A few of "You Lucky Dog!"...Some "Oh! Good for you!"...A couple of "Make use of this opportunity..Go back to your home town and chill out"...ONE "Ok! Work on this and this and well..this too" ...And a lot of "Maan...you had to be there to believe it"...
My eventual homecoming was greeted by these and more of (not-so-)mixed feelings...I could have settled for "Oh! we missed you loads.." or maybe even "We skipped the weekend 'session' cuz you weren't here"...but well,I wasn't exactly returning back to page 72 of 'Krithika in Wonderland'...as bipolar as it can get from it, actually...I was back at Bombay..Bombay waking up to the aftermath of 28 hours when nature ravished its fury with one of the most fatal low blows...A bombay under siege by Rain gods, in the stranglehold of its poorly architected drainage system, at the mercy of its unsturdy roads, held hostage by the lack of a good disaster control system...A bombay afloat with debris of every kind and buoyant vehicles...A bombay, which lived to tell a oft-repeated tale of how the tenacity, resilience, grit and generousity of its people stood resolute and unfazed even in the most turbulent of times..
So what's the loudest news that is being heard?.... The fact that the waters ebbed to ten feet and more in certain areas? Or maybe the fact that they gushed in to most ground floor apartments washing away everything in sight? Or what about the fact that there had been no prewarning meted out by the authorities? Or..maybe the more universal of facts..the city having recorded the highest levels of rainfall in a single day ? Err....take another guess...Trust me you wouldn't even be able to get anywhere near the ballpark...
The only thing strikingly visible is the fact that irrespective of all of the above happening, there were people volunteering to get out of their dry grounds (if they have managed to find them, i.e.), in order to distribute biscuits, tea and food to all those unlucky ones who are still wading through water to get to their dear ones...What about this? You might just have a 10 * 10 that you call home, but that doesn't stop you from offering it as a refuge to those helpless who have no way to get home..and yes, you might have a handsome 7 figure amount smiling down on your salary account on the last friday of every month, but that does not stop you from accepting a corner of that 10 * 10 and a public toilet... And of course, if there are 150 people stranded on the top half of a double decker bus with the bottom half of the bus falling prey to seeping water, there are an equal number of people standing sure-footedly in the neck deep water with a rope so that they can pull the ones on the bus to safer grounds......
Its high density of population might be one of the reasons why the morbid images of overcrowded trains, jam packed roads and brimmed up buses surface in the minds of most people, but hell...without them, the city could not have picked up the salvages of their battered lives and reported in at 9 a.m sharp for work on Day 2! Kudos!
P.S - Definitely not an afterthought...wanted to postscript this bit...16 people died suffocated in their cars waiting for 30+ hours to get home, more than 50 people fell victims to landslides...20 odd were stampeded to death due to a false tsunami scare....I did not know 'em, but...R.I.P ...
This blog goes to the one person that I did know who did not turn up at work, like the others did today...He reached home after plodding through the waters for hours...He hit the bed and never woke up, passing away due to a cardiac arrest...Malay, May your soul rest in peace...
