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“I saw the taxi burning but didn’t think it was my husband’s”

Meena Menon

The wife of the taxi driver, who died in the Vile Parle blast, is still coming to grips with the tragedy

“I have to still get the compensation”
“I could have spoken to him. He just went away”

MUMBAI: Thirty-year-old Momina Khatoon Sheikh is still coming to grips with the tragedy. She sits in a dark room in a slum in Govandi, an eastern suburb, and her dark eyes look at the world in incomprehension. Her frail body is wrapped in a dull-coloured dupatta and her pale face reflects her grief.

A resident of Daphalpurwa village in Siddharth Nagar district in Uttar Pradesh, Momina came to Mumbai only eight months ago. “My husband wanted me to see the city,” she explains. At that time, she had no idea things would take such a turn. Her eldest son, six-year-old Arbaz, comes in from school dressed in a bright green checked shirt. He insists on changing into a brand new white kurta pyjama. Arbaz bears a striking resemblance to his father Mohammed Umar Sheikh, 35, who was killed in the blast in the taxi at Vile Parle on November 26.

Umar was a taxi driver for eight years. He kept dividing his time between the city and his native village. Momina and he were married for eight years. Their youngest son, Abujal, is only one-and-a-half years old. “I have no proof of residence or any identification papers.

“I have to still get the compensation,” she said. She is illiterate too. “That night, I went to my sister’s house to watch television and I saw the burning taxi but I did not know my husband was killed in it. I panicked so much. I did not know where it had happened but they said it was a bomb blast. I called my husband’s mobile phone many times but never got through. Then I called my cousin brother. They kept showing the number of the taxi but I could not recognise it. Who remembers the numbers?” she asked. “After that I came home, washed the vessels and went to sleep. It was only in the morning that I knew. The owner of the taxi recognised the registration number and realised it was his vehicle that was burnt.”

“You know if he was ill or in hospital, I could have at least spoken to him. He just went away. I did not even speak to him before that,” she cries.

Daraksha, a relative of Momina, says that on the evening of November 26, Umar was reluctant to take the taxi out. “But he said he’ll make some money for Bakrid and also he needed to pay the rent,” she recalls. Momina says if she knew he was hesitant to go out that night, she would have stopped him.

She remembers Umar’s even temper and his smiling face. He was the eldest of a family of five and his three sisters who are younger to him are not married.

Arbaz meanwhile has donned his new attire and rushes out of the house to show off. “My three children used to wait for him to come back every morning and have breakfast with him. He did night shifts. He left home at 7 p.m. and came back at 10 a.m. He never ate out,” says Momina. She feels helpless and alone. “What am I going to do now? It is all my fate. There was no one like him.”

The single room with erratic electricity costs Rs. 1,500 a month. “I have to stay back here for the mourning period of four months and 13 days. Also, my son has been admitted to a local school. I want to educate him,” she says.

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