Mr. Harda, 55 years old with salt-and-pepper stubble, is a gentle, relentless executioner. He fumigates. He drops poison laced with garlic and chutney into burrows. He brings new traps to shopkeepers and collects the previous catch for killing. The rats are sometimes drowned in buckets. Other times they are seized by the tail and smashed onto the hot pavement.

These are the small, unsung tasks that keep big cities humming. Behind every great city there is, or perhaps ought to be, an obsessive, fearsome rat catcher, toiling silently so that bankers can bank, film stars film and vendors vend.

But Mr. Harda is an Indian Sisyphus. When he got the job 33 years ago, the rats were no match for the catchers. Government service attracted India’s brightest in those days, and Mumbai was still clean enough to starve rats of the garbage on which they snacked. But in three decades, India has turned inside out, and so has the equation between catchers and rats.

Private-sector jobs in call centers and software firms beckon, and the government struggles to attract men of Mr. Harda’s caliber. Many rat-catching posts lie vacant. Meanwhile, Mumbai has metastasized from a genteel city of a few million into a grimy megalopolis of 17 million. More than half of the population lives in shanties surrounded by garbage - and, consequently, by rats.

[ view ]