For the first three years, Namdeo tried to get a power connection here, and then, for over a decade since the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA) first recognised the chawl and levied a rent on it in 1999, he worked to get ownership rights of the residents recognised.

With the lack of drains causing heavy water-logging in the chawl every monsoon, Namdeo was still trying to look for solutions to the neighbourhood's problems. Now with a builder offering a proposal for redevelopment that he and others found reasonable, there was much enthusiasm about the prospect of shifting into comfortable flats in a seven-storey building.

What Sindhu and daughters Deepti, now 24 and a civil engineer, and Smriti, a Std X student, were excited about was Namdeo's 60th birthday on July 14. “Papa was very fond of new clothes. So I offered to buy him a new shirt over breakfast that day," remembers Deepti. "He laughed and said we will all go shopping together in the evening.”

As they had planned, Deepti left work early. She was on the overbridge at Santacruz station when she heard the sound of the first blast that took place between Khar and Santacruz. "It sounded like thunderbolt... there was utter confusion at the station," she recalls. Sindhu and Smriti, too, could not make sense of what had happened as they tried to reach the Malad station ticket counter where Namdeo had asked them to meet him. "We waited for a long time, before coming home” says Sindhu.

... contd.