A man is standing in his weather room – or so I imagine – looking out to the Arabian Sea. Perhaps he can see Dharavi from his 27th floor perch. In the heart of Mumbai, Dharavi is the largest slum in Asia. In this neighbourhood of almost one million people crammed into a two square kilometre area, with one toilet shared among several hundred people, social distancing is mere fantasy. Spatial inequality is just one variant of the inequalities that have manifested during this pandemic, as virus infections and deaths are mapped along the contours of poverty, race, class, and citizenship status.
If Mukesh Ambani had been home in the first days of June 2020, he would have been preoccupied with the weather rather than the pandemic. A cyclone had been forecast to hit this metropolis of more than 20 million people. Built on an estuarine archipelago exposed
