Despite the unity slogans, the story of last week's terrorist attacks at the Taj and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) is the story of two Mumbais. The 60-hour seizure of the hotel consumed reams of newsprint and hours of TV time—there were narratives of shock, fear, courage, and duty under fire, mostly in the English cosmopolitan India is easy with.

"I didn't even have money for kafan-dafan. I haven't been driving my taxi since that night but I have to, soon."

In contrast, the coverage of the equally dramatic, equally tragic attack at the railway station that claimed more than 70 lives was waterish.

The irony was that, even in being exposed to the fate of taxi drivers and street-side vendors during such attacks, the elite ended up taking away from them the opportunity for some catharsis by way of speaking out, some prompt sarkari help thanks to media attention.

On the Sunday after the attacks, the streets of Colaba leading to the Taj were barricaded, there were policemen turning people away. But beyond them, within a hundred metres of the hotel, were scores of TV crew, motley groups of middle-class citizens' groups, raising slogans against politicians and about the failure of the intelligence-security mechanism, laying flowers and expensive wreaths in memory of the dead, and holding up candles flickering in the sea-breeze.

But at CST, there were no barricades. Taxis, as usual, drove right up to the gate. Policemen at their desks lazily watched streams of people come and go. Life rolled on. Anonymously, as usual. At the cramped railway police station, there was a garlanded poster of Inspector Shashank Chandrasen Shinde, the first to take on the terrorists and lose his life in the process. But his sacrifice, too, was somehow overshadowed by that of much senior and high-profile officers.

And nobody knew that Chandulal Tandel, a vendor at the Wheeler bookshop in the corner, was among the dead.

Inspector Shinde used his service pistol to fight terrorists armed with AKs. They killed him in no time.

Nobody knew the name of the sweeper woman who had died near the weigh-bridge at the station. Head ticket collector S.K. Sharma, who surely had people known to him at the station, was reduced to anonymity in death. People also mistakenly thought that Mukesh Agarwal of the Re-Fresh Food Plaza had died. In fact he had survived despite the bullets he took in his stomach. The wailing of survivors at CST and the trauma of the families of those dead, like taxi driver Mohammed Israeil Ansari, who lost six of his dear ones, have drowned under the weight of well-constructed outpourings of empathy outside the Taj.

At the St George's Hospital, where people were taken after the CST carnage, 14 of the 72 dead still remain unidentified. Among them is the body of a five-year-old boy. Hospital superintendent Dr C.G. Gaikwad says: "Of the 72, only 11 died after admission, the rest were all brought dead that night."

Mohammed Zuber, who helped us track down fellow cabbie Ansari, says: "Every taxi driver who drove to CST on Wednesday after 9.30 pm has a story. I drove two people from near the airport and dropped them a few paces away from the gate. They had trolley bags. They paid me Rs 300 and gave me Rs 20 as a tip. When I went with a friend to identify bodies at St George's the next day, I saw their bodies. The Rs 20 tip haunts me."

Ansari, who went to drop eight members of his family at CST, is shattered: "I dropped my brother, brother-in-law and sister, her two sons and son-in-law, and my elder brother's two children at the entrance and told them I would park the taxi and return. They were to take the superfast train to Patna. When I went back, the shooting had begun and I couldn't enter. Later, I rushed to St George's and after looking around for an hour, around midnight, I found the bodies of six of my family members. Two of my nephews were lying injured."

Ansari, who lives in a bylane of Tulsiwadi in Tardeo, is from Navada district in Bihar. He came to Mumbai in search of hope, but now feels it's time to go back: "My brother, Ilyas Ansari, who died at CST, used to say that if Nitish Kumar started a factory near our village we should return to Bihar. We didn't have money for kafan-dafan and ambulance. The Bihari Ekta Welfare Society helped us. After the incident I haven't been driving my taxi but have been looking after my nephews at J.J. Hospital. I can't continue like this on charity. I have to soon start earning my roti."

Commuters stop to spare a few minutes for ordinary policemen who lost their lives taking on the terrorists at the railway station.

Dharmendra, who works at the Wheeler bookshop, does a minute-by-minute recollection of the day he lost his colleague, Chandulal: "From my mobile call list I can tell you that I was there at the shop till 9.52 pm. I left asking Chandulal to pull down the shutters and go home. He was rolling them down when he was killed. We found his body the next day at the hospital. He had been working at this shop for 32 years." Hospital records put Chandulal's age at 50, which means he'd been at the bookshop through youth and adulthood. No slim loyalty to the workplace, and quite comparable to that displayed at the Taj.

The policemen who have spread their lunch of roti and egg curry right next to the empty magazines, shells and grenade shrapnel they have collected for investigation from the platforms are angry that their man, Shinde, was almost forgotten. Sunil Naik, a railway policeman who is helping the investigators document the terrorist attack, says: "Shinde was a dashing officer with a fantastic network. He was from Ratnagiri district. He bravely took out his service pistol and put up a resistance. Many more people would have been killed if he had not done so. But the terrorists shot him dead from behind. Unfortunately, nobody has spoken of this officer's bravery. He has left behind two children."

At another end of CST is the Re-Fresh Food Plaza, where Pankaj Goyal counts 17 bullet marks on the glass panes. Some of the bullets hit his uncle Mukesh Agarwal. "He is lucky to have survived," says Goyal. Dinesh, who handles cash at Re-Fresh, still shakes as he speaks of the bullets that flew millimetres over his head. "The worst thing was that those guys (the terrorists) were giggling as they were shooting. They were also calling out like they call out for a run during a cricket match," he recalls.

The people at Re-Fresh Plaza could perhaps be called lucky—no one was killed, even though there were several passengers having dinner behind no more than a glass partition. But 'lucky' is a word that somehow rings hollow in Mumbai's many stories of survival. Mohammed Israeil Ansari has survived too—but he blames his luck.