People cling to a bus in Mumbai on Wednesday. (Reuters)

Mumbai, July 29: But for a terrible monsoon evening, Air-India engineer R. Ramakrishna of Santa Cruz, award-winning painter Sanjay Nigam of Chembur, telecom engineering student Julius Lopes of Virar and Mahanagar Gas employee Nilesh Sapkal of Ghatkopar would have remained strangers.

Mumbai’s unbeatable spirit ? so admired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh yesterday ? brought them together on Tuesday evening.

Using a single inflatable tube as a lifeboat and sarees coiled into ropes, they saved over 150 people cowering on three public buses as floodwaters rose to 10 feet around them.

Lopes and Sapkal were on one of the buses, No. 322, stranded on the stretch between Air-India Colony and Santa Cruz airport.

Nigam, 30, was travelling to Andheri on his motorbike when he saw the bus, its passengers perched precariously on the roof.

“Water threatened to submerge the single-decker bus,” Nigam recalled today.

He got off his bike, beckoned to Lopes, Sapkal and three others to join him and swam to a first-floor flat in the colony.

Ramakrishna, marooned at home with his wife and two young daughters, opened the door to face six strangers with a request to help the bus passengers.

Ramakrishna’s daughters Anjana and Bhagyashree found a round, inflatable tube used in swimming pools and some bamboo sticks.

The bus conductors threw the rescuers the nylon ropes used to tow the buses. The 12-hour rescue operation began.

“The swimming tube was big enough for four people to sit comfortably,” Nigam said. “We tied one end of the ropes to the bus and the other to Ramakrishna’s flat and also secured them to the compound wall.”

Nigam, Lopes, Sapkal and Pramod Kamble ? a 37-year-old employee of a construction firm ? along with two others whose names they still don’t know, helped the passengers on to the tube and ferried them to the flat.

Soon, night fell and it was pitch-dark, thanks to a power cut. “We rescued the children, then the women and finally the men,” Lopes said.

The Ramakrishnas and another family, the Parthsarthys, provided water and food to those rescued.

“We used sarees when we ran out of ropes,” said Sapkal, 28. At 1.30 am on Wednesday, the operation was over.

“When some of the passengers told me I had saved their lives, it felt incredible,” said Nigam, who reached his home in Chembur on Wednesday evening.

Lopes didn’t tell his family about the rescue. “They would think I am joking. Please don’t make me a hero. Please don’t write about this,” he requested over phone.