More articles by

Deepak Tiwari
Deepak Tiwari

SPECIAL REPORT

Made of metal

42mahendra

For the survivors of terror attacks, the trauma is for the lifetime. But how they have bounced back is a story worth telling

And now you’ll be telling stories
of my coming back
and they won’t be false, and they won’t be true
but they’ll be real
— Mary Oliver

The Taj Mahal Palace and Tower still stands tall in Mumbai. German Bakery in Pune and Gokul Chaat in Hyderabad still do brisk business. The Samjhauta Express continues to run between India and Pakistan. So do the local trains in Mumbai. Sarojini Nagar market in Delhi and the Varanasi Cantonment railway station are still thronged with people. They all seem normal, just going on as if nothing had ever gone wrong.

There is, however, a day that all these places have been trying to forget; a day when a bomb went off at the peak hour of business or a maniac wielding a machine gun sprayed bullets at anyone who came his way. They all survived that day, and bounced back. And their comeback story is not just a narrative of reconstructing buildings or relaying railway tracks; it is the story of many people, and each one has a different version.

Also read: The blast was a kind of rebirth for me

About 2,000 people died in some 80 terror attacks in India in the past two decades. Many of them hardly made headlines and most were forgotten the next day. For the survivors and victims, however, the trauma is for the lifetime. “The victims of terror attacks are different from the survivors of a natural calamity or an accident,” said social worker Ashok Randhawa. “These people undergo a complete change of personality and their outlook changes towards the same society of which they are a part. Their mental healing is much more important than the physical healing.” Randhawa has fought cases for victims of the Samjhauta Express blast.

Also read: These scars are mine

While the government provided medical and monetary support to the victims, only a few were fortunate to get the help of a clinical psychologist to overcome the mental trauma. “The media reporting of court proceedings of these terror attacks may have been a curious thing for others, but for me it was like reliving the bad experience again and again,” said Mahendra Pitale, who lost his hand in the Mumbai train blasts in 2006.

Also read: I am now beginning a new innings

Many of these survivors have turned spiritual after the tragedy. But they feel what they need more is a social platform to share their sufferings with fellow victims. Lawyer Sumeet Singh, a survivor of the bomb blast in German Bakery in Pune in 2010, is planning to create such a platform. “There is a dearth of organisations for terror victims,” he said. Journalist Sourav Mishra, a survivor of the 2011 terrorist attack on Leopold Cafe in Mumbai, and Nidhi Chapekar, a survivor of the bomb blasts in Brussels airport this March, are also thinking about creating a platform which can make the rest of their lives more meaningful.

This browser settings will not support to add bookmarks programmatically. Please press Ctrl+D or change settings to bookmark this page.
The Week

Related Reading