Column

No, I’m sure they’re very good people and are kind to doggies and little children. Their families and friends love them. Their bosses beam kindly on them. Their subordinates gaze up at them adoringly. They help specially-abled people across roads.

They give to charity. They never even swat flies. I just don’t believe them. I don’t believe the municipal commissioner and all his additional, exceptional, associate and other assorted commissioners. I don’t believe the chief minister, chief secretary and chiefs of all the agencies that help to run Mumbai and its surrounding satellite towns. Sorry, it’s true.

You can’t believe them either. They say that 78 per cent of the pre-monsoon drain clearing work is done. Ha! Where I live, all the drains that have been “cleared” have the “cleared” muck piled carefully next to them.

Already, half has been spread across the road because no one has picked it up. One ickle, lickle, wickle shower and sploosh, back it goes into its natural home: The drain. But that’s the small problem.

The bigger one is the digging for the drains which has just started. Like 10 days before the arrival of the wet season. Every road in my area is either being paved (yes! By paving blocks!) or being dug up or both. The monsoon has already hit Kerala. And 80 per cent of Mumbai is dug up, being cleaned and drained of all good sense. That is why I do not believe them. Do you?

Luckily for me, our office is managed by very thoughtful people who are working to prepare us for an unprepared city. So the air-conditioning vents on top of our heads have spent the last month liberally dispensing vast amounts of water on our heads. Perhaps it is hoped that this way we will be inured to the travails of a badly managed monsoon.

We’ve already been through it — annoying drips on your head as you work, property being gradually destroyed, the threat of short circuits, heat and humidity between showers — hey which nature-made monsoon could beat man-made perfection?

Now all we need is for the toilets to overflow and we’ll have practised the walking through the drains manoeuvre as well. Meanwhile, this does not let the worthies mentioned above off the hook. Not all Mumbaikars are fortunate enough to work in my office, after all. What is going to happen to them?

Pick of the week: Now that the cricket is over, what are we going to do? I fear that the country may collapse into gloom and doom that has little or nothing to do with oil prices or inflation or any other boring such thing. I know I said I love Salman Khan, but I fear that he will not be enough.

We must be fed from now on a non-stop diet of endless limited-overs cricket. Let there be leagues upon leagues. I will by then be under the sea. Or under water at the very least (see above).

b_ranjona@dnaindia.net