Nothing romantic about the rains

Heavy waterlogging is seen on Barrister Nath Pai Marg at Mazagaon on July 27. Pic/Ashish Raje

I resent that late American politician who encouraged his countrymen to consider what they could do for their country. I believe it helped a lot of people in government absolve themselves of what should be treated as a crime: the dereliction of duty. Nowhere is this clearer than in Bombay when dark water-bearing clouds appear on our horizon every monsoon.

That is when our desperation to escape those darling heatwaves of May compels us to forget the horror that June and July have in store for our city. That is when we exchange notes on petrichor, share the best pakoda recipes on WhatsApp, and add old film songs about the rain to our Spotify playlists. What we also do, in the process, is gloss over the overwhelmingly obvious fact that our government has let us down on yet another occasion.

I thought about this during the monsoons a few years ago when I realised how depressingly predictable it would be, long before things began to fall apart around me. The BMC did what it always does around April or May every year, which was issue several proclamations about how the gutters had been cleaned and the Mithi river was flowing smoothly out to sea. Its officials promised a season of no waterlogging at Hindmata, and the smooth functioning of traffic and trains. They spoke of new measures that had been undertaken to ensure that no one would be inconvenienced. As always, there were millions of us ready to believe them because hope is such a cheap commodity.

Naturally, everything they said wouldn't happen, promptly did. Our subways were flooded within 72 hours and closed without warning, stranding commuters on both sides of the highway and adding hours to their journeys home. There were multiple incidents of waterlogging reported across the city, and those mysterious water pumps that are allegedly deployed in low-lying areas failed to do their jobs in much the same way that they fail every year. The romance of the monsoons rose and died as quickly as this month's version of the state government currently in power.

We shouldn't have to accept this, but there is a realisation and acceptance of hopelessness that inadvertently dawns in the mind of every person who spends more than a few years in this city. There comes a point when we all acknowledge that we are in for a few months of trauma and that there is nothing and no one who can help us. We accept this trauma as part of the price that must be paid to live here, even while we know that our taxes aren't being used the way they should. How can an organisation with the kind of annual budget given to the BMC fail to come up with a viable solution to these widely known problems in over half a century?

I repeatedly ask myself why a city of 27 million people looks the other way in silence each year, allowing a few hundred elected officials to hold us all to ransom. It probably explains how a few foreign businessmen took control of a country and held on to it for as long as they did.

Not long after this year's rains began, a photograph of two young men on a bus went viral on Twitter. They were clearly exhausted, stuck on a commute that must have already taken a few hours, and had no option but to sit on those damp seats for a while longer until they got as close to their homes as possible. For me, it was a reminder that the rains are romanticised only by those who have the luxury of not interacting with them. For millions of others, it is a time of unbridled misery, of missing cabbies and broken public transport, of wading through filthy water and sitting in wet clothing, of not knowing how long the journey from home to office and back will take. It was also a reminder of the people we have lost to tragedies that have always been manmade and completely avoidable because we allow our state government to get away with murder.

If this sounds like the ranting of a person blind to the beauty of nature, it's probably because I have long embraced the idea that India is a beautiful country that can only be enjoyed by a few. For those who must get out and work, it is a place of pain and suffering, and the rains only make it worse.

When he isn't ranting about all things Mumbai, Lindsay Pereira can be almost sweet. He tweets @lindsaypereira
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