Woman of Letters: Let us give praise - Malavika Sangghvi acknowledges those who keep the city's engines chugging

On this rain-lashed and cloud-filled day, let us take our eyes off the breaking news, the prime time debate, the trending topic, the unparalleled sound byte and the unanswered question and instead turn to those who have little time for all this. Let us praise the men and women whose quiet toiling as they tend to their tasks, fuel the city's engines and give us this day our daily seven-grain bread and marmalade.

The liftmen in their vertical abodes who travel with us to offices and homes, sharing the space with us for those brief moments between entry and departure, never impinging on our private ruminations, whose faces we won't remember.

The peons who carry our aspirations and dreams from one office to another for travel, for investment and for buying and selling, duly attested and signed in triplicate with God-knows-what dreams of their own.

Let us praise those deliverers of our despair – electricians, carpenters and plumbers – for securing the windows, fixing the leaks, redoing the wiring and above all, somehow, arriving when called, perhaps at the last hour, but arriving nevertheless, with their expertise and tools to deliver us from our discomfort.

And as deliverers of our difficulties, the time has come to praise garage mechanics, especially in the rains, for they are unschooled in anything but hard knocks and tough love, these grease-stained men with their miraculous hands that mend and tune and breathe life in our two- and four-wheelers so that we are on the roads again.

Let us praise them.

And while we are on the topic of tuning and mending, let us praise those part-time agency nurses and bais and war boys who leave their ailing, loved ones and travel miles away to look after those of our own, who share so palpably our own sorrows and fears and yet are so alone in their own.

Let us give thanks for them.

The time has come to praise roadside flower sellers, upscale dog walkers, basket carriers, building watchmen and car washers. For in their toil and grace, we rest and recover. They make us who we are too.

Compounders in cavernous and cobwebbed homeopathic stores straight out of a Dickens' classic, attendants at coffee shops who ask if you'd like them to 'Vomit?' And mean 'Warm it?', bartenders who can be hired for the evening and know exactly how each of your guests like their poison, toilet attendants who peer at their own faces in the shiny big mirrors and of course, bus conductors who will never become Rajnikanth – let us praise them too.

And while we are doing so, let us remember with grudging fondness the night watchman who snores through the nights on his makeshift throne, the courier boys and the pizza delivery men with their headphones to block out your noise, event planners and copywriters who compose the innovative enticements to elicit your presence at the next big do. They too make up the jigsaw of our life in Mumbai. Praise them.

Window cleaners who hang perilously from a wire in the sky as they risk their beings, so that your outlook is shinier, sound stage technicians who check and recheck mics at city events until your voice can be carried to the last row, photographers who join in your celebrations to capture them for posterity and then disappear from your lives until the next one, the girls who answer the phones at the receptions, the girls who wax and colour your hair, the boy who delivers the bread to your door, the muttonwala and the woman you buy fish from, the guy who weighs your vegetables at the market and the man who takes your order at the fine dining restaurant, let us praise them all. Bouncers and tailors, porters and policemen, the man in the government bureau who issues your certificates and the person in the train who sings tunelessly in your ear.

On this rain-lashed and cloud-filled day, let us take our eyes off the breaking news, the prime time debate, the trending topic, the unparalleled sound byte and the unanswered question, to those who have little time for all of this: the person who transferred these words you read onto a printed page and the one who cranked the wheels in the press so that the paper reached you on time. Today, let us praise Mumbai's unsung heroes, for it is their quiet toiling as they tend to their tasks, which fuel the city's engines, that give us this day our daily seven-grain bread and marmalade.

(The columnist believes in the art of writing letters)