When he underwent his first operation it had to be done without anaesthesia. “Since I had lost a lot of blood, so my haemoglobin was low. The doctor said he could operate on my face but without anaesthesia as I risked slipping into coma. I told him to consider me a dead body and go ahead with the operation,” Kirti Ajmera, injured in the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts, told The Hindu .
In the next seven years, 39 more operation would follow. A smashed face would be restored, a dislocated arm and a ripped ear would be joined back, punctured lungs would be treated and glass pieces stuck in the body would be removed, though not all. Mr. Ajmera was lucky to have survived, but luckless in not getting any compensation from the government.
“The government has not given a penny in compensation. I have written and met many political leaders, all of whom sympathised and made promises, but none came through. They just ignored the victims,” Mr. Ajmera says.
ADVERTISEMENT
He was injured in the explosion that rocked the Bombay Stock Exchange. The impact of the blast knocked him down unconscious for ten minutes. “When I gained consciousness, it was as if there was a shower of glass, bodies were strewn all over and blood had splattered on the streets. I resolved that if I get up if would just lying bleeding there like the rest. A friend came to help me and luckily a cabbie drove up to me offering to take me to the hospital. I had to turn away from two hospitals as they were overflowing with victims and finally got admitted to the GT Hospital,” he recalls.
Exhausted with pain, he remembers he sat at the bed of a man who had died of shock. Mr. Ajmera got his bed.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
Danger stalked Mr. Ajmera one more time in 2006, when he providentially escaped the serial train blasts. He boarded the train from Churchgate station to go home. He got off at Bandra as it was too crowded. Between the next two stations, the train would be blown by a bomb blast. “I suppose I was meant to live to do big things,” he says.
A Mumbai-resident, Mr. Ajmera feels despite a series of terror strikes, the city has not changed. “It was not safe then, it is not safe now.”
He is critical of the calls for sparing Yakub Memom, the lone death row convict of the 1993 blasts, the noose. “We should let the courts do their job. The intelligentsia who do not want him hanged are not supporting him, their stand is against capital punishment,” he says.