It was around 4 P.M. when the water started gushing inside the house fast, the same day, 20 years ago, I must’ve arrived early from the school that morning. Parents came to pick their children from school if it rained even moderately. It caused such panic if my parents didn’t come to pick me — that feeling of instant abandonment was the root of all of my childhood restlessness — I’d wait for the parents of my neighbourhood friends, so I could go along with them. I remember my raincoat, the fresh smell of synthetic — mostly nylon, the laminated insides of it. For the longest time I had a burgundy raincoat, with large buttons, which when I fastened over my burgeoning backpack behind, fitted tight across the upper body but was left loose around the legs. I remember it getting worn from the tightness and tearing one day, but its material was still anew even though not usable. I didn’t know then where such exquisite torn things found their value? But I know the value of an object when lost, when it's you who is torn apart from it. The first umbrella I forgot in the under desk of the bench, and the regret of losing it even though not a stitch had worn. Since then my parents have never trusted me with a new one.
Now back to that afternoon of 26th July, 2005. I remember waking up to the water cascading in from both sides of the door, since the ledges resisted the stream, the flood hit them from the inside in an upstream, making the flood look like a fountain. I remember looking at my sisters in elation after I rose from the sleep my mother had to struggle to wake me. I was sleeping on the bare mat already half drenched on the terrazzo floor. But that elation faded when the paper boats wouldn’t sail on these waters. The flood was made crystal clear by its force, breaking white with its speed. This went on for hours and the water was knee deep. When the neighbour poured a bucketful from her house outside in an unstoppable rain, it didn’t do much, of course — the flood was equalizing — the water didn’t escape out her house, so where did that cracker think the water would go? When it stopped raining as violently as it did, the water had acquired a murky blackness, the deposit of dirt had finally settled in. We could not walk without splashing the water on each other. I don’t remember about the rest of the day, like what we ate and how we slept that night. The electricity went out for three days. It took two days to clean the mess at home. We looked at each other's macerated hands. (While across the city: hundreds of human deaths, 24,000 animal carcasses were disposed of, 3,700 people were rescued.) The most mundane had a new found value through its irreversible damage and later through its slow disintegration and decay over time and then our unwilling dispossession of those objects — which also included the carefully preserved plastic wrapper entwined around the legs of folding iron chairs. The sunmica pried open over furniture wood had to be given to scrap. The documents, books, photo albums in the underbed storage, all ruined. The dye of the prints gave into that black water, making obtrusive patterns of discoloration over the photographs — even now, 20 years later, they smell of the flood like yesterday. From then on every time it rained, we dreaded the same fate, and it did flood a couple times in monsoons, but not as fatally as this. Because it had prepared us for the floods. Empty the underbed, put out the candles in case of a powercut, and so on. 26/7 was the reference for every monsoon, even if it flooded or clogged mildly.
The water that should have (or shouldn’t have) led into the vastness of the Arabian sea — like its intended design — had changed course into the shape of our homes. Because the BMC had decided that Mithi is not only a river but also a drain. Mithi was seen as an infrastructure, and not an environment. Hindustan Times ran a story in 2008 “Is Mithi a River or a Drain, Asks Centre”. After the 26/7 Mumbai floods, the Union Finance Ministry called Maharashtra officials with a question: Is the Mithi a river or a drain? The answer would decide if the city could get funds to clean and fix it. If it was a river, the project wouldn't qualify for urban renewal funds. Officials quickly explained that the Mithi is a 14.7 km river — but one that also carries sewage and rainwater — so it should count as urban infrastructure. But back then I didn’t have the cognisance of infrastructure beneath like I do now, and back then being a child meant not knowing what proximity to the fear of disappearing into statistics and all that I cared for is that no catfish or snake cut through the flood waters inside my house like it did elsewhere. And I heard about the crocodiles. Fucking crocodiles by the banks of Mithi. But in the end that 26/7 flood was a river. Not a metaphorical one, but the actual river. Turbid in its withdrawal — it left so much stillness, and everything was cleaned, the tubelights and fans and glass panes of the showcase. What did the river want to tell us when he claimed our houses? His seams were constricted by the extension of airport runaway to highway projects and Bandra-Kurla Complex and the inadequate sewage system, he had nowhere to go. So, he went where our ancestors did in the city that needed their use but wouldn’t shelter them, so they went to a distant relative, a friend from the village, married sisters house. And we were closest to the river’s kin.
We were terribly sick when the water finally receded into the gutter, drain, back into its 2,024 km pipeline network, and into Arabian sea, creeks of Malad, Gorai and Thane. Sick for days. Sleeping all day. Then it became imperative to re-built our houses in two storey, level up our thresholds. Six years later, we did the same. The kaula roof tiles had become weak and could barely withhold the tympanum of the rainfall. I know how things might have resumed past this flood into the normal, like all things do now after the most fatal of incidents and global events — from Pandemic to the death of a loved one. Leaving black slit ripples on the terrazzo floor.