Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
There was a time when I waited for the first rains in Mumbai. Like millions who have lived in the city, I romanticised Mumbai’s monsoon season. Cinema taught us to. Songs did too.
Last year, just days before I moved to Delhi, I was at Juhu Beach when the monsoon arrived in Mumbai. I remember the sand whipping into my eyes, fat raindrops pelting my face hard, and lightning flashing over the Arabian Sea. The first day of “Bambai ki baarish“, as always, was cinematic. I posted a Reel about it on Instagram, with a jazz backdrop. Typical of Mumbaikars.
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Mumbai without rains would be as dystopian as Gotham. Perhaps worse, because there’s no Batman to save it. Rains fill the city’s lakes — its main drinking water source, and also bring relief from the summer heat and the muggy air. Beyond these necessities, however, I find very little to romanticise about the rains now.
Today, when I look at the news, I am relieved I am not in Mumbai.
Before I explain why I feel entitled to make this argument, I should say that I have spent more than half my life in the city. I have watched it evolve from the city I knew in the late 1990s, into the megacity it is today, and I still return regularly.
During my college years, I spent years riding my Bullet between Powai and Vile Parle. It’s approximately a 10-km stretch. There was nothing I enjoyed more than those monsoon rides, despite the potholes, the waterlogging and the spray of muddy water from passing vehicles.
Then, as it should with time for Mumbaikars, something changed.
I moved to Bengaluru in 2019 for work and experienced a different kind of monsoon. In fact, Bengaluru sees monsoon twice — once when it arrives, and again when it retreats. When I returned to Mumbai in May 2024 for a writing job at a local daily, my opinion about its rains had changed drastically.
They say absence makes the heart grow fonder. It’s merely a romantic cliche. My time away from Mumbai’s monsoon didn’t make me miss it. If anything, it stripped away its romance.
Nissim Ezekiel, in his poem, ‘A Morning Walk’, called Mumbai, “Barbaric city sick with slums, / Deprived of seasons, blessed with rains…”
Blessed with rains, yes. But also burdened by a monsoon that, year after year, exposes the city’s weakest infrastructure and exacts the highest price from its residents.
We Mumbaikars have long had a habit of celebrating chaos.
Upon my return five years later, the humidity hit like a truck. Two minutes outside without AC and sweat soaked through clothes.
This year, barely a week into the monsoon, the news from Mumbai is grim, and it makes me glad I am away.
Let’s have a look at why.
Two college girls, 15-year-olds Shubhangi Nalawade and Ujwala Wagh, were electrocuted in Navi Mumbai near Nerul’s LP Bridge. They stepped into waterlogged road where a short circuit electrified accumulated rainwater. They are hospitalised, but the videos of young students wading through flooded stretches under live wires are circulating.
Most Mumbaikars are at risk of electrocution on waterlogged streets throughout the monsoon season.
In Chembur, an 11-year-old boy, Vihan Shrivastav, died when a peepal tree fell on his school bus. Five other children were injured. Residents had warned the BMC about the tree. Notices flagged root damage from road works. Yet it stood until the rains came.
Beaches vomited garbage, again. At Girgaon, Dadar, Juhu, Versova, and Silver beach. Tides and drains pushed waste back onto the sand. Videos showed piles of plastic and filth. This happens every year.
In a local train, a 22-year-old, Mayank Lohar, was stabbed to death in a first-class coach. He wanted the door shut against splashing rain. Another man wanted it open. The argument ended with a knife.
Flooding has hit from South Mumbai to the northern suburbs. Locals packed like cattle. Streets have again turned into rivers.
This is just week one of the monsoon in Mumbai. Four months of monsoon are yet to be endured.
Mumbai’s rains last roughly from June to September, with July and August the worst.
In 2017, I walked through the city floods from Vile Parle to Powai in waist-deep water. Metro lines had failed. Trains were impossible to board. I reached home soaked, exhausted, but shrugged it off as the “spirit of Mumbai”. Living in Mumbai numbs you to misery.
After years in Bengaluru’s more manageable rains, returning felt like a shock.
The same downpour which I have endured 15 times, now seem harsher.
During the monsoon, finding a cab or rickshaw in the suburbs can become impossible on many days. Sometimes, walking is the only option, and Mumbai is not the most walkable city. On waterlogged roads, every step risks an open gutter or contaminated water that can lead to leptospirosis, or electrocution.
Responding to the school bus tragedy in which a child died after a tree fell on the vehicle, Shiv Sena minister Sanjay Shirsat said on Wednesday that the fall of trees is “not in human hands”. I was immediately reminded of a line by Charles Bukowski, “The only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.”
Nature isn’t in government’s hands. Granted. But accountability very much is.
The BMC carries out pre-monsoon tree pruning precisely because weak branches and unstable trees can pose a danger. Every year, people in Mumbai are killed or injured by falling trees during the monsoon. Risks can be identified and reduced. Yet, after every tragedy, accountability seems to evaporate faster than the water that collects in Mumbai’s pothole-ridden roads.
In fact, as I wrote this piece, India Today TV flashed news of another man falling into a manhole in Mumbai’s monsoon and dying.
Another pilot survey has thrown up a shocker, revealing that most of Bandra suburb’s 5,000 trees have been found to be unsafe and at risk of falling during heavy rains.
You’ve heard AR Rahman’s ‘Jai Ho’ on Mumbai’s Coastal Road. But Mumbai’s manholes have a feature of their own. Every monsoon, they become dancing fountains. There is an element of surprise too. You never know which one will erupt.
The BMC is Asia’s richest municipal corporation, with budgets exceeding Rs 74,000 crore in recent years — more than the budgets of many Indian states. It has resources. Yet every monsoon, news repeats. Fallen wires kill, trees crush, potholes swallow vehicles, people slip into open drains, slums drown in sewage water, and old buildings collapse. Lives in Mumbai’s monsoons end over trivial things.
Travelling like cattle, wading through filth, accepting death, every day. Mumbaikars have called it the “spirit of Mumbai”. That is not spirit. It is Stockholm Syndrome. We love what we cannot escape.
As a journalist, I see the city’s flaws more sharply than its la vie en rose moments. The former always outnumbers the good parts.
I have lived in Banaras, Bengaluru, and now Delhi to some extent. Every Indian city tests you in different ways. But the Mumbai monsoon packages misery as resilience, and no other city does it quite like this.
I am glad I am away now. The city I love has shaped me, but the romance is dead.
– Ends
SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
