Has the Maximum City met its match?

Having lived in Mumbai for many years, it’s easy to understand why the moniker “the city never sleeps” is better suited to Mumbai than Citibank. This is indeed a “24x7x365” operation, long before any consultant came up with this pithy phrase. The trains sleep for a mere 4 hours between midnight and 4 am, and that rest is mainly for cleaning and getting ready the city’s lifeline for transporting another 10 million people on their daily commute. Indeed, having had many opportunities for being on the midnight roads while travelling to and from the airport, it never ceases to amaze me that the city remains always on. Probably the only time Mumbai snoozes is between 3-4 am, as the trains refresh and the morning indispensables markets get ready for the next day’s action.

So you can well imagine that the last few days have been fairly eerie for this famous insomniac of a city, with the expectation that the new normal could be something more akin to Malgudi, not Mumbai. By any standard, “social distancing” in Mumbai is no more prevalent than is the use of English grammar and punctuation in the US President’s tweets. It’s not something that comes naturally, where the daily crush is felt more in the rib -cage rather than the heart; where regular “local” travellers are experts in identifying deodorant and perfume brands of the multitudes surrounding them perpetually; where “adjustment” is a natural law allowing traffic ostensibly going in different directions to operate on the same side of the road, and where “safety in numbers” is a practical reality and not just an intellectual proposition.

But has the Maximum City finally met its match? What happened to those decibel levels that have been used as the training grounds for Arnab and his ilk? What happened to the sounds of the 1000 cc bikes that have disturbed many a Sunday slumber? What happened to those endless doorbells signifying the arrival of the most important people in our lives-the milkman, newspaper wallah, maid, dhobi, and driver? COVID as named by the WHO and the “Chinese virus” as named by “He whose name we cannot say” (courtesy JK Rowling) seems to have bent the knees of even this Herculean city. But this is not a defeat but a strategic retreat. It’s a time to regroup and reflect, to show the resolve and restraint required to overcome this pandemic. It is a step or two back, but not a fall. It’s a comma and not a full stop. It’s a new beginning and not the end.