Thank you

Far away from the scenes of the blasts, inside a basement office, another dedicated team had swung into action. This was the Emergency Operations Center EOC of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, a crucial link in the coordination of relief efforts.

When Municipal Commissioner Johny Joseph yelled over the din for somebody to connect him to Cooper Hospital, wireless operator Vijay Jagtap was already dialling yet again to get somebody at the key suburban hospital.

During the first two hours, when phone lines went dead, the control room was busy ensuring there were enough ambulances at the blast sites and that every hospital was in a state of readiness.

8216;8216;Sion Hospital. Sion Hospital, this is disaster control. Do you have sufficient stock of medicines for a large number of trauma cases? If not, then give me a list of what is required,8217;8217; said the officer handling the wireless in fluent English. That was Divisional Fire Officer Kargopikar, who had eagerly taken over as wireless operator.

Similar messages went to each of nearly 22 hospitals.

Additional Municipal Commissioner Manu Kumar Srivastava8217;s attention was caught by a helpless girl on television; she was looking for her father.

Immediately, there are instructions on the wireless and by phone and soon, hospitals begin to display the names of the injured patients on a notice board at the entrance.

Finally, a call came from Cooper Hospital. There was a sense of jubilation, because this time, the Emergency Operations Centre had succeeded in making contact.

8212;N Ganesh

They got Mumbai home

THEY were the first heroes8212;seven motormen and seven guards. Fire extinguishers in hand, they joined relief efforts, then kept an all-night vigil around their mangled train compartments, hungry and tired, until the rakes were safely inside carsheds the next morning.

Next, they had to get the railway service running. General Manager Rajkamal Rao was not even in Mumbai, but he got on the phone and planned everything along with Additional General Manager Vivek Sahai, an experienced hand having been divisional railway manager of Central Railway when the Mulund blast occurred in March 2003. They chalked out plans to the last detail8212;who would be at the control room, who would coordinate things at the sites, inspection of the sites, everything.

8216;8216;It was team work,8217;8217; says Sahai. 8216;8216;Everybody played an important role, whether an official or a D-grade employee.8217;8217;

Police permission was needed to remove the damaged compartment from the tracks. A team of gangmen and pointsmen examined the entire railway track, a tower wagon fitted with gas cutters and other repair equipment was kept ready on the fifth line at Virar, Vasai Road, Andheri and Mumbai Central stations.

Every field officer and employee was called to report for duty immediately. Chief Mechanical Engineer S C Agarwal got the workshop opened past midnight8212;more coaches and equipment had to be fetched. Through the night, Divisional Railway Manager Western Railway Satya Prakash monitored progress from the Mumbai Central control room.

At 11 pm, Rao reached Mumbai by car. And saw his line8217;s local trains beginning to ply gradually. 8216;8216;Five thousand railway workers were rushed to the affected areas. Our senior officials camped in control rooms at Churchgate and Mumbai Central,8217;8217; said Rao.

That8217;s why, 16 hours after the blasts, the line was fully restored.

8212;Kalpana Verma

The relief footsoldiers

8216;8216;Jo mila woh leke aana tha,8217;8217; says Santosh Teli, 34, who runs a private ambulance service. Quite matter-of-fact, he says he had to pick up whatever was lined up on railway platforms at Matunga and Mahim stations8212;bodies swathed in white, mutilated bodies still waiting for a shroud, injured lying moaning or unconscious.

8216;8216;No doctor, madam,8217;8217; he says, when asked if paramedics accompany ambulances to accident sites. 8216;8216;What do you need a doctor for if you8217;ve to pick up a dead body?8217;8217;

Teli and others like him worked till 2 am on Wednesday, ferrying the dead and injured. While dozens of ambulances reached KEM and Sion Hospitals, the suburban hospitals also saw an army of autorickhaw and taxi drivers pitching in, even waiving fares for frantic Mumbaiites on a hunt for family members.

At KEM Hospital, the Class IV workers returned to work even though duty hours were past. Temporary worker Ramanand Singh laboured until 3 am, carrying body after body8212;22 of them8212;into the narrow mortuary. 8216;8216;He collapsed after that and was on a saline drip,8217;8217; says a colleague. 8216;8216;But he got back to work the next morning.8217;8217;

Teli has been running his ambulance service for 12 years and remembers the time when Bhoiwada police called him to rush to Chinchpokli station when a train had derailed, dozens of house collapses, accidents and sundry assignments. 8216;8216;Like this?8217;8217; he asks. 8216;8216;Never. And hopefully, never again.8217;8217;

8212;Kavitha Iyer

Healing a broken city

At midnight, standing outside the makeshift mortuary near the emergency and casualties ward of the Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General Hospital at Sion, the dean8217;s standing instructions to Dr Rajeev Kumar, communities and medicine who was also in charge of co-ordination couldn8217;t be more precise: 8216;8216;Clear everything here. Make way for the blast victims.8217;8217;

It was later at 2 am that Kumar said: 8216;8216;The entire hospital, staff from every department, interns and doctors were on standby alert. Mass casualty was on its way.8217;8217;

And as bodies were brought in from blast sites in trucks, autorickshaws and ambulances, it was the city8217;s medical fraternity that stretched 16 long hours stitching Mumbai back to life.

