Rain, blood and sirens
On foot and by rickshaw, from train station to hospital, a Bombay writer surveys the aftermath of the bombings.
By Dilip D'Souza
Reuters/Punit Paranjpe
A damaged train compartment hit by Tuesday's bomb blasts in Bombay, India.
July 12, 2006 | BOMBAY, India -- In the city of bomb attacks on sardine-packed trains, it's the morning after. The palms sway in the sea breeze, the sun is breaking through the gray clouds, and I am writing this in a car as we drive across town, remembering Tuesday night. For the first time in a while, there's no rain and I don't hear any sirens. For hours Tuesday, that's all I heard, all I felt. Rain, sirens.
Yesterday. Bandra, where I live, is considered the "first" suburb of Bombay, the oldest and closest to the city. When I get to the Bandra train station just after 8 p.m. on Tuesday, not two hours after the bombing, it's unnaturally, almost eerily, quiet. Lots of people, but so quiet. Yet the eeriness itself seems entirely natural. It's that kind of day, that kind of bomb-blighted day. Platforms are swept clear of the usual throngs of rush hour, public-address speakers blare monotonous announcements about blasts, no trains, please stay calm and cooperate with the authorities.
I walk down to the southern end of the platform, dark here, and immediately find hands reaching up to me from the tracks two feet below. Long lines of men and women off the trains that have stopped south of here, walking home along the tracks through the rain, asking me to help them onto the platform. One man hauls himself up, then tells me in inimitable Bombay Hindi: "Bahut log marela!"
"Many people dead!"
I continue south along the tracks and it is wet, slippery. Plenty of obstacles that I can only sense in this dark. Snatches of never-before conversation -- blast at Khar, no at Santa Cruz. None at Churchgate. Many dead, many dead. One train at Borivali, right?
Just short of Mahim, the station that's a mile and a half away, a train has stopped on the track I'm treading, long, dark and undamaged. A hundred yards on, another train, and the buzz I'm now beginning to hear -- huge crowd on the footbridge above me, huge crowd on the side of the tracks in front -- tells me that this is the one. Train with the blast.
Sure enough. The first-class compartment in the middle of the train looks like someone buckled down to work on it with a blunt can opener. It's just twisted metal now, but I flinch on merely looking at it. Suketu Mehta wrote once, famously, of hands unfurling like petals from a packed Bombay train compartment, reaching out to whisk just that one more commuter onboard. From this train stopped and dark in Mahim, the metal of the train itself unfurls like grotesque petals.
I see no hands.
Hundreds of times I've traveled in these very compartments, at this very time of day. I know as if I were in one right now how people hang from every inch. What happens to people pressed in like that when a bomb goes off in their midst?
Gawkers everywhere. Some squatting on the concrete wall beside the road, some attached -- permanently? -- to the fence beside the track, others like me just standing on the stones and filth everywhere. At the jagged hole in the train, no more than 10 or 15 yards away now, a huddle of men. Their demeanor suggests that they are bringing out a body. They don't, but one suddenly breaks from the huddle and rushes at us gawkers with a long stick. "Get going, go on, get out of here!" he screams. "What're you looking at!" What are we looking at, actually?
Another huddler steps over and suggests that instead of standing around watching, we might go donate blood at nearby hospitals.
The rain is now a lashing torrent, the traffic on the road outside a confused mess trying to negotiate through the crowds. Sirens again in the distance. Every time a bus comes through, a part of the crowd coalesces into a coordinated shouting whole, thumping on the side of the bus for it to stop, urging stranded women commuters -- only the women, for now -- in. Down the road, another band of men stops taxis and cars; in one case, they actually roll a small white car backward, pushing that hard. Some serious and heated negotiation with the driver done, a few women fold themselves into the back and the car moves on. A shopkeeper watching this from the sidewalk tells me that the police should be here doing this, organizing buses to take people home. Instead the "public" -- the Bombay word for "common man" -- is doing it itself.