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The view had always been one of the best things about the seventh-floor house of the Bundelas. From the balcony they could see every day vast open fields being tended to by a small group of men. The men are in fact prisoners and the fields part of the open jail that led to the Nagpur jail.
For the past three days, the men tending the fields have been nowhere to be seen. And on Thursday, the serenity of the view too seemed to have disappeared, perhaps forever.
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“It’s a strange feeling to absorb what has taken place in the prison today. In all the six years we have lived here, we never quite thought of the prison across the road as something that is disturbing. Today I am not so sure,” says Anita Wanchurkar who lives five floors below and whose balcony too stares directly into the prison.
“Since this is a VIP road we have seen many personalities such as Sonia Gandhi, Narendra Modi and Pranab Mukherjee among others in their convoys passing by. At such times there is considerable police bandobast. But there has never been anything like this,’’ says S Venugopal, a banker, who lives on the fourth floor, referring to the melee of OB vans, huge crowds and hundreds of police personnel that have lined the road below since the past three days and nights.
Deepak Nilawar, whose bungalow shares a wall with the building, also bang opposite the prison gates, got himself involved in the proceedings. With many of the television crews using his compound for their camera stands and wires, he helped set up chairs and organised tea for them.
On Thursday morning the builder and president of the Vidarbha independence movement even lent his Audi equipped with a sunroof to a TV crew, on their request, as it chased the ambulance that came out of the prison carrying Yakub Memon’s body.
They travelled almost halfway to the airport before they were stopped and the ambulance sped away.