He detested rush hour traffic. But Shashikant R Doshi’s obsession with punctuality forced him to commute by train.

Like every other working day, he ate in a hurry at breakfast time. Just to ensure he got his train. “He would breakfast at exactly 8.30 in the morning. We had to drop everything else for the time being,” recalls wife Meena.

Terrible Tuesday began like any other day. But the Doshis will remember it as the day of a long, never-ending wait. Unlike on rain-hit 26/7 last year, when the family waited for Shashikant—he was trapped inside a stalled train for hours—who managed to reach home in Mahavirnagar in Kandivali the next day. If that day’s wait paid off, on 7/11 it didn’t.

“He had called us at 5.30 pm from Matunga asking if we needed anything for next day’s breakfast. We started panicking only after we didn’t hear from him till midnight,” says Meena.

Shashikant was on the Borivali-bound local and he died when one of its compartments blew up at Jogeshwari around 6.25 pm. His body was recovered from Cooper Hospital by his son Bimal at 3.30 am.

An accountant by profession, Shashikant juggled two jobs: one at a private office in Matunga for the better part of the week and the other at Jogeshwari’s Darshan Electricals Industries on Wednesdays and Saturdays. “He was perfect at his work, he never made a mistake in his accounting. He was a very gentle man and never asked for extra money,” says Chandrakant Shah, owner of Darshan Electricals.

... contd.