Train friends who won't come back

Mumbai: Every weekday, heading into work and then coming back home, Ashok Shah met up with his diamond-merchant friends: same train stations, same cars, same times.

They talked business - prices and shipments, carats and quality - and chatted about family as they rode the city's clattering rail network.

This week's train bombings, which killed nearly 200 people and left more than 700 wounded, ended that tradition for some - sending Shah to a hospital, killing two of his friends, and ripping apart dozens of groups of train friendships.

"It's one big train family," said Mayur Shah, Ashok's brother-in-law, waiting for him to regain consciousness after surgery on both his arms in a hospital.

"We travel at a fixed time on a fixed train so we keep friendships for years."

"Train friends," as people call them here, are a Mumbai tradition and a part of workday life for thousands of men and women.

Some groups play cards, some sing songs. Others, like Shah and his diamond-trader friends, mainly talk shop.

Each morning, they jump onto their trains at various suburban stations, flinging bags, lunch boxes, or even legs over the benches to save space for friends in the packed train cars, before spilling out in downtown Mumbai.

Each evening, the trip is reversed.

"Business is their bond. They talked work. But these men also shared their happiness and sorrow,'' and often met outside of the trains as well, said former deputy mayor Dilip Patel, who has spent much of his time since the blasts attending the cremations of victims.

Of Ashok Shah's group of friends, two are dead and another has been hospitalised with burn injuries. Shah himself is in another hospital recovering from orthopedic surgery as doctors try to save his badly injured arms, both of which remain at risk of being amputated.

"Ashok knows what happened to his friends. He wants to keep tabs on what is happening," said Mayur, who traveled with his own friends on a later train, so missed the blast.

Train service across the city was shut down for hours after the series of carefully coordinated blasts split open first-class train cars at the height of Tuesday's evening rush hour. Police suspect the bombs were placed in overhead luggage racks.

On Thursday night, authorities named two suspects in the blast - and released photographs of the two young bearded men - but released no other information about them.

A couple of professional communities appear to have suffered badly.

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At least two dozen of the dead are believed to be upper-middle-class diamond traders and stockbrokers, mostly men from Gujarat who live in the city's northern suburbs.

Both Shah and his brother-in-law are Gujaratis from those areas.

"Many Bombay people travel in groups. This time the diamond workers were hit, if the blasts had happened a little later then it would have been the stock brokers," said Mayur.

''These terrorists targeted people who work in offices, people who were slightly better-off and could afford first-class passes. It was a deliberate calculation to hit the middle class,'' he said, adding he knew of at least 25-30 of the dead who were diamond brokers, traders and brokerage workers.

Jigar Shah, 24, who works as a diamond sorter in downtown Bombay, spent hours with his relatives trying to identify the body of his uncle, Anil. ''I used to meet him at the station. He traveled with his friends in the first-class and I traveled with my friends in the second-class,'' said Shah, who is unrelated to Mayur and Ashok Shah.

Anil's 17-year-old son, Ronak, sat nearby, surrounded by red-eyed relatives in his suburban home.

''These people targeted hardworking Bombayites. Who knows when it could happen again?'' said Ronak, shifting between anger and despair. ''Anyway my daddy can never come back. So what's the difference?''

Ronak said his father dreamed that he should eventually be able to stand on his own. His admission interviews for engineering college begin next week.

"My father won't see his dream come true," said Ronak, tears spilling over behind his spectacles. ''My uncles say I must go for the interviews. They will come with me. I guess life will go on.''

Patel, the deputy mayor, would agree.

He said many groups of traveling friends had already begun commuting together again.

"Nothing will stop these men from meeting," he said. ''It will always be a fixed train, a fixed time.''