By Nina Martyris

MUMBAI: Mumbai stayed home yesterday, and its roads queered into cricket pitches. For the few brave souls who ventured out, the danger lay not so much in being struck by stones as being felled by cricket balls. A ball would have been a fitting missile, actually. Two years ago, it was a fancy bowling alley in a Lower Parel mill that became the flashpoint of an angry mill-worker storming. Out-of-work mill hands stormed the entertainment centre, and more than nine pins were smashed.

Yesterday, for the first time in Maharashtra's history, saffron and red marched in step. When nine political partiesb - including the local toughs - and 50 trade unions request you to stay at home, it's best to employ the grace-under-pressure strategy. Which is what most of the city did. Daddies and mummies stayed home and caught up on Govinda songs on MTV, schools and colleges were shut for summer in any case, so the whole family could fight over the remote, Nariman Point did not hum with cellular activity, the sugarcane vendor lay on his empty stall and devoured a paperback romance, hawkers did not hawk, and taxi drivers after successfully fleecing early-morning bakras put their metres at half-mast and joined the strike. At VT and Churchgate, long trains sulked on the various platforms, indicators flashed idly, no one travelled ticketless - all untoward incidents actually, but don't forget it was bandh day.

There were streetfuls of silence throughout Mumbai's length - unwittingly, the marginalised labour movement got more than a one-minute tokenism. Unwittingly, because to the average Mumbaikar, the `anti-worker, anti-farmer, anti-people' plank is of little interest. Most know vaguely that the mills in Parel are being sold, but the city is too busy staying alive to keep track of another's death throes.

The mills are being sold one by one, or being leased to gourmet restaurants and gymnasiums. Enron, after raising a racket, is pulling out. The Chinese are dumping shiploads of toy trains, and Taiwan is dumping yards of cheap fabric. The powerlooms of Bhiwandi are puttering, some owners have opted for closure, others for suicide. And in the production bowels of Taloja and Thane, factories are shutting down, small labourers are losing jobs. Despite reassurances to the contrary, nothing but unemployment and layoffs seem to have trickled down.

But now that the bandh is over and the roads have been reclaimed by cars, who will take up cudgels on behalf of Mumbai's labour? The Shiv Sena is championing its cause, but it did precious little for Maharashtra's farmers or workers during its five years in power. And wasn't it Mr Bal Thackeray who had famously declared that Enron would be dumped into the Arabian Sea, only to have it mysteriously reinstated at Shylockian power-purchase rates? Seventy-one years ago, another man had enlisted the support of the Arabian Sea. He had marched for 26 days to its borders and lifted a fistful of salt in the Empire's face. The people hadn't stayed back then to watch television or play cricket or fight over remote controls. They had marched behind him, the salt of the earth.

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