Six hours after the blasts, traffic on the winding Mohammad Ali Road is thinner than other days. The Muslim heartland of the city is minutes from the Mumbadevi blast site in Zaveri Bazar. Several shops had shut as news of the blast travelled faster than the aroma of biryani would from the local hotel, on a happier day.The immediate reaction of the residents was to rush for rescue. Never mind the blast happened outside a temple. Never mind the fear in their own minds.Kadir Ghare, who works at the pay-and-park under the massive JJ flyover, was among those who sped to the spot. He noticed some school children among the blood-soaked injured. ‘‘I had seen them alight from their school bus, a little earlier,’’ he says with a shudder.Ghare and many Muslim youth like him who rushed to volunteer at the spot had no time to think of the magnitude of the tragedy. They bundled the injured into cars and rushed them to hospital. ‘‘I had keys of some cars parked here. I used them to drive people to hospitals,’’ Ghare says. Ismail Attarwala has been living and working on Mohammad Ali Road for 65 years. He remembers the 1993 serial blasts like they happened yesterday. ‘‘It was a similar scene that day. People scared. Chaos all around. But again like that day, normalcy returned pretty soon,’’ he says. And it did. In true Mumbai style. By evening, some businessmen living nearby had returned to work. Much to the disgust of employees hoping to wind up work and go home earlier than usual. By night, the fear factor is less dominant. But the silence is loud. Will Mohammad Ali Road be a victim of post-blast combing operations? ‘‘Never,’’ says a salesman at a furniture showroom confidently, ‘‘in all these years, nothing has gone wrong here. And it will stay that way this time too’’.
