Things fall apart

In the 24 hours between the morning of Sunday (June 9) and Monday, the city of Mumbai that had been wilting under sweltering heat the day before was pelted by an average of 70 mm of rain, with its eastern and the western suburbs recording 109 mm and 159 mm, respectively.

In that period the usual happened: a restless citizenry used to being on the move was virtually grounded as rickshaws and taxis refused to ply, wisely, because the choked drainpipes had let streets flood; local trains were cancelled or delayed, with Monday afternoon and evening offering little respite.

On a very wet Sunday, seeking guidance from the weather people, you could never have guessed at the severity of the rainfall: the forecast spoke of drizzle, occasional thunderstorms.

On Monday the news on your mobile told you how the Indian Meteorological Department was explaining the biggest one-day downpour for June in twenty years: an offshore trough all along the western coast from Gujarat to Kerala over which an upper air circulation, the combination of which was causing excessive pre-monsoon rainfall.

Fickle forecast?

Mumbaikars would have wished they had known earlier that nature was playing tricks; it would have been nice if the IMD had issued such warnings as are appropriate to the intensity of the “unseasonal” rainfall for people to be prudent and stay indoors, not choke up the drains with garbage (always a very difficult thing to do).

But for the city, the Met department has always been something of a joke, a reference point for the aftermath of a bad day. Those Mumbaikars who would have heard that great line from a Bob Dylan song: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” would have nodded their heads at its unintended literalism.

The rain as mirror

One day of heavy rain, however, does more than show up the Met department as a kindly uncle tolerated but not listened to. For a city drenched in its own sweat and the detritus of its excesses, a spell of rain, however hard, should come as a cosmic blessing, a cleansing of tired limbs and dusty streets and grubby buildings.

But, in fact, the rain comes as a nightmare to be endured, and increasingly as something more apocalyptic: a reminder of our own careless and reckless modernisation.

Even in sunny weather, the exit by car from the north-western suburb of Andheri to Chembur on the east and onward to the Expressway that leads to Pune, some 200 km over the Western Ghats, is a tedious and long struggle jostling for space between garbage piles, demented drivers steering rickshaws, rickety buses and drivers of swanky cars on roads never planned for such vehicular density.

With every passing year, the rains show up the unplanned nature of the city’s expansion as a parable for India’s urbanisation: not as an accidental fracture between the symbols of affluence and poverty but as a joint statement of the dystopian vision we have created for ourselves.

Driving down Swami Vivekanand Road, the long artery connecting the suburbs of Andheri to Bandra you know the future is upon us.

The incessant rainwater unable to escape to their natural confluence with the Arabian Sea moulds the city’s detritus into rather surprising forms and shapes: rotting garbage heaps now turning slithery, oozing their filth into the flowing rainwater, uprooted cement slabs or tiles piled carelessly in the middle of pavements, over which pedestrians clamber, the drab facades of buildings back-grounding them, colonies of pavement dwellers huddled under plastic sheets glistening soot-grey and blue-green, dreaming of a better world than the ones they fled, and the ubiquitous polypropylene bags usually to be found scattered near construction sites like dirty piles of snow.

The Mannequin economy

These symbols of frenetic urbanisation, the glass-paned façade with faux archways and the empty, non-biodegradable mounds of PP cement bags always existed; but the rise of the global economy’s symbols of consumerism evident along SV Road -- behind glass-fronted windows, those mannequins in chic designer wear, secure in their air-conditioned ambience, an arm raised, finger pointing out somewhere to another world not yet seen -- completes the picture of utter dissonance .

But equally the mannequin with its rich colours, the cheek-by-jowl shanty shops and the pavements both with their monochrome drabness reveal time to be out of joint.

Between the two worlds there is no interval; unlike earlier, western versions of modernisation where monochromatic grubbiness gave way to manicured orderliness – think London or New York over time with good policymaking and rising civic awareness. In Mumbai, the narrative of globalised prosperity has collapsed unto itself.

Policymakers would like to think of the city’s ugly drabness as a visual expression of incompleteness, of remnant of a past to be reformed, of work left to be done. In reality those symbols are the ruins of an aborted endeavour. The project has involved the creation of the space for the mannequins and the obliteration of civic consciousness.

To a large extent, such decay does not encourage urban Indians in cities such as Mumbai particularly to question their quest for the fruits of globalisation’s artifacts and artifices; in fact, it pushes them to enjoy those goods and attitudes with greater exclusivity and increasing privacy than ever before.

Unlike in the West where the mobile and the video-game close the mind to the world of books or lived experience, in urban India, the consumer experiences the simultaneous restriction of physical space.

Two days of rain that underscore the grubby alter ego of affluence should remind Mumbaikars of how restrictive their island city has become for their pleasures and edification, how crenellated their view of its geography.

No city in the world of this size has so few parks or public spaces for recreation, unless you can pay for it. Between rent-seeking capitalists, civic officials and a complicit citizenry, the open space acquires meaning only as the site for the apocalyptic debris of their excesses.

Those empty cement bags, recyclable but not biodegradable, and the mannequin in the window, are the faces of India’s urbanisation.

blfeedback@thehindu.co.in

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