Salvation by the sea

The waters of Mumbai have turned into a graveyard for the frustrated and depressed. Fishermen are bringing bodies home so that families can bid a respectful goodbye

At 3 pm on July 17, Sandesh Mistry gets a call from a friend working at the Bandra-Worli Sea Link toll booth informing him that he has just seen someone jump off the bridge and into the rough Arabian Sea below.

Mistry, 23, who has grown up in Bandra Koliwada, happens to be nearby, sitting below Bandra Fort with his friends from the Kadheshwari Fishermen Sahakari Sanstha Maryadith (KFSSM) group. From the shore, they scan the ocean to try and spot the jumper, Bhavesh Seth, a businessman from Ghatkopar. There was no sign of him in the swelling tide.

“The tide was too high for us to even see him. It’s hard to go and rescue anyone at such times; all we could do was wait until his body came closer to shore,” says Mistry, who was one of the five who finally retrieved Seth’s body around 7 pm.

Akash Khapne (from left), Sandesh Mistry, Anwar Ali and Robin Willam were four out of the five who retrieved the body of Bhavesh Seth, the bussinessman who jumped off the Bandra-Worli Sea Link on July 17. Pic/Kirti Surve Parade

“The waves might not look like much from the shore, definitely not from the bridge, but the fury is genuine. Mumbai’s residents might take it for granted because they think they live near the sea, but they don’t truly live by the sea, nor do they know it,” he adds.

Once the body was spotted, Robin Edwin Williams, Anwar Shaukat Ali and Raju Singh dive in and bring it to the shore. “He [Seth] was floating and he had been in the sea for almost four hours, so we knew it would impossible for him to survive,” says Williams. 

“I have fished bodies out from here since I was a kid, it’s just second nature to us now,” he adds as we walk towards the machhimar community’s settlement on the rocky shore, where non-residents are often shooed away with no pretense at politeness. This, the locals inform us, is for the “public’s good”, since there have been too many accidental drownings when untrained tourists come to satiate their wanderlust.

D Bunty Rao

The attraction is understandable. Behind the fishermen, the sea link looms large—an infrastructural marvel that has drawn scores of tourists every year since its opening in 2009. However, for the machhimar community, that is also the year when the Grim Reaper moved in. Following its opening, the sea link became a notorious suicide point, forcing the authorities to place CCTV cameras, as well as guards, along the bridge. 

At the newer Atal Setu bridge too, there have been two deaths by suicide in the seven months since its launch. In the past fortnight alone, there have been four such suicides by drowning in the city—one each at the sea link, Atal Setu, Marine Drive and the Gateway of India. There are also victims who are swept away by swollen waves during the monsoon.

“We end up rescuing at least two people per month. During the monsoon, this number just spikes to as much as one rescue per day,” says Ali. 

Prem Ramesh Soshte

Akash Khapne, 23, lets us in on an unsaid rule of the machhimar community for retrieval of drowning victims—never put the body on the boat. No machhmar likes a body to be close to their boat, fearing the boat might “catch” death too.

Such is the stigma and fear around such incidents, that the group has yet to inform their friend whose boat they had taken out on that fateful Wednesday, to get to the spot where the body was floating. 

“She [the boat] is our Laxmi. You do not put a dead body on her. We usually put the body on to a raft that is attached to the boat. But this time, the place where we found it [Seth’s body] was very rocky and steep, so we tied a rope to the body directly and pulled it ashore,” he says.

Khapne and Mistry both tie ropes to their waists and attach the other end to each leg on Seth’s body. They swim to the shore, pulling the body through the waves, taking it up the jagged rocks on the shore, until they reach even ground and lay the corpse down, less than 500 m from where the last of the community’s homes end. 

The community is also kept busy with accidental drowning cases. As per the National Crime Records Bureau report released last year, as many as 4,728 people died by drowning in Maharashtra alone in 2022, putting the state second only to Madhya Pradesh (5,427 drownings).

Bandstand and its extended shores see many such cases. Prem Ramesh Soshte, the treasurer of KFSSM is well into his 40s but was one the many fishermen who rescued Mukesh Sonar, who along with his wife Jyoti and two kids, had climbed on to the tetrapods along the shore to take a selfie back in July 2023. Jyoti was swept away by the waves and videos of the incident had gone viral. 

Soshte mentioned that the couple had been chased away earlier by a local fisherman but the husband and wife sneaked back later. “When the waves crashed against them, we began to yell at the parents. The two children were closer to the shore and someone hoisted them to safety,” he recalls. 

“The husband had managed to hold on to a rock, so we formed a chain and pulled him out,” says Soshte, adding, “We don’t jump in blindly either, because on a few occasions, fishermen have died while rescuing people.” 

Like most fishermen, Soshte has been part of so many rescue or body retrieval efforts, that when asked about an October 2021 case in which Gujarat High Court lawyer Bhavesh Shah had jumped off the sea link, Soshte couldn’t recollect the victim’s name off the cuff. He requests the details from Mistry, who documents each rescue via videos and photographs and maintains a list—an exchange that is telling of the frequency of such tragedies.

The list has a second purpose, apart from record-keeping. “The police do not know how to do water rescues and arm-twist us to do it. We have long been asking for jobs as lifeguards and every time we do, they ask us for evidence,” says Soshte. 

“The truth is that no one can swim in Mumbai’s waters like a machhimar. We have a healthy respect for the sea. Our kids learn to swim at the same time they learn to walk. The sea is a playmate we grow up with—we learn when to leave this friend alone and when to ask for a ride,” he adds.

IN the monsoon of 1999, an 11-year-old orphan, D Bunty Rao had run away from his home in Jharkhand and landed up at Juhu beach. “Juhu gave me a livelihood at a gola shop at the age of 11, as well as a place to rest. That same year, I rescued a kid who had gone too far into the water. After that I never looked back,” he recalls. Now 36, Rao is a member of the Baywatch Lifeguard Association.

Lifeguard training takes place over a span of three months and ends with tests to check stamina, speed as well as the candidate’s presence of mind. If any qualities are found lacking, “you never make it out of the swimming pool to the sea”, says Rao.

Apart from 20 civil defence forces-trained swimmers, the association has also trained locals like the coconut and gola sellers to be the first respondents when things go awry at the beach. 

Rao has rescued people in all kinds of cases, ranging from suicide attempts to those who get swept away by the waves. The most important thing is to stay calm and not get pulled under by panicking swimmers. “In 2013, three kids had ended up in deep waters. I caught hold of one child and asked them to all hold on to each other in a chain as I pulled them out slowly,” he says. 

“There are thousands I have saved. The police keep asking me for proof, but I don’t keep count. Who hands back a drowning child to their mother and then asks them to go to the police station or take a video? I am fine with helping. Juhu’s water gave me the gift of life, this is how I work off the debt,” he chuckles.

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Avg no. of rescues the community does every month

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No. of suicides by drowning in Mumbai in last fortnight

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