Two Mumbais, One Monsoon
I live in Colaba. I say this not to boast, though I am about to describe conditions that will make it seem like boasting but only to those who don't live in Colaba and because intellectual honesty requires that the author of a piece about Mumbai's monsoon paradox acknowledge his position within it. I am, by geographic accident and considerable good fortune, on the winning side of this city's most revealing annual drama. I step out of my building into rain that falls vertically, drains efficiently, and does not accumulate around my ankles requesting a toll. My road does not crack open like a birthday cake whose baker had structural ambitions beyond their skill. My footpath does not double up as a swimming pool. The trees above me, planted by people who understood that trees are not decoration but engineering, process the rainfall with a quiet competence that the BMC has not managed to replicate with its drainage budget in thirty years of trying.
Meanwhile, in Vikhroli, a man I do not know, is standing knee-deep in water that was, until this morning, his commute.
I know this because he sent a photograph that reached me through frustrated forwards. His WhatsApp worked because he had correctly elevated his phone above the waterline in the universal monsoon posture of the suburban Mumbaikar - arm extended skyward, elbow locked, phone gripped with the ferocity of someone who has already lost one this way.
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| Colaba's Gateway of India against the high tides in the rains is a huge hit |
In the photograph, the BEST bus stop sign is visible above the floodwater, its neck craning from the brown with the expression of a man who has been told this project would definitely be complete before the monsoon. Behind the bus stop, a Maruti Suzuki is parked at an angle it did not choose. A child has fashioned a paper boat and launched it into what, on a better day, would be called the main road.
I look in the direction of the Gateway of India, from my home in Colaba, where the rain is coming in off the Arabian Sea in full theatrical sheets, backlighting the basalt and making the harbour look like the establishing shot of a film that cannot decide whether it is romantic or tragic and has settled, wisely, on both. I go home, a stone's throw away, make myself a second cup of chai and feel, honestly, a little guilty about this.
Only a little though.
The western suburbs took the first hit on Tuesday, as they take the first hit every Tuesday in July, because geography in Mumbai is not merely spatial but karmic. The low-lying areas of Andheri West had barely finished being waterlogged from the previous weekend before Tuesday arrived with renewed ambitions and several hundred millimetres of rainfall in twenty-four hours, against the July daily average, a number that only meteorologists find surprising because the rest of Mumbai has simply accepted that the daily average and the actual delivery bear the relationship of a government project estimate to its final cost. The local trains stopped. The BMC's disaster management control room logged hundreds of calls by noon. Scores of trees fell. Many roads were reported waterlogged, a figure that experienced Mumbai observers understand as the number the BMC was prepared to formally acknowledge rather than the number that would require explaining why all of them also flooded in 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, and every other July for which living memory provides testimony.
The central line expressed its solidarity by flooding between Kurla and Ghatkopar, because the central line has spent forty years perfecting the monsoon flood and sees no reason to abandon a formula that works. The harbour line, not wishing to be excluded from the municipal conversation, offered its own contribution at Wadala and Govandi, where residents assess flood depth not with anxiety but with the practiced precision of harbour pilots gauging a channel. The Ghodbunder Road in Thane was a parking lot by seven in the morning, every vehicle from the junction to the highway frozen in a configuration whose resolution no traffic engineer has ever successfully modelled because the model requires the roads to be roads rather than rivers wearing a tarred surface as a seasonal disguise.
In Navi Mumbai, several underpasses conducted themselves as swimming pools, which is technically an infrastructure failure but is also, if you squint, a facilities upgrade for the three children who immediately climbed in. Kalyan flooded in its traditional locations with such reliable consistency that the residents have stopped filing complaints and begun scheduling around it, the way one schedules around a difficult relative who arrives every monsoon without invitation and leaves when the season ends. Dombivli produced a road collapse of sufficient diameter to briefly trend on social media before Bhiwandi produced a larger one and the attention migrated north, which is roughly how civic accountability operates in this city - chased by the next disaster before the previous one is repaired.
And then, there was Colaba.
I stepped outside at four in the evening to see what the rain was doing, which is to say I stepped outside to confirm what I already knew, which is that the rain in Colaba is doing what it always does in Colaba - falling, draining, and leaving the roads in the condition in which roads are theoretically supposed to exist. The stormwater channels were functioning. The gradients were doing their engineering job. The trees that line Shahid Bhagat Singh Marg - those magnificent old rain trees whose canopies meet overhead in an arch that the BMC has repeatedly threatened to interrupt with construction and repeatedly been persuaded to leave alone by residents who understand that the trees are not beautification but drainage technology wearing leaves as a disguise - were processing the rainfall with a quiet botanical competence that no amount of storm drain procurement has matched.
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| Hotel Taj against its reflected glory during the monsoons |
The Gateway of India at seven in the evening in a southwest monsoon is one of the most specific and unjust pleasures this city offers. Unjust because it is available, in its full cinematic glory, primarily to those who live close enough to walk to it without crossing the waterlogged geography that separates South Mumbai from the rest of the metropolitan experience. The rain bounces off the basalt plaza. The harbour behind the arch is invisible in the grey. The old lamps do their amber best against the downpour. The whole scene has the quality of a film set that someone has spent considerable money on and then left out in the rain for maximum effect. Standing in front of it, you understand, viscerally and immediately, why the reels keep coming.
