Police mum on cab driver

Pande’s identity was supposed to be a well-kept secret. But the disorderly establishment that is the Mumbai police leaked the news of his survival as soon as it was known on Monday. Now however, police have finally closed ranks and are saying nothing about the critical leads that Pande provided them. ‘‘We have sent teams to various places based on his statements,’’ is all that Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) Satya Pal Singh is prepared to say.

Meanwhile, the hunt for the two men and women who had hired his taxi is on, as Crime Branch sleuths check all the places that Pande had heard them discuss on Sunday and Monday. Pande has been kept by the police at an undisclosed location.

He was clearly not expected to survive the blast, and did so only because he decided to step out for lunch — just in time to escape the devastation caused by the RDX that had been left in his taxi.

Bombay Taximen’s Union General Secretary, A.L. Quadros, confirms that Pande has been a member for the past 12 years. However, he had recently started working as a clerk at Santacruz. Registration records indicate that he lived at Chavan Chawl near Appa Pada in Kandivli (East), a slum pocket near the Sanjay Gandhi National Park.

However, people there refuse to recognise him. Ask anyone about him, and there is a sudden silence.

His neighbours all claim not to have known him, as does Bijoy Yadav, the man who occupies the front room of the two-room dwelling in which Pande and his son Harinath lived. ‘‘They leave early and come late, so I never meet them,’’ Yadav claims.

Eventually, some details are revealed. Pande has been staying here for the past seven or eight years, and his elder son works with a private firm at SEEPZ. But probe further, and silence descends again. Fear of the police has a tangible presence here. Pande’s past remains a mystery.