Irtiza Pathan loved to indulge his youngest son. After all, 20-year-old Zubair was roughing it out in Mumbai to become a CA, away from his comfortable Vadodara home. So he would travel by air — no less than the Rajdhani if it had to be the train — at times, run up huge telephone bills, but his father didn’t mind. He was a good kid without any vice. If anyone would chide Zubair for his expensive ways, he would mischievously tug at his father’s beard and say: Dada thakur, who else will spend your money?

The Pathan household doesn’t laugh like that any more. For Zubair was one among the 187 Mumbaikars who died in the serial train blasts of 7/11.

Within a week of the dreadful event, we at the The Indian Express were grappling with reports about the immediate fallout: the overwhelming number of those who died were men, mostly sole breadwinners, relatives were still looking to identify the missing in hospital morgues, the injured battling for their lives in hospitals, the police trying to join the dots in the investigation. This was a tragedy like no other.

It happened in Mumbai, but it had a national dimension in the way Mumbai has a national dimension. It was about you and me, about grandfathers, fathers, sons, brothers, husbands, wives, daughters, daughters-in-law and friends. Here today, gone tomorrow. It was about Zubair, about Paresh Thakkar (38), Sandford de Sales (40), Nandini Naik (27), Sumant De (23)... many more who had also come to Mumbai, some even when she was Bombay, from across the country: Gujarat, Kerala, Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, in search of their dreams for a better living.

... contd.