They were three young women, two sisters and a friend, all three colleagues, their workplace, the Borivali Station.

Seated on a platform bench, Hemlata Yadav, 19, was discussing with her sister Suman Yadav and friend Madhuri how to apply for a new job. All three were with a unit of the Brihanmumbai Home Guards, deployed to protect the city’s woman commuters. The Virar-bound Fast pulled in, its First Class coach just a few steps from the bench where Hemlata was.

It was July 11, 6.35 pm.

“Madhuri and I fell down to the ground from the bomb’s impact but my sister was injured badly. I tried to pick her up but her right side was badly wounded, Hemlata never got up,’’ recalls Suman.

If death linked Hemlata to a city attacked, her life was touched by it as well.

Exactly a week before her death—7/4 to use terror’s New York universal vocabulary—she and her family had moved to the first flat in their lives: a 225-square-foot home in Jogeshwari, part of a government rehabilitation colony for those displaced by a road-widening project.

Perhaps, the prospect of a new home with a new roof— “she was very excited about living in a flat,” says her mother—got the two sisters to look to a new future and take risks. So they dropped out after Class XII and two months ago, joined the 3500-strong Home Guards corps at a salary of Rs 90 a day. That Rs 180 extra meant it was easier to pay the convent school fees for their younger brother Yogesh.

... contd.