Mumbai rains: As city drowned in chaos, perception of safety changed for women looking for shelter

By Shruti Sunderraman On 30 August, 2017, Mumbai recorded 486 mm of rainfall. The roads were flooded, buses stranded, trains stopped, and Mumbai was rendered immobile. An eight months pregnant Siddhi, was stranded in Mumbai’s Lower Parel area. The person accompanying Siddhi informed her friend Mariam D’Souza about the situation, following which Mariam tweeted about Siddhi’s situation. Within hours, over 70 people offered to help Siddhi and host her in their homes. Many braved the rains to look for her and the Mumbai Police intervened soon after. She was then taken to the home of one of the hosts who had offered to help her. [caption id=“attachment_3988865” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] People walk through a flooded street during heavy rains in Mumbai. PTI[/caption] On 26 July, 2005, like several Mumbaikars, business consultant Banu Shridhar was stranded in the floods. Seven months pregnant, she was stuck in a cab for 24 hours without food and water. If only Banu had the reach of social media during 26/7, she could’ve been spared the traumatic experiences. When Mumbai was drenched in chaos and infrastructural loopholes (and potholes) this Tuesday, its people came to the rescue. Twitter and Facebook users started offering help to host people across Mumbai. Soon, a crowdsourced list of hosts and a website called mumbairains.org was created to help the stranded find temporary shelter. A hashtag #RainHosts started trending in no time.

But for a lot of women, hosting or finding shelter through the internet was a strange experience. Even in the face of disaster, the question of safety arose. How does one trust a stranger from the internet? They had to deal with prejudices that came with conditioning and age. Women using social media in the face of a natural disaster also had to make peace with the strangeness of opening themselves and to trust blindly, something we’ve been taught all our lives not to.

For Ekta Koparde (name changed), a software professional in Mumbai, talking to people does not come easy. An introvert, she finds it very difficult to ask people for help. But she didn’t have a choice when she was stranded waist-deep in water near Milan subway in Andheri on Tuesday. Through mumbairains.org, she managed to contact a host called Niranjan (name changed). Tired, drenched and nervous, Ekta walked to her host’s home and upon reaching, she found that Niranjan lived alone.

Apprehensions followed nervousness. “I thought he lived with his family. How do I just stay with a complete stranger alone?” she exclaims.

But Niranjan, a journalist, gave her a change of clothes, made her some staple rain food — Maggi and chai. She liked that he didn’t force her to talk. Slowly, they started talking to each other about Mumbai rain and each others’ lives. “We spent four hours just listening to music and reading. I don’t know how I went from feeling terribly nervous to having a tiny crush on him. It was ridiculous how filmy it was. I slept, had breakfast in the morning and left.” But Ekta intends to call him soon, for a non-emergency chai. This time, with a little less apprehension. If apprehension-to-crush was Ekta’s story, kindness-to-disgust was Karishma Hemlani’s. Karishma was helping those who were reaching out to her on Twitter, to find temporary shelter. But found herself stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Matlab try to help someone and you have to deal with this. pic.twitter.com/wpTSqnEdLL

— Karishma (She/Her) (@The_Karishma) August 29, 2017

More from India

Why physiotherapists in India will no longer be allowed to use ‘Dr’ before their names Nepal’s Sushila Karki and her India connection

She said, “I was trying to help people. The last thing I want to do is flirt.” It is rather sad that even in situations like these, women can’t escape strange men making unwanted advances. However, advances are not the only thing that worried women in Mumbai. Apprehension about accepted behaviour in a complete stranger’s home also bothered a few, especially older women. For them, the idea of going to a stranger’s home for a sleepover is an incomprehensible one. This becomes even more difficult to accept if it’s a man’s home. Many Indian mothers have problems with their adult sons and daughters staying over at their friends’ homes. It’s a huge adjustment for women their age to stay at a stranger’s home. My mother, for example, initially refused to take shelter even as rains lashed parts of the city. Along with her colleague Lata, she was stuck in South Mumbai. Both women were insistent that they’d prefer to go back home, which was an hour away by train. With standstill trains and no relatives or friends in South Mumbai, I convinced her that her only option was to take shelter in a stranger’s home. Through #RainHosts, I found 59-year-old Sangeeta and 62-year-old Vishwanath Iyer, living 10 minutes away from my mum’s office, willing to host them. Very reluctantly, Lata aunty and mum went to their home. For the first half an hour, my mother just kept profusely thanking Sangeeta and Vishwanath. “What could I have done? I had nothing to say except ’thank you’. I didn’t know what was the accepted behaviour in their house. It was very uncomfortable,” my mother told me later. But Sangeeta, a Carnatic music teacher, was a gracious host. According to Lata aunty, sensing my mother’s discomfort, Sangeeta started talking to her in Tamil. “Once they both started talking in Tamil, Raji (my mother) became more comfortable. They even discussed their favourite Carnatic singers. Sangeeta is the warmest lady I have met,” Lata aunty said. If on one hand, older women, like my mother, had to deal with the discomfort of an alien environment, on the other, they had to deal with their own class prejudices while hosting people. Rekha Shinde (name changed), a web developer in Kandivali, had registered herself as a host on mumbairains.org. A woman named Abhinaya (name changed) asked her for shelter and Rekha agreed. Abhinaya told her that she was accompanied by Abhinaya’s domestic help, Archana (name changed). Since she’d already given her word, Rekha could not refuse her. But she felt uncomfortable having Archana around, something she does not like to admit to herself. She was aware that this would cause trouble for her parents as well, who were reluctant to have strangers in their home. Rekha said, “But once my parents started talking to both of them, they slowly started easing into it. Abhinaya and Archana, in fact, helped make breakfast for us in the morning. It helped me, and especially my mother, recognise that our prejudices were false-bottomed. Abhinaya and Archana were so nice!” Even if we open our doors and shed prejudices, safety never stops being a concern for women hosting strangers. Shweta Sangtani, a lawyer-based in Mumbai had similar apprehensions. She was alone at home when she offered to host two strangers on Tuesday. Her husband was away, wading through water to make it home. But when two gentlemen asked her for help, she could not refuse them. Cautiously, she welcomed them into her home. Shweta said they were from the same profession as her, which helped her feel at ease. She said, “The younger guy worked in a start-up which works with lawyers while the older man was a lawyer. Such a small world. We kept talking about banking and litigation laws, since he was majorly connected to the banking sector.” The older man also offered sweets that he had bought for his wife. “He gave it to us… My husband and I munched on it heartily.” After years of looking over shoulders, it’s instinctive for women to be careful about whom they let into their homes. But if there’s anything these women’s accounts describe, it is that in spite of valid safety concerns, they found warmth and welcome in strangers’ homes. What a liberating and revealing feeling it must be for these women to walk into a stranger’s home and find welcoming food and kindred spirits; to find that despite our differences, there is still room for compassion. For some women it helped reinforce their concerns for safety. But for most, it changed perspective about apprehension towards taking candy from strangers. There are still major concerns for women’s safety in Mumbai, but an entire social network of kindness proved we have reason to hope for better days, even with our streets and homes flooding. The Ladies Finger (TLF) is a leading online women’s magazine delivering fresh and witty perspectives on politics, culture, health, sex, work and everything in between.