Not even their gruesome daily routines could prepare them for the disfigured bodies. 8216;8216;So much blood,8217;8217; recalls Nartaki Devidasi, a nurse for three decades, about the bloody trail at the Bahkti Vedanta hospital at Mira Road, where victims of the Mira Road blast were rushed.

Patients in shock, unable to remember their names, doling out wrong telephone numbers, they took it all calmly.

For the interns who were called in, this was a lesson no classroom could allow. Jitendra Mandwade, 23, an intern at Sion Hospital, recalls holding a patient8217;s earlobe in one hand and a suture in the other8212;certainly a little early in the syllabus, he admits. They were called in from their annual bash, cancelled when the alert was sounded at 7 pm.

Parag Chaudhari, 23, another intern, adds their role also expanded to being 8216;8216;stretcher boys8217;8217;. Because the regular wardboys were washing the bloodied floors.

Sion Hospital8217;s head neurosurgeon Dr Alok Sharma conducted a two-hour surgery through the night, on Mashreq Bank executive Joga Rao 50, who was taking a local home to Goregaon. 8216;8216;Rao was rushed in on Tuesday night with a badly fractured skull, shrapnel fragments and a lot of blood loss. We worked on saving him for over two hours, he is semi-conscious now,8217;8217; says Sharma. Rao8217;s son Naresh, 22, who flew in on Wednesday from Hyderabad, says the doctors were 8216;8216;superb8217;8217;. His dad8217;s recovering fast.

They opened their doors

Looking around nervously at Churchgate station at 7.45 pm on Tuesday, Amit Narayan, 17, saw a sea of people whose minds he could read in that instant. 8216;8216;How do I get home? Are my loved ones safe?8217;8217; That one thought made them all kindred souls, he says, and then they all became roommates the next instant.

An announcement at Churchgate said those looking for a roof for the night could head to the University of Mumbai8217;s International Students8217; House, a hostel with a capacity of 123 students. Over 700 people spent the night there, thanked officials profusely as they ate dal-chawal-sabzi and congregated in front of a television set.

8216;8216;Those stranded, in need of a meal or any other assistance came in,8217;8217; says Dr P C Warke, warden of the hostel and head of the Law Department of the University of Mumbai. 8216;8216;I told the canteenwallah to prepare food8212;there are NGOs sponsoring the costs later.8217;8217;

Giant mattresses and dozens of sheets came out8212;8216;8216;even the boys in the hostel cooperated,8217;8217; says Warke8212;and Narayan saw some families, children in tow, finally sigh in relief.

The hungry kept showing up until 3 am, by when the stranded commuters were swapping cellphones to get messages across.

Elsewhere, municipal schools opened their gates, offices at World Trade Centre gave employees from nearby establishments space to spend the night and South Mumbai families materialised on the roads8212;with food packets, bananas, biscuits and water bottles. 8216;8216;And some words of support,8217;8217; says Narayan. 8216;8216;That was really touching.8217;8217;

8212;Kavitha Iyer

Keeping the peace

Candle-light vigils, mohalla committee meetings, shraddhanjali, condolence meetings, and finally, public dialogue.

From students and professionals to social workers and policemen, Mumbai is leaping to do everything to ensure that the cosmopolitan heart of the country does not burn in the wake of the serial blasts.

8216;8216;One spark, that8217;s all it takes to provoke a communal incident,8217;8217; says Shakeel Ahmed of the Nirbhay Bano Andolan, a social organisation working for communal harmony. The activists are not the only ones who know8212;riots after the Godhra incident left 793 Muslims and 293 Hindus dead, according to official figures. So Mumbai8217;s peace soldiers are busy, keeping religion-based animosity at bay.

Activist Teesta Setalvad8217;s Citizens For Justice and Peace CJP8212;it was formed in the aftermath of the Gujarat riots8212;is planning a mass contact programme in trains and among citizens, to assuage fears and suspicions.

Small public meetings across the island city, especially in communally sensitive areas like Mira Road and Bhayander, are also on the cards. Meanwhile, social workers like S S Sanjeev are mobilising locals with the message of communal harmony. 8216;8216;Local representatives from traditionally riot-prone areas are getting together,8217;8217; says Sanjeev.

In fact, in the bylanes of Muslim-dominated Jogeshwari, in ghettos like Meghwadi and Gandhinagar, locals cutting across religious barriers have enlisted their support to the police and have even submitted a memorandum seeking that political parties be restrained from provoking violence.

