Imagine stepping into a dark cave, thinking you’ll be out in 15 minutes. But when you finally emerge from the cavern, 19 years have lapsed.
Mohammed Sajid Margub Ansari (Sajid), listed as Accused No. 7 in the July 11, 2006 Mumbai train bombings, sits in his modest flat in Mira Road’s Naya Nagar. His breathing is uneven, and his silent pauses are heavy. He had been released on a 40-day parole just before the Bombay High Court’s verdict that cleared the accused. It was as if the last 19 years swam before his eyes all at once. He held his daughter close, but the memory of prison still clung tighter. “When they first brought my child to see me, she cried. She didn’t recognise me,” he whispered.
His mentally and physically draining ordeal began with what seemed like a routine police inquiry. But for Sajid, it marked the start of a long, unforgiving chapter, shadowed by suspicion and social isolation.
In the early 2000s, he had been questioned for distributing pamphlets linked to the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), an organisation banned after the 9/11 attacks. He had also been questioned after the 2003 Mumbai blasts. “Those old enquiries never left me,” he says. “They made me a suspect even when there was nothing to prove.”
Stigmatised by allegations, Sajid was forced to quit his job at a Nariman Point firm. He later found work at a small mobile repair shop in Jogeshwari, trying to solder his life piece-by-piece.
July 11, 2006, began like any other day. Sajid had opened the shop with his employer Bilal, and they were sorting through inventory.
“We heard a loud boom and felt the ground tremble,” he recalls. “There was construction nearby, so I assumed it was something from the site.” But it wasn’t. It was one of seven bomb blasts that tore through Mumbai’s suburban train network, killing 189 and injuring over 800.
The horror sent shockwaves across the country—and would soon shake Sajid’s life to its core. “In that moment, I had no idea those vibrations would shake the very foundation of my life,” he says.
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