the framework of extractive capitalism running its course. I cannot imagine how many floods it will take for us to understand that the frenzied pace of accelerated development that has gripped the city is not sustainable. We need to slow down and rethink what it means to demand a suitable standard of living, with guaranteed access to the most basic amenities — clean air, clean water and affordable housing.
Deliberating on the life and times of every woman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She posts @rosad1985 on Instagram
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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