Sunday, March 2, 2003		Books

The day that no one will ever forget
Kanwalpreet

Black Friday: The True Story of the Bombay Bomb Blasts
by S. Hussain Zaidi. Penguin Books, New Delhi. Pages 288. Rs. 325.

RELIGION is the best armour, but the worst cloak. This work of non-fiction by S. Hussain Zaidi reflects his dedication to detail and his passion for accuracy. His aim through this work is to reveal the role of the conspirators who played havoc with the lives of the citizens of Mumbai on March 12, 1993, when a series of bomb blasts shook the city.

The first chapter, Prologue, summarises the day when bombs exploded in ten places starting with the Bombay Stock Exchange in the south of the city to Centaur Hotel, Juhu, in the north. This chapter is fast-paced because the writer rushes the reader from one tragic spot to the other with the same urgency as must have been evident on March 12, 1993. The account is moving too because he talks about people who were going about their daily lives, not knowing that their dreams were going to be shattered in a few minutes. The last chapter, Life After Death, talks about the families which have lost a loved ones in the blasts. The author has managed to pen down their inability to comprehend what wrong they had done to deserve the fate of losing a loved one.

The writer manages to depict the helplessness of the police, the fire brigade and the government machinery. Zaidi acknowledges that when he was told to write about the blasts he thought it would take him six weeks. An estimate he later had to revise because the mammoth work took him four long years. The more involved he got with research, the more he found himself entrenched in a quagmire conspiracy and facts. His work enriches our knowledge of the investigations and of the innumerable police officials who helped crack the case.

He exposes the nexus that exists between traitors and officials who are paid to defend the country and its vital installations. The blasts would have been nearly impossible to carry out if each official had done his duty, whether it was the guard at the Bharat Petroleum Oil Refinery or some of the officials in the Customs Departments or those policemen who abetted the wrongdoers. Though these people did not know what was being brought into the country, yet it is obvious that they were willing to trade duty for money. The writer covers the planting of the bombs so well that the reader feels, at times, helpless that he is unable to do anything to prevent such a calamity. A sense of foreboding pervades the description of the conception of the plan. Zaidi’s interviews with the accused shows how misguided these people were. The folly of a few people led to misery for the rest of their community.

The work salutes the many police officers whose solidarity and determined adherence to the cause led them to work so hard that they could finally reach the people behind the conspiracy. It is touching to read how the innocent people of a particular community were subjected to torture because of the folly of some of their co-religionists. But it would be incorrect to put the entire blame on the shoulders of the police because it would have been impossible to execute blasts on such a scale without the compliance of officials at all levels. It is amazing to read how much unused RDX was uncovered in the next few days which would have been used elsewhere. The book, on the whole, is a tribute to the optimism of the people of Mumbai.