On September 23, as Kolkata was preparing for West Bengal’s biggest annual festival, Durga Puja, it encountered roughly 12% of the city’s average annual rainfall in just six hours. From midnight to dawn, it rained 234.2 mm causing severe waterlogging that the city had not experienced in almost four decades. Kolkata is used to cyclonic storms bringing the city to a standstill with fallen trees and electric poles. This time however, there was no cyclone. The rain mostly stopped around 8.30 a.m. Yet, water alone paused civic life — from flight operations to railway and bus services. This cloudburst-like situation, where rain falls heavily in a short period, is new to the city located in the world’s largest deltaic landscape, the Bengal delta. Kolkata was unprepared. Informal settlements, ground floors and basements of houses, high rises and hospitals were all flooded with drainage water or overflow from waterbodies. People were stranded in multi-storey apartments without electricity or an operational elevator for hours. Damaged cars, motorbikes, and vans were left in the middle of roads. Loose, live wires created safety hazards. Items from grocery and garments to electronics and electrical goods worth millions of rupees were damaged in stores and markets. Thousands of books got drenched in the heritage book market of the College Street area. At Netaji Nagar in the southern part of the city, a bicycler lost balance while navigating through a flooded road. He fell on an electric pole and was instantly electrocuted. Fearing electrified water, none dared…