THE WRIST WATCH
As he stepped out, he quietly closed the door of his car, locked it , took his brief case from the back seat and made his way towards the lifts.
He had calculated all the steps in his mind. Chimanbhai never left a stone unturned. He had planned this meticulously in his mind for the last 3 months and today he was going to go for the jugular.
He would underprize and sell the Birla shares for half their value and buy them back as their value dropped.
Once, Birla came out with their announcement ( an information he had had deviously extracted 3 months before), his off shore Swiss account would be riding a cool 42 and half crores in profit.
His Fiat dashboard clock had turned from 1.27 to 1.28, as his right index finger hovered over the faded green lift button and his left index finger and thumb pulled up his belt buckle over his tummy...
The indicator on the scooter fuel tank was dangerously close to nil. He could see the petrol pump sign 500 yards away, as the scooter spluttered and finally stalled.
"You don't get down Simi. I can push the scooter to the petrol pump."
In the sweltering Mumbai afternoon heat, Baldev singh pushed the scooter those 500 yards with his daughter sat on the back seat. Simi had sprained her ankle at lunch time in school and he had picked her up early.
As he opened the cap on the fuel tank,
the attendant asked," Sardarji, tanki full kar doo? "
"Ha, kar do piyoo . Meri gudiyan par dhyan rakhio. Mai, toilet ja kar aaya", Baldev said pointing to his daughter who was sat on the rear seat.
"Jaldi aa jao. Aaj pump dhai bajese bandh hai", the attendant said pointing to his wrist watch which indicated 2.25....
"Pratik, shall I pack some theplas for you? You have 3 hours before the training session. Doesn't your school finish today at 10?"
Ba new that Prarik's school was a centre for SSC exams, so he was finishing early. She proudly admired her 13 year old as he tied his shoe laces. He had grew much tall in the past 6 months, easily outgrowing Papaji by an inch. His feet size matched his height. No one in Mehta household had broken the size 9 shoe barrier before.
Pratik was eating those theplas as he sat and looked out of the windows of Bus no 86. That bus would take him past Century Bazaar towards Shivaji park for his training. He was amongst the 50 young boys under 15, who had been selected for grooming and further cricket training at MCG.
The training started at 3.30.
He checked his watch, as the bus approached Century Bazaar.
It showed 2.42....
"Apna toh ussool hai ...
pehle laath, phir baat, uske baad mulaqat", Nana Patekar thundered on screen at The Plaza cinema playing the honest and rowdy cop in Tirangaa.
The afternoon movie show had begun.
Shantaaram was at the edge of his seat, whistling and clapping at every of Nana's aplomb..
His newly wed wife, Kanta, admired her husband more as she was learning of his idiosyncrasies.
It was going to be a long 3 hours for her. Kanta believed in onstage drama. It had so much spontaneity in it.
But then, a small sacrifice of 3 hours was nothing for somene she was going to spend the rest of her life with.
The hands of her wristwatch turned to 3.13 as she let out a stifled yawn, waiting for them to turn to 6.13....
The pager had gone off for the 12th time since she had picked it up at 8 am that morning again from the handover room.
She cursed the Motorolla pager system. If she had known better, she would have cursed Mr Alfred Gross for patenting the paging system.
She left the half eaten onion uthappa and ran down the canteen stairs.
She checked the number , 7777 sent at 3.50...
That was casualty's number.
As she rushed towards the casualty wing, she heard many footsteps behind her. A flock of white coats descended to the casualty door from all directions.
She didn't realise.
But it was the start of 48 hours of the most gruelling experiences in her 23 years of life.
She was to see blood splurting from wounds and ruptured organs
and the insides of humans as they lay on the hospital trolleys.
The bones as they lay exposed and shattered by the might of the blasts.
The eyes which once harboured love and promises, now replaced by disillusionment and hatred.
The hearts which were full of affection had been wrenched out and the sorrows so deep in them that one could drown in it..
It was March the 12th, 1993.
The black Friday ..
The shock was soon replaced by chaos.
The chaos by panic.
The panic by determination.
The determination by action.
She remembered vividly:
Applying tourniquets on the bleeding vessels,
Wrapping bandages across the flesh wounds,
Pushing trolleys along the corridors to the theatre,
Calming the animated relatives,
Pushing patients in chairs to the Xray department and taking them back.
