The 6.24 pm blast at Bandra station on 7/11 ended Hariharan Iyer’s 46-year-old love affair with Mumbai’s local trains. Since October 1960, the company secretary had been taking a morning train from his home in suburban Malad to his ad agency office in South Mumbai’s Fort area, and one from Churchgate station back in the evening.

‘‘He loved Mumbai’s western line trains. Even if he was being offered a lift to town by civic officers who stay in his building, he would say, I prefer my train,’’ says daughter-in-law Kaveri. ‘‘On holidays, he would seek an excuse to visit the station.’’

That Tuesday, he was in the first class compartment of the Borivali bound train.

At the Dattaram Ad Agency, whose finance wing a young Iyer joined four-and-a-half decades ago as a young Chennai man who had just moved to the city, they are all stunned. His boss, a grieving Lalita Raman, points out that Iyer, ‘‘a workaholic who did not believe in retirement’’, wasn’t meant to have come to office on Tuesday.

‘‘Since April, he had been working Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The previous week’s heavy rains meant he had stayed at home. So he came on Tuesday also, keen on finishing work on a particular file.’’

Mumbai’s work ethic and frenetic energy mirrored Iyer’s and so he firmly rejected any suggestion of leaving the city for any other place. But as colleagues and family testify, in the past year, like several Mumbaiites, Iyer’s love affair with the city had started turning sour.

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