An officer frisks two men. Picture by Gajanan Dudhalkar

July 12: There is enough evidence that the “Mumbai spirit” is alive and Mumbai is “bouncing back”. Television screens are full of it.

But there are some that bristle at the words.

“What is bouncing back?” demanded Aruna Gokhle, a media professional. “It means having to come back to work at any cost. I reached home at 2.30 in the morning. I am back at work today.”

“But at what cost? I don’t even know if I will reach home safe.”

As more and more Mumbaikars queued up to donate blood, hospital officials said they had enough. Several of the donors were Muslims, which even had the Shiv Sena acknowledging the generosity of the community it loves to hate.

“We don’t care whether it’s a Hindu or Muslim who gets our blood as long as we can save them,” said Abdul Khan, waiting in the long queue at the blood bank in Siddharth Hospital near a blast site at Jogeshwari station.

Many see yesterday’s blasts that killed some 200 people as the latest in a campaign of violence by Islamic terrorist outfits.

But the city will never give in to communal violence, said Lata Sirsha, who was injured on her head and legs, from her hospital bed. “This is the real Mumbai that cannot be defeated.”

Real Mumbai. The city that survives. Nobody can break us. Codes that are written into the city’s psyche and make up the Mumbai spirit, a special quality that helps it “bounce back” again and again whenever disaster strikes: blasts, riots, rain.

Those who feel uneasy with the expression “Mumbai spirit” say the city bounces back because bouncing back is not a matter of choice but a necessity. Life goes on because it cannot stop, in Mumbai or anywhere else.

“I am tired of the words ‘Mumbai spirit’. I reached a cousin’s place in Mahim at 2.30 in the morning, and on the way there were car-owners giving a lift to complete strangers, especially women,” said Sonya Banerjee, marketing head, Yahoo! India. “This is the spirit that I love. But to say that Mumbai can bounce back again and again is to take the city for granted.”

Banerjee warned: “Mumbai is being mistaken for an elastic. But if this goes on, it will snap one day. Don’t forget that the BSE is here, too. There will be a direct reflection on the economy.”

The stock market did bounce back, though, where the words are probably more appropriate.

Gokhle said her indignation might even have an impact on her job. “My boss, a very nice person, agreed to drop me home last night. But on the way, he went on talking about the city’s spirit. ‘Tomorrow is another day,’ he said about three times.

“Something snapped in me. I told him that it was all right for him to believe in the city’s spirit because he travelled in a car and he did not have to make sales calls. It was not real for him. But I have to travel on trains and come to work. There is no choice. I have to ‘bounce back’,” she said.

“I just heard a neighbour died at the Borivli station blast yesterday. It could have been me.”

Most of the city would have the same feeling ? ‘It could have been me’. Just as most of the city would have to bounce back ? to work.

Psychiatrist Dr Harish Shetty, who has treated disaster survivors since the 1993 blasts, said: “Mumbai is an auto-pilot city. It moves because it has no choice.

“The city gives lifts, water, immediate relief. It happened with the rains last year. It happened yesterday. But? if the city was really interested, its anger should have been directed towards the authorities. Why hasn’t a single person been convicted for the 1993 blasts? Why do we have to watch film after film featuring a blast accused?”

He said that by falling back on the word resilience, the city is blocking its real feelings. “It is denying that it is angry and tense. What is going to school like when your neighbour is dead?”

And what will happen to Chirag Chauhan and his love of cricket? His legs are paralysed. He will never play Sunday cricket again. “What remains of his life now? He hasn’t even started out on it,” wept Hiren Gohil, Chauhan’s brother-in-law.

Yet, Makarand Bhopatkar, a 35-year-old corporate trainer, said: “We’re used to crises here. The city survives.”

Because even Kashmir does, and Iraq and Palestine are trying to all the time. That’s why Shakespeare has someone come in and put in a word of hope at the end of his bloody tragedies.

Life goes on. Because there’s no choice. Call it the Mumbai spirit, if you like.