The city of Bombay, as it was then called, was rocked by a series of bomb blasts on March 12, 1993. I was in the office of my seniors, Mr Ram Jethmalani and Mr Mahesh Jethmalani, at Nariman Point, during the lunch break from court. We heard the loud blasts and the first thing that we all did was to call our families and find out about the welfare of our kith and kin. Within minutes, we heard of a series of 12 bomb blasts in the city of Bombay. The financial capital of India was attacked and there was mayhem all over the city. We were all warned not to leave our locations, lest we suffer injury to our person and property. I ventured out of our Nariman Point office later in the evening to see the Air India building devastated. The Stock Exchange was bombed, so also many other vital locations in Bombay. The devastation and destruction was there to be seen. The only motive of the attackers was to cause untold misery to the innocent and unknown victims. Many lives were lost, a large number of citizens, innocent and of all religions, were the gullible victims. The timing of the blasts between 1 pm and 3 pm on a Friday made me believe that the perpetrators of the crime could be from the Muslim community, as the locations of the 12 bomb blasts were all away from the minority-populated localities and it was during the Friday prayers that these vital spots were targeted. We in our office did not realise that, one day, we would be defending some people in the same case.

Illustration/Uday Mohite