26 July, 2005: Flooded streets, crazy traffic and near darkness in Mumbai

It was just days before the launch of dna on the newsstands and after two months of intense rehearsals for the paper's D-Day which was scheduled for July 30 2005. Four days before that on July 26, the Mumbai skies opened up to torrential rain such as the likes of which were never witnessed in our lifetimes.

At the time, I was scheduled to visit the soon to be launched dna newspaper office in the evening. Sitting indoors in the comfort of my air-conditioned magazine office in the morning, it was only when my then-editor pointed out that we noticed the sheets of rain were simply relentless and unstoppable as they pelted the sides of the building. Given the situation, most of the magazine staffers packed up early for home, but intrepid reporter that I am, I set off for the dna office nearby nevertheless.

It was floods and mayhem on the street outside with no taxis available at Mahalakshmi. I had to get to Lower Parel and so I walked all the way, over the flyovers en route – which, unlike the roads, were not submerged in water. A phone call from my editor soon-to-be editor Malavika Sangghvi at dna warned me off against coming to the newspaper office which happened to be in a low-lying area and had been affected by rising waters. (Later I learned that female staffers camped three nights in the office starting that evening). So now I had to traverse the relatively short distance from Lower Parel where I was to home in Santacruz.

Even as fortuitous chance would have it, a taxi driver on the flyover agreed to drop me home. Yet nobody could have reckoned that it would take me six hours to reach Bandra that night, a distance normally traversed in 20 minutes. The taxi wound its way through flood and high water and hundreds of people walking on the street. Traffic was so slow that there were waiting periods of 15-20 minutes of absolute standstill before the taxi would move forward a few inches. I never could find out exactly which roads were blocked though the taxi took several diversions from the normal course before it found that we could go no further around Prabhadevi. So I got off and joined thousands of people who were walking, to reach my destination – Bandra – on foot in the dead of night among flooded streets, crazy traffic and near darkness.

With a sigh of relief I reached my sister's house to find my sister and nephew immensely relieved to see my face. The landlines and most mobile communication in the city was dead and my whereabouts had not been known since morning. The television and radio were also incommunicado and there was no knowing what was happening elsewhere in the city. I got into a warm and dry bed that night, thanking my stars at just being alive.

Later we heard the horror stories of people trapped in their cars who never made it out alive. An acquaintance of mine who went out to celebrate his imminent job in Dubai with friends that night never returned home alive – he was asphyxiated while sitting in his car as the flood waters rose on the streets with no escape. It was a nightmarish night when everybody had a story to tell including my aunt whose ground floor house in Khar was ruined by the rushing waters while she was holidaying in the US. The destruction of life and property among Mumbaikars had never seemed so real in recent history as it was that night.

The next morning, I walked home to my parents house to Santacruz, one among hundreds of people walking the roads among thigh high waters. I was the only person I could see as I walked among chest deep waters to the safety of my parents house which was luckily in the first floor, even as it continued to rain that morning. With none of the shops open, getting rations – bread and milk – was difficult but that seemed like child's play compared to the fact that the electricity had also gone off in our building society and we had to suffer for two days in humidity with the mosquitoes breeding in the stagnant waters.

It took a week before Mumbai completely recovered from the havoc the rains wrought on the city though for many who lost family members and relatives in the floods the loss may be still irreparable. Nevertheless dna went on to a very successful and record-breaking launch of several lakh copies daily thanks to a flawless distribution system and the gritty work ethic of this city and its survivors. It took an obstacle as strong as the floods to bring out the real strength of the city and the compassion of helping others which had hardly been witnessed until that testing time.