An Indian city engulfed by the coronavirus.

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Workers fumigating a vegetable market in Mumbai in March.Credit...Atul Loke for The New York Times

Mumbai is India’s most densely populated city. A scraggly peninsula framed by the Arabian Sea and other waterways. A city of outsize dreams and desperate poverty. It is where Asia’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, built a 27-story single-family home, and where “Slumdog Millionaire” was filmed and set.

Indians call it Maximum City.

And as the coronavirus gnaws its way across India, Mumbai has suffered the country’s worst outbreak. The city of 20 million is now responsible for 20 percent of India’s coronavirus infections and nearly 25 percent of the deaths. Hospitals are overflowing. Police officers are exhausted enforcing a stay-at-home curfew.

Doctors say the biggest enemy is Mumbai’s density, particularly in the city’s vast slum districts, where social distancing is impossible. People often live eight to a room across miles and miles of informal settlements made of concrete blocks and topped with sheets of rusted iron. As temperatures climb toward 100 degrees Fahrenheit, many can’t help but to spill into the streets.

The nation of 1.3 billion people has been put under one of the world’s tightest lockdowns for the past seven weeks. That has kept reported coronavirus infections relatively low — around 78,000 cases reported so far.

But India’s testing is also relatively low, so many experts fear that the real number of infections is far higher. Many people still don’t have masks.

For the past eight weeks, Atul Loke, a second-generation newspaper photographer, has been tracking the spread of the coronavirus across Mumbai. His photographs, which can be viewed at the link below, reveal a city under siege.