The intern from KEM hospital was on his motorbike with a friend in Matunga, heading toward Bandra, when he heard an explosion at 6:30. It was at the station, three kilometers away. He raced back to the hospital and wore his scrubs, and took his first breather at 3am the next morning, when he walked alone in the courtyard and stared past the fence at nothing in particular and then sat on a green stretcher with a touch of red on top. Outside the hospital were chalkboards with names of the admitted and the dead. A man speaking on a phone said, “We’ve looked everywhere.” The woman beside him was shattered. By the hospital entrance a woman howled and buried her face in her husband’s lap, and family gathered around them in vain. His eyes had glazed and he looked straight ahead without expression while patting her robotically. Behind his wife was another woman, sniffling. People stood in groups, saying nothing, too tired to break silences. They either waited, or they knew. Every now and then people would stride in purposefully, their calm countenances constructed solely on hope, and they would leave lost and defeated when yet another hospital told them that the person they sought to find was not there. Sometimes they would return, with renewed vigor, and leave broken again. A period of relative silence was shattered by the desperate wail of two poor women who emerged from the hospital hitting their head with their hands, and they left the premises with the urgency one leaves behind bad dreams. But they must not have gone far because their cries could be heard faintly for an hour afterwards.

The courtyard at KEM was filled with metal stretchers and wheelchairs touched with blood. A group of tired body transporters sat on these stretchers and joked with each other. At one point, one said, every bed in the courtyard had a body on it. There were forty or fifty lying about, piled up and on their side under two spotlights in the empty yard. By our approximation, he said, 45 people are dead, though the doctors have yet to declare it. He knew there was an emergency when taxis brought in three maimed people in quick succession. His shift had gone from being a regular eight-hour one into a nightmare. Just then, as he began describing where he was when the explosion happened, a woman’s scream erupted from a hospital ward, and it went on, with a break of a second or two, for over a minute.

This is where they went: behind the main KEM entrance, if you take a long walk down a dark side path, is the morgue. Outside it, some were murmuring into their cell phones. Some were huddled together, wondering what to do next. Those who went into it held their nose and breath in anticipation of the stench. Those who came out held theirs for too long, wanting to never ever smell the smell again. Policemen held white plastic bags filled with identification. At the end of an endless sterile corridor was a large, thick door. Everytime it opened a gust of cold air swept down the hallway, bringing with it a smell that stopped you breathing. A group of men standing outside peered in with a kerchief held to the face, waiting for their turn to be called in. Inside, naked bodies were on the floor and on a platform. One’s head had sunk in, a blow had smashed the bone structure beneath his face. It resembled a punctured football. Around another was a pool of blood, his brain spilled out from beneath a flap of skin above the ear. Another, a man with a moustache, had half-open eyes and a cut leg, and a slash across his chest that exposed the heart. Beside him was a body with no head. In another world, someone in the room said, “No, it’s not him, he was wearing brown socks,” or, “No, he had a ring.” Where were they when it happened? Were they standing or sitting? Was their last conscious expression the one they wore here, on this morbid floor? How did this man call in people professionally to identify the corpses around him? Did he ever break?

Trains began to come and go at Mahim Junction at 4:30. Travellers looked tired and upset. Small bits of the damaged roof continued to fall. The debris was in a pile on platform 3. Among it were twisted metal spectacles without the glass lens. Workers sat around, their work not yet done, sipping tea and finally finding time to talk. One claimed he had found three headless bodies, and even more in the city’s suburban stations. In a few minutes they restarted work. A policeman summoned a ragpicker to sort two piles of cloth. One was what people had donated. The other belonged to the people in compartment 528A. A wallet fell out when he picked up the second pile. He dropped the pile and opened the wallet. There was nothing inside. He flung it away forcefully, and it plopped on Tulsi Pipe Road, the road that runs beside the tracks. Picking up the pile again, he stepped into a moist puddle of blood at the station entrance and was on his way.

Elsewhere in the station there were tired firefighters from Byculla. The first call came in at 6:30, six minutes after the blast. But news had spread quickly, and the roads were jammed. We got stuck, he shook his head and said. The railway police were filing FIRs. They had arrived soon after the blasts. Now they dozed in their chairs in cramped offices.

In the distance the 5:54 Borivali fast flashed a yellow light. The train’s drivers had spent the night at the station, and now, bolstered by piping tea, made their way to it. They climbed aboard and started the engine. The sound of that particular train was fascinating. People turned to look at it, more alert, shaking off the effects of the last 12 hours. On every platform there were people waking up in a new way as the sky turned blue.

Zee News had Mika and Rakhi Sawant on a split screen. Sawant was at her home, Mika was at the television studio. Sawant said that since Mika had been granted bail, she had received threatening messages. Mika tried speaking several times but Sawant went on, unable to hear him try. The singer had a khanda pendent around his neck. When she stopped, he said he did not send her the messages. How could he have? His phone was off. He visited the Haji Ali mosque after his release. He had also visited the Siddhivinayak temple (He missed the Buddhists and Christians). There was no way he could have sent her those messages, he said.

Now that things were at an impasse and there were no flare-ups, Zee decided to go to a real expert, someone who could fill our blanks, someone who knew exactly what had gone wrong, who knew how to sort things out. So they cut to the expert – the expert to beat all experts. Finally we would see him and have our answer. So they cut to their newsroom, where, on a chair, sat a sadhu. The headline of the segment was called Shani pe chada mangal or something similar. He talked about things that sadhus talk about: planets, timing, unpronouncable words. For a moment, dear reader, it seemed like a different planet. And what to say about the split screen? The sadhu was beside an animation of our solar system. There was no dialogue between the two screens, thankfully, but neither of them needed to speak for one to know that we’re screwed.

The offshoot of wide walking spaces is that there will be fewer people on roads, which are essentially for cars. So drivers can be alert for other cars, and not be on high alert for pedestrians who venture into their path. So that’s less stress right there. And less stress equals more happiness. So good pavements equals a somewhat happier city. Simple.

When the police come, it is usually a rude surprise. They turn off their motorcycle headlights and quietly approach cars in which they suspect “vulgar anti-social activity,” as a policeman put it to me once. This term is used to describe a kiss or a clench. They flash a torch onto startled faces, park their motorbike and indicate to the driver that he (it is mostly the man) is needed outside. This man will spend some time pleading, begging. The police will stand by firmly, pulling out a reciept book, asking the man if he has any shame, asking him for his parents’ number and his address, as well as the girl’s. But then, slowly, the policeman will soften, tell the man that what he’s doing is wrong. By now the man knows what’s coming. This pattern is as familiar and expected as breathing. He pulls out a wallet and offers a bribe. They will negotiate and the cop will leave, but not before chiding him gently for his indescretion, telling him to repent and change for there is still time left.

This happens everyday in this city. There is simply no place left to hold hands without someone complaining about vulgarity or troublesome questions by passing police.