People try to push a car on Western Express Highway on Thursday. (AFP)

Chandrima S. Bhattacharya recounts a 25-hour adventure that took her back from office to home on the night of deluge

The cellphone started to ring around 3 in the afternoon on Tuesday with frantic friends calling to say the rains had stopped all local trains and I should go home.

My husband was in town and we met at Churchgate and took the radical decision of taking a taxi home to Kandivli, which is about 40 km away and would cost a fortune.

Marine Drive was a paralysed sea of cars. The only thing that could be seen in that depressing grey light was the glow of car tail-lights. My sister called to say she was on a bus in Worli and there was similar traffic around her.

It took us one-and-a-half hours to cross Marine Drive. In one-and-a-half hours more, we reached Lower Parel. There civilisation ended.

One hour ? and we moved 50 metres. I was hungry, thirsty, in desperate need to use the toilet and calculating the taxi bill. We decided to wait at a restaurant, letting the taxi go.

It was a bad mistake. When we came out of the restaurant after an hour, the same cars were still there. We tried taxis ? but cabbies were wiser now.

I stepped up and tried to stop private cars alone, hoping being a woman would help ? but no one stopped. The rain fell in sheets. We had one umbrella between us.

Maybe it was the look on our faces. The driver of a Qualis took pity. He said he would drop us in Bandra, about 20 km from our home, perhaps even Kandivli. We jumped in, only to reach Tulsibai Road in Elphinstone, which was the dead end. Dadar, which lay ahead, and Mahim, a little beyond Dadar, were submerged.

The water was knee-deep. My office was very close. We asked the driver to try to take us there. But near Deepak cinema hall, the landmark near my office, Maruti 800s were floating.

We came back to the main road. We tried babe-spotting. Office-goers, including plush young women executives, had come down on the streets and begun the Walk Back Home. That helped to keep our minds off the lack of drinking water. One of the pavementdwellers had started to sell vada pav. But our driver decided against it because vada pav would make him more thirsty.

Two hours passed. It was 11. We had again made a progress of 50 metres. Then we decided to turn back and try Worli Naka to reach Bandra.

The traffic was better, but it took us three hours to reach Bandra, about 10 km from Elphinstone. The driver took one look at the traffic on the highway and said he would not go to Kandivli.

Bandra, the capital of night clubs, was a shock. It was absolutely dark and silent. We asked to be dropped anywhere ? a night club, a roadside restaurant, anywhere where there was a light. But there was nothing. We went to the one place where lights burned ? the coffee shop of a swank five-star hotel.

It did not look like a five-star place any more. The tables and chairs were haphazard and the place was swarming with people who also looked like things the cat has brought in and fast asleep on the sofas. But for some reason just after we entered, the restaurant put up a notice saying it was closed.

We had coffee over an hour and stepped out at five. But there was no let-up, either in the rain or the traffic. In the parts that were not choked with traffic, the main Bandra roads ? we tried every one of them for the next three hours ? were strewn with stranded people or abandoned cars.

We started to walk, with Kandivli as the ultimate goal, but a lift as the short-term one. We reached Khar and not a hope of going anywhere. The rain and the water and the smell were making me sick by now.

There were hundreds walking with us. A television actor lost an ardent female fan when he didn’t stop despite her wildly flailing arms.

We kept walking. We got a lift from a man who looked like a filmi bhai, but his driver managed to land the jeep on a pavement. We tried a million taxis. We tried police vehicles, but they were as scarce as drinking water. No phone booth worked. Our cells had stopped.

I hadn’t heard from my sister since 4. Her husband said she had started to walk back home, in Kandivli, too, from Mahim. He had tried to get out but couldn’t because the water was neck-deep near his house. A dead cow had washed up against his car. Six bodies had also apparently washed up in a nullah there. Then his phone had conked off. I tried not to think about my sister.

We turned to our last resort, the train. We walked back to Bandra station ? and hallelujah! At 8.30, the first train from Bandra to Andheri, four stations away from Kandivli, was about to leave. We squeezed into it.

The happiness was short-lived. At Vile Parle, one station ahead of Andheri, it was announced that the train would stop because there were other trains on the same line.

We tried to walk to the highway. But we heard that the traffic had not moved on the highway since the previous night. We came back to Vile Parle station.

The first train to Borivli, which also stopped at Kandivli, arrived around 3 in the afternoon. The train reached Kandivli after an hour. I reached home soon. Just as I was about to plunge into the waters right back to search for my sister, she turned up at my doorstep.