He spent five hours in line at his bank branch here, only to reach a teller who had run out of the new notes. And on Sunday, when he usually has appointments all afternoon for haircuts and color treatments at Beau Monde salon in the neighborhood of Colaba, only one client showed up, the rest lacking the cash to pay.

His family was surviving on 1,500 rupees in small-denomination notes that he fished out of his daughter’s piggy bank, he said.

“I am willing to handle all of this if this will really reduce corruption,” Mr. Sheikh said as he held a blow-dryer to his sole client’s hair in the otherwise empty salon.

A Mumbai taxi driver, Girja Prasad Goswami, 48, said his daily earnings had been cut in half, to 300 rupees, since Mr. Modi’s ban went into effect. He was not sure how he would send money to his wife and three daughters in his home village in Uttar Pradesh if business did not pick up. Yet he said, “If it’s going to help the nation, I am willing to continue.”

In banning the two largest currency notes on Tuesday, Mr. Modi aimed to reduce the use of unaccounted-for cash in India, where experts have estimated that one-third of transactions are made this way. With the sudden ban, Mr. Modi rendered vast caches of unaccounted-for cash useless.

Mr. Modi, in his Sunday speech, asked the public for 50 days of forbearance for a transition to new bills of 500 and 2,000 rupees. Complicating that transition is the fact that many of the country’s approximately 200,000 A.T.M.s are not working. Those that are working are quickly running out of 100-rupee notes, and none of the machines are capable of dispensing the new 2,000-rupee notes, which are a different size from the previous notes.

The finance minister, Arun Jaitley, said recalibrating the A.T.M.s to dispense the new notes would take as long as three more weeks. The machines were not recalibrated before last week’s edict; by keeping the move a secret, officials prevented big holders of unaccounted-for money from outwitting the ban.