Behind it all is a single idea: De-polarise communal tension; despite the blasts, Mumbai must stay peaceful.

8212;Lekha Agarwal

One giant loudspeaker

Mumbai was calling in to say, 8216;Mom, I am alive.8217; So they played messengers, these radio jockeys working three shifts until the wee hours.

At 4.30 am on Wednesday, the last caller was still sobbing. His voice, familiar by now, was still asking for information on his best friend who should have reached Andheri by Tuesday 7 pm.

And listening to him once again was Jose Covaco, 24, creative head and radio jockey at RED FM, regular love doctor 8216;Hoezay8217; and full-time messenger that night.

As communication lines collapsed or were stuttering, casualties were being counted and loved ones were missing, distress calls from worried Mumbaiites took centrestage across radio stations. 8216;8216;It was like this one giant loudspeaker where you could reach and check on your loved ones,8217;8217; recalls Hoezay. He took calls as varied as 8216;8216;Mom, I am alive,8217;8217; to 8216;8216;what8217;s happening,8217;8217; to 8216;8216;where are you Sweta, I8217;m worried.8217;8217;

And since broadcast regulations restrict the airwaves from relaying news, the jockeys took updates from Mumbai. Some callers said the railways were stalled, others called about blood donation arrangements or simply offered a random traffic update.

Says radio jockey Manish Paul from Radio City whose team logged on between 7 pm Tuesday and 1 am Wednesday: 8216;8216;By 6.50 pm, we knew what had happened, but maintained that a mishap had occurred and do not commute till things become normal. To avoid panic.8217;8217;

When the messages from stranded Mumbaiites who managed to get through to radio stations became a flood, the music was stopped. When things got really hectic, there was always that one call which summed it all up. Hoezay recalls: 8216;8216;At 2 am. Someone hurriedly calls, says great job, okay bye, and hangs up.8217;8217;

8212;Smita Nair

A few good men

Even as the seven near-synchronised bombs had just finished exploding, Mumbai Municipal Commissioner Johny Joseph was already receiving the first reports. Much before the cellphone networks passed out, he had called the hospitals and fire chiefs. The disaster control cell in the basement was told to expect the commissioner to take charge. Then he was on the phone with Mantralaya.

There, Chief Secretary D K Sankaran was already commanding his forces, linking urgent tasks with bureaucrats at lightning speed. Metropolitan Commissioner T Chandrashekhar was pulled out of preparing an all-important report on the status of roads to handle Bandra8217;s Bhabha Hospital, where he was joined later by Additional Municipal Commissioner Shrikant Singh. Additional Municipal Commissioner R A Rajeev was at KEM Hospital, which saw the most number of patients.

When Joseph left the control room after fielding hundreds of calls about blood, ambulances, shifting patients, post-mortem requirements and stranded passengers, it was to visit Bhabha Hospital, then back to BMC.

8216;8216;Communication was very smooth, from the headquarters, control room and from Mantralaya,8217;8217; says Additional Municipal Commissioner Vijaysinh Patankar who was posted at Sion Hospital. 8216;8216;Our job was to ensure that there was no delay for want of an immediate decision.8217;8217;

It was 4 am when this bedraggled team returned home, before heading back a couple of hours later to hospitals, control rooms and more tough decisions.

8212;Kavitha Iyer

Back to business

If the Mumbai stock market exhibited anything the day after, it was a loud hurrah: The market was not going to be cowed down.

Contrary to general expectations and despite a shaky start in the first 20-odd minutes of trade, scores of investors bought stocks on Wednesday, pushing the Sensex up 314 points, or 2.9 per cent. 8216;8216;I thought I was going to be among the rare buyers on that day,8217;8217; says Deepti Bhatnagar, a 34-year-old housewife. 8216;8216;But the market8217;s resilience had me surprised. It never occurred to me that there would be such a widespread buying interest.8217;8217;

It8217;s not difficult to see why there was this special buying interest from staunch investors. Much of the reason was the superb set of first quarter numbers from Infosys Technologies that buoyed sentiments. Infosys notched profits up 50.4 per cent over last year. The rest of the technology pack comprising TCS, Wipro and Satyam followed suit.

Audit professional Ketan J Vyas, 36, was also convinced he was not going to shy away from the market due to a series of bombings. 8216;8216;I looked at the financial numbers of Infosys and they looked fantastic, so I just went ahead and bought,8217;8217; he says. 8216;8216;I wasn8217;t going to get bogged down by these incidents and run away from investing. I am pretty confident of our economy.8217;8217;

For scores of Mumbai residents, a small purchase here and there from die-hard investors together with a stellar performance from India Inc, helped the market put on its best show ever this month.

8212;Clifford Alvares