Rly engineer, he worked for chawl-dwellers’ dream of moving to flats

Bhagat, who would have turned 60 in three days, was only a few months away from moving into a new 540-sq feet flat when a blast at Mahim in the Borivali-bound local abruptly ended it all.

“Bole the ab yehi mera kaam hoga (He had said that would be his work from now on),” says wife Sindhu (48), remembering how Namdeo planned to follow up the redevelopment of the chawl after he retired as a section engineer with the electrical department of the railways by July-end.

With Bhagat’s sudden departure, there is a sense of being left without leadership in the close-knit community.

“Unki kalam chalne se hi hum yahaan tak pahuche (It was because of him, we’ve reached this far),” says Zarina Sheikh, a social worker who lives in the same lane as the Bhagats. With neighbours Alim Malik, Suresh Gupta, and Vasant Lahane, she had gone to Mahim police station in Malik’s taxi to bring home Namdeo’s body that night.

Sheikh narrated how, over the years, Namdeo tirelessly wrote to various government agencies to improve amenities in this huge, haphazard sprawl of ground-storey structures ever since he first moved here from Vadodara in 1982 with his wife and elder daughter Deepti, then a year old.

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.

From then till the first telephone call informing them of Namdeo’s bag being found at Mahim, it was a long wait for the family for any news of his whereabouts. Neighbours left in a taxi to begin a frantic search which ended at Sion hospital.

“There was not a bruise on his body. He looked like he was resting after many days of hard work that he did for himself, and for all of us,” says Malik.