“It’s not easy to forget the blasts, especially when they claimed so many innocent lives. The images of people dying in front of me still haunt me. It’s very difficult to forget the appalling sight of mindless bloodshed. Every time my younger son sees photographs of local trains, he says ‘yeh hai local train jisme bomb fatta hai,” Majhi says.

Majhi was part of an unfortunate group of seven motormen who had literally driven the city to tragedy, which left 186 dead.

Girish Chand Chaurasia was driving one of those ill-fated local—-the 5.54 pm Borivali fast that was jolted by an explosion at Mahim station.

“I could not sleep properly for days. The images of death and destruction kept haunting me. I hope that such a dreadful thing never happens in my lifetime again. But we just can’t go on working with this approach,” said Chaurasia.

Forty-seven-year-old Madhukar Surse reminisces philosophically: “I kept on thinking how could humans kill one another like that? What had happened to humanity?” Surse, who was driving the 5.30 pm Borivali fast when one of its coaches was blown up at Bandra, could not sleep for a month. “The pain of 7/11 will remain with me, always,” he said.

The incident changed the way 36-year-old Anjanee Kumar Pandey saw life. He was driving the Borivali show local when the blast occurred between Khar and Santacruz stations. “I realised that there is little gap between life and death. It pushed me towards spiritualism,” said Pandey.

“Jewellery and other valuables of victims and survivors were strewn around. We collected all of it and handed it over to the station superintendent at Santacruz. The bag full of valuables was worth Rs 4 lakh,” he said.

Musarrat Firoz, 39, was driving the 5.37 pm Borivali slow when he heard a loud explosion at Jogeshwari. “I saw people lying in pools of blood and crying for help. The damaged door of the coach had bent towards the roof. These images send a chill down my spine whenever I travel past that spot even today. And I shudder at the thought of it happening again.”

Thirty-year-old Sachin Singh’s parents in Aligarh have never been at ease after the incident. “They get worried if I don’t call them after every two-three days,” says Singh who was driving the 5.57 pm Virar fast when the blast ripped apart coach No B64A at Matunga.

But Singh’s happy that the coach has been repaired. “It will again become operational on July 11. Yahan fir zindagi hasegi (Life will again smile here),” Singh said, adding, “I don’t want to remember the blast but I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.”

O P Gupta, 41, took three months to come out of the trauma. He was driving the Virar fast that couldn’t go beyond Borivali where the blast left a trail of death and destruction.

“I was in a state of trauma for three months. My wife and children remained tense for several days. Then slowly it started fading from our memory. Yet, at times, I still can’t help recall those terrible moments.”