MUMBAI: The year was 2016. Shadab Momin was wiping the floor at the juice centre where he worked when the unthinkable happened. His ex-girlfriend walked in. Her brother asked for a one-litre Cola.Momin, hands still sticky from the day’s shift, stopped mopping, handed him the bottle and refused to look at the woman who had become his past. “That night,” says the 28-year-old, “I decided I had to become someone people would bow down to.”Today, in Bhiwandi, few call him Shadab. To the powerloom town, he is Spidey Bhai.With over a million Instagram followers and a part Marvel, part mohalla aura, Momin has become an unlikely symbol for a town better known for flooded roads, crumbling infrastructure and powerloom distress.Like Peter Parker, who grew up not in glossy Manhattan but working-class Queens, Momin came of age amid Bhiwandi’s potholes and poverty. He grew up in Chator Gully, where every Ramzan the aroma of dry fruit-rich gawla mingles with shawarma smoke, and still calls his government school “Peeli school” — the yellow school.Dance came naturally. Money did not. After Class XII, financial troubles forced him to quit studies. Two of his three elder brothers left for Gulf jobs while Momin spent four years at a juice centre. A stint in pharmaceutical sales followed, but by 2018 he knew he was chasing a future that would never quite arrive. “I would grow by two to five per cent every year. That’s it.”His thoughts kept returning to Spider-Man. “In the movies, he was an ordinary boy who entertained people and helped people. I wanted to be that.” It would take another six years, spanning a pandemic and a plateauing pharma career, before Shadab became Instagram’s “Aapka apna Spider-Man”.On April 14, 2024 (”I remember it was Ambedkar Jayanti”), he donned a Rs 2,000 Spider-Man costume bought online and danced in a local market. Trolls arrived first. “Spider-Man should be admitted to hospital,” one wrote. Then came followers. Soon, his unemployed desi Spider-Man sold paan, worked at the juice centre, hauled cement sacks and increasingly filmed himself helping others — distributing food, assisting strangers and turning everyday kindness into content. “Some videos are for entertainment, some for emotion and some for helping.” Within two years he crossed a million followers. Critics called it performative. “Dikhawa nahi hai,” he insists. “They are not for reel. They are for real.”During the monsoon, when floodwater swallows roads, Momin rides to the worst-hit stretches on his scooter carrying little more than a floor wiper. He warns motorists about submerged craters, pushes stranded vehicles and recently went viral for carrying two children through waist-deep water. “Ek saal se sau saal,” he says proudly of his fanbase. He recalls helping rescue passengers from a car trapped in a flooded pothole and spending hours alongside a policeman clearing water. “With great waterlogging comes great responsibility,” read one Instagram comment.These days, Spidey Bhai has been watching Tom Holland’s latest Spider-Man film and fighting villains that are less cinematic: garbage, potholes and waterlogging. “The authorities are doing their best,” he says. “Still, I don’t understand why the same places flood every year,” adds Momin who wants litterers fined.Every day, on returning home, he washes his sole costume by hand. People do not yet bow to him but they do stop for selfies. Children shout his name and somewhere, perhaps, the ex might have noticed too. Does she follow him online? “I don’t know,” he says. “She is married now.”
