This is the last interview Kirti Ajmera says he will ever give. Ajmera (49) nearly became a second-time victim of terror when he missed one of the ill-fated trains on Tuesday by bare seconds, but it’s March 1993 that gets this marketing professional talking. After 13 years, still painful.

Ajmera was at Bandra on Tuesday, waiting to go home to Malad. Two trains passed, a ladies’ special and an Andheri train.

He’d have boarded the Borivali train scheduled next — one compartment of this train blew up soon after, between Khar and Santacruz — but his beeping cell phone stopped him. ‘‘Then, everybody was talking about a blast.’’ For a few seconds, Jain stood still, his mind rushing back 13 years to another blast: Bombay Stock Exchange, March 11, 1993. He remembered his right arm hanging by a shred, a hole in his right jaw showing broken teeth, a torn earlobe, broken ribs.

He’d been about to walk into the iconic building at 1.15 pm when the explosion flung him in the air. When he regained consciousness, burning glass was ‘‘raining’’, cutting up hundreds of people — ‘‘there was a public issue launch that day’’ — were lying moaning or dead.

‘‘There must be some reason that God saved me for a second time. This time, without even an injury,’’ he says.

There are others to thank, a friend who almost didn’t recognise the bloodied Ajmera, a taxi-driver who showed up ‘‘bhagwan ke maafik, like God incarnate’’ to ferry him to hospital, faceless blood donors who responded to a call for AB-positive.

... contd.