They start arriving after ten. The midnight cyclists, the monsoon pilgrims from the suburbs, pedalling south through the emptying city after the trains resumed and the roads partially cleared and the collective suburban decision was made that the flooding had peaked and the evening might as well be salvaged. They came down the Western Express Highway and through Bandra and along the seafront route, each kilometre south an incremental improvement in road condition, each drain they crossed one that was actually draining, each tree one that was actually standing, until they arrived at Marine Drive and the road was simply a road again and the rain was simply rain and the city was, in this small and historically fortunate precinct, exactly what a city is supposed to be.
Marine Drive was empty and glistening and curved, the familiar arc of the bay reduced to its essential geometry - the dark sea on one side, the string of amber lamps on the other, the wet road between them reflecting both into a long, wavering image that has made Mumbaikars feel things they cannot adequately articulate since the necklace was first switched on. The cyclists stopped here. The couples stopped here. The groups of friends from Ghatkopar and Mulund and Thane who had driven down in cars through the half-cleared flood routes stopped here, tumbled out, held their phones up, and made the reels that will circulate through Friday captioned with things like 'Mumbai monsoon magic' and 'The city that never stops' and 'Love this city' and 'Rain love', none of which will mention that the magic is geographically specific and the love has a postal code and that the city they are celebrating is approximately twenty-three kilometres long and the rest of it is currently underwater.
The girl in the yellow raincoat at the Gateway. The couple cycling past the Taj with the rain making halos around the streetlamps. The group eating kebabs at Bade Miyan at two in the morning, their wet jackets draped over the plastic chairs with the comfortable familiarity of people who have been doing this for years. The man at the Gateway of India stretch with his arms out and his face up, receiving the rain from the Arabian Sea directly and personally, as if the monsoon had come all this way specifically for him, which in a sense it had, because he had come all the way from Mulund specifically for the monsoon, and that is a transaction in which both parties can be said to have kept their end.
I watched them from the promenade, or from the steps of the Taj where the security guard who has seen eighteen monsoons in this job watched them with the benign indifference of a man who is paid to observe rather than participate. I thought, as I think every monsoon, about the man in Vikhroli standing in the water that used to be his road, and about the fact that he is not here, and about why he is not here, and about the answer to that question which is both perfectly simple and completely inexcusable.
The answer is drainage. The answer is roads built with gradients that direct water away from the surface rather than into it. The answer is stormwater channels designed with the actual rainfall in mind rather than a figure that makes the project cost manageable. The answer is trees, planted generations ago by people who understood that trees are not amenity but infrastructure, whose root systems hold the ground and whose canopies manage the load that falls on the surfaces below. The answer is the difference between building a city as an engineering problem and building a city as a contracting opportunity, and the answer to which approach produced which Mumbai is visible from space on any Tuesday in July when the southwest monsoon is in full delivery mode.
Colaba does not flood because it was built not to flood, by people who built things to work rather than to be built. The suburbs flood because they were built without asking whether they would drain, by processes that found the question either inconvenient or irrelevant. The BMC has spent decades and budgets that would embarrass small nations on projects that address the flooding without resolving it, which requires a particular institutional commitment to the appearance of action over its consequence, a commitment that Mumbai's civic administration has demonstrated with a consistency that would be admirable if it were directed at anything useful.
The midnight cyclists are heading back north now. The trains have resumed. The roads have partially drained. The reels are already being uploaded from the Colaba promenade and the Marine Drive curve and the rain-slicked stones of the Gateway plaza, the images beautiful and real and entirely unrepresentative of the city's actual monsoon experience in the way that a highlight reel is unrepresentative of a full match. The full match is still being played in Vikhroli and Thane and Mulund and Dombivli and Bhiwandi, in the unlit underpasses and the waterlogged underpasses and the road craters whose WhatsApp photographs will not trend because they are familiar and because familiarity is the anaesthetic that this city applies to its own suffering.
I live in Colaba. The rain here is beautiful. I know why, and the why is an indictment of everything north of Mahim that this city's municipal machinery has produced since independence. That I get to enjoy the beauty while understanding the indictment is the specific luxury of the geographically fortunate, and I am aware of it, and I feel appropriately guilty about it.
Not guilty enough to move, obviously. But appropriately.
The rain is coming in sheets off the Arabian Sea. The Gateway is doing its monsoon best. The trees are processing the water with their usual unacknowledged competence. Two Mumbais, one monsoon, one night. The reels show only one. The other one deserves something more permanent than a photograph of a man standing in a flood with his shoes in his hands and his phone in the air, though that image too, taken in sufficient numbers across sufficient years, eventually constitutes a charge sheet.
The rains return every July. The charge sheet, at least, accumulates interest.
