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.
