March 12, 1993: The day that charred Mumbai's spirit

It was business as usual at the newspaper office and March 12, 1993, was just another day till lunch. As few of us journalists sat together at the office canteen, a colleague walked up and told us of a blast at the Bombay Stock Exchange. She told the photographer who was with us that the Editor wanted to see him right away.
 “ Ah ok! After lunch,” he retorted. All of us thought it was a routine blast involving at the most a gas cylinder. No sooner had we got to the next morsel, she came up again, this time louder with more urgency, “There's another blast at the Air-India building (Nariman Point)!”

We continued with our lunches thinking our colleague was exaggerating an earlier event with a shift in venue now. Five minutes and she was back yelling, “ Everybody in the Editor’s office right away. There’s been a series of `bomb’ blasts in the city!”

Lunches were forgotten as we rushed to the Editor’s office. We were told there had been six bomb blasts across Mumbai. Desperate attempts to call our sources, cops, politicians, ministers and even the CM himself began. But, the MTNL telephone lines - fixed telephony for the current generation - the only means of communication of that pre-mobile and internet era were either dead or had delayed dial tones. Some even spoke of this being a deliberate precautionary measure by the state to prevent panic.

Ours was a financial newspaper with just one political correspondent, but then a major event like bomb blasts, that too at the Bombay Stock Exchange, couldn't be ignored.

Back at the Editor’s desk, small groups of four or five were being formed after identifying at least one person from each group well-versed with the location so the spot could be reached at the shortest time.

Prabhadevi or Century Bazaar, was little known to most except that it housed the passport office. Most linked it to Dadar, its closest railway station. Only it was a good three km from the station to the blast site. Since I lived in the neighbourhood, I was asked to lead a quartet including a photographer, to the site. A colleague who'd got his father’s car to office became our driver as we waved our press-cards at cops and barricades to get across to what had become no-entry zones.

What we saw was unbelievable. The blast from a bomb, planted in a BEST bus had not only killed around 90 commuters but left behind a crater big enough to gobble a single-storey building. Among the dead were a young boy and a girl who worked at the newly opened Taj Cake Shop nearby. Further down, another shopkeeper’s son, had lost his hearing. We couldn't even wrap our heads around the sheer number of people who developed multiple complications from injuries and died later. Malkani building in the area looked like a haunted hall, with charred facade and dangling balconies.

And Mumbai reacted like it knows best to. Generously. With blankets, bedsheets and water which the shopkeepers around were happy to receive. For them it wasn't just largesse. It reaffirmed their belief in humanity which had been jolted badly. Many of these shopkeepers had barely re-done their shops damaged by mobs in the communal riots of end December 1992 and early January 1993.

A charred tree facing a Udipi restaurant at the site is testimony to Mumbai's indomitable spirit which refused to be broken by the 13 blasts that left at least 350 dead. The tree's since grown taller, wider and greener.

Back in office, among the stories we filed and exchanged the ones about people cheating death at one blast site only to die at another- they still give me goose-bumps.

Another memory that's lingered is of a senior cop at Prabhadevi feigning ignorance about other blasts in the city we asked him about. But Mumbai had stopped trusting her cops a good three months ago when they watched as politicians fanned communal flames and whipped up emotions to start a riot which only the army could stop. The riot ended but the city's social fabric has never been the same since.