Somewhere on the Jogeshwari-Vikhroli Link Road, under a sheet of monsoon water that looked no different from any other flooded stretch of Mumbai, a pothole was waiting. It had no warning sign, no barricade, nothing to mark it as anything other than more grey road.

A motorbike carrying two brothers home rode straight into it — and in the seconds after, one father's entire life split into a before and an after.

Nine years later, that same man walks the city's streets at dawn with a shovel over his shoulder, broken paver blocks in a sack, and a name Mumbai has given him that he never asked for: Pothole Dada.

A phone call that changed everything

Dadarao Bilhore was standing in his grocery store in Andheri, getting ready to break his Ekadashi fast, when his phone rang. His sons, Ram and Prakash, had fallen off their bike near Seepz.

Nothing serious, he was told — they'd sought shelter from the rain, then ridden on once the water eased, only for their bike to vanish into a pothole hidden beneath the flooded road.

He left for the hospital alone, still believing it was a scare rather than a tragedy. Halfway there, a second call arrived. Ram was alive, shaken and bleeding but saved by his helmet.

16-year-old Prakash, riding pillion without one, had been flung further and had landed with an impact his body could not survive. He had suffered a brain haemorrhage. He was gone.

Dadarao didn't tell the rest of the family. Not that day. He waited almost 24 hours, until Ram had stabilised, before anyone else learned that Prakash was never coming home.

When his wife finally did, she remembers seizing her husband by the shirt and saying, “You promised to bring my son back the way he left this morning, she told him. Give me my son back.” There was no version of that promise he could........

© The Better India