Ba beating on her chest wanting to bring her Prateeek back,
Baldev Singh holding his head in hands, wishing he had taken Simi with him,
The quiet Kanta looking blankly at the wall next to Shantaram's bed...
Those 48 hours had churned her soul.
It had taken a lot of battering .
She had been a ward boy, a nurse, a technician, a psychologist, a theatre assistant and a doctor.
There was no distinction in her mind.
It was well past 3 am the next day, when she realised that she hadn't had a bite to eat since her half eaten utthapa from the previous morning.
With heavy half closed eyes, she dragged her weary legs past the mortuary towards her quarters.
The bobble holding her hair had slipped out and the early morning Mumbai breeze was fluttering her hair across her face.
As she crossed the haematology department, she saw a big queue of over 150 people and instinctively she joined the ranks.
As slowly, the queue progressed inside the building, she approached the entrance.
She thought she saw someone from yesteryears, a fleeting memory, a man in his sixties, with a full crop of sandy white hair, equally white 60s style well groomed moustache, his chest so broad that it nearly filled the entrance through the door at the top of the stairs.
Not till he started descending those stairs that she recognised him.
"Dina kaka!," her voice broke through the early morning chill.
She couldn't exactly remember when she first saw him.
But her earliest memories of Dina kaka were with Kaki next to him.
She had never seen them without each other.
They visited her together, dined together, shopped together, watched Buniyaad together and read Maharashtra times together too.
But today, his left side seemed bare. Shantalaa kaki, his ever present companion was nowhere to be seen.
She opened her mouth to ask him what he was doing there at that unearthly hour. But the bandaid tape on the inside of his elbow and the sign above his head, which read, 'Blood bank' , said it all.
After she had donated a pint of blood, they hunted down a chaiwaala at the end of the lane and stood around the Peepal tree. During day time it used to be a common gathering site for doctors and nurses off duty to have a quick cup.
Someone had plastered an orange shendur on a stone at its base, giving it a religious hue, so the surroundings were kept clean without any spit marks or rubbish around it.
She listened how they were celebrating there wedding anniversary at the Plaza cinema, how he went out to get her favourite mango ice lolly and how that was the first and last time they were physically separated.
2 people in white consoled each other. An uncle in his white lehengaa and Kurta and his doctor niece in her white apron.
His companion of 40 years was decimated and fractured off him by one cruel act.
She was searching for any signs of anger, repulsion, grief, revenge in his eyes. But either he was controlling them well or he had achieved sainthood.
She was deliberating which of those, when she saw him take his HMT watch off his wrist. Holding it in his left hand, he started to wind a small round button on its side.
"Unlike this watch, the clock of life is wound just once.
Visheshwar knows when those hands will stop. This is the only time we have.
We live, we love, we suffer with a will.
But the clock may quietly run its course and soon become still."
"Do you get your strength from God? How do you pray to him?, " she was eager to know.
" It very much deoends on whether we use prayer as our steering wheel or your spare tire?
A prayer is not meant to influence God, but rather to alter the behaviour of the one who prays.", Uncle was explaining to his niece.
A few rays of the early morning spring sun gleamed through the Peepal leaves. Standing under that tree, the niece listened to her uncle and watched his image achieve larger than life proportion.
The hospital was her karmabhoomi, but suddenly under that Peepal tree, the rising stature of her uncle resembled Lord Krishna explaining Arjun about his karma.
" I watched over her as your hospital heart monitor chimed its final beep beep tune.
But when the chimes stopped, there was no applause.. no claps for my Janhvi's true life performance", he sighed.
He had never left Janhvi alone.
But the mortuary gates were about to be closed, so he bid both of them good bye..
She realised that God was within and around. It's just how and where we search for him/her. That early morning she had found her God in Dina Kaka.
24 years on, she found herself in a similar queue outside a similar blood bank in a city thousands of miles away. The city was torn apart by a similar tragedy.
"Would you like to lie down on the couch during donation?, "the pleasant nurse asked.
The nurse didn't fail to notice that she clenched a very old HMT watch in her hand as she reclined on the sofa to partake some millilitres of her blood..