It's an unexceptional chair, but they kept it vacant for a month after 7/11. For, when the terror attack claimed their most cheerful colleague, whose computer sits just 18 inches away from the next in an office shockingly cramped even by government office standards, the office suddenly felt empty.

At the Dadar headquarters of the Central Excise Commissionerate (Division Thane II), they lost two colleagues, working in different departments but sitting an arm’s length from each other. And Shashi Shekhar Singh (37) was the cheerful, raring-to-go excise inspector in the adjudication section whose open-hearted smile they sorely miss.

Shashi died in the blast on a train at Mahim station on July 11.

Asha Shashikant, the inspector now handling Shashi’s work, and occupying his chair, can’t forget that morning. “My son’s Std X results were out,” she says. And as soon as she walked in, Shashi wanted to celebrate. “No mithai? Don’t step in,” he had joked. Nelson Fernando, superintendent and one of Shashi’s immediate seniors, adds: “He just needed an excuse to celebrate, to order sweets. He loved sweets.”

PV Ramchandran, another superintendent, had been on the same train but luckily in another compartment. “Shashi always rose to the occasion when targets had to be met,” he remembers. “And anything he was asked to do, he’d take up cheerfully.”

With no fresh recruitment and responsibilities multiplying, it’s common for Central Excise inspectors to work late. “Just the previous day, he’d stayed back till 8 pm; we were getting some show-cause notices prepared and signed by the boss from his residence,” says Fernando.

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