Mumbai, can I resurrect you from the sinking feeling?!: A poem 

You know, when I think of a stricken city, I get the  

sin-king feeling of your existential horror. But the  

city may not yet, though a marvel of parallel underground,  

be sinking, like Jakarta. Though, it is a heavy 

metropolis on seven islands, and a landfill 

that’s rotting at every seam. I thought they 

built flyovers to nowhere, everywhere. I just 

can’t imagine a city of dreams become a sewer 

of nightmares every monsoon with every ground floor 

deluged! And the poor city folk think they are waking  

in a graveyard, at least, every day; not wandering 

in an abattoir of humanity! How you are the laughing 

stock of the world because your metro became an also-ran  

before it began (to be filled with leaking water); and your 

skyrail collapsed to the ground?!! See the city streets  

fill up through the digging and building all over 

till you have no place to space your elbows, but 

have your shoulders brushing and knocking everyone 

and everything around! You would have wrung your fists 

at the councilors in despair and rage, if not for your  

schooled religiosity in Karma! Are all those gods led 

by your favourite Ganesha smiling at your miserable 

resignation? You can say, you all live in a human-manufactured 

over 40-degree furnace, praying for rain to cool you and 

yet hoping it won’t rain, so as not to deluge you. All those 

Ill-conceived rickety skyscrapers to house your faint 

survival and all those spilling-over slums that are homes 

for the unwanted! This is a city, where my sister, brother-in-law  

and sister-in-law live feeling a piquant indignity and yet keeping 

for most part silent about it! And do they think I can get back there  

and prompt a resurrection when the powers that caused its doom 

have gotten away without any accountability at restitution!