MUMBAI: White boards outside Sion Hospital listed people who were dead, as well as those injured. Shreeranjan Inamdar, Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) said 67 victims of the synchronised bomb blasts on Tuesday evening were admitted to the hospital. Of those 41 were declared dead before admission. Five died after being admitted.

Six bodies were yet to be identified until afternoon. Mr. Inamdar had photos of unidentified bodies on a desk outside the hospital. The bodies were bloodied and burnt, some without parts of skull. They had numbers stuck on their chests. The bodies were kept in three rooms on the ground floor of the hospital, a witness said. All day, people came to the hospital with photos of loved ones who were still missing.

Mahindra Gohil had a photo of his brother, Kantilal, who he said was an engineer with the Municipal Corporation. "Anybody with a clue, please contact me. Help me out," he pleaded, holding up his brother's photo for a television camera. He was searching for Kantilal, who lived in Borivali with his wife and three children, since Tuesday night.

Inconsolable

A woman, who identified herself as Vallarmathi (30), said her husband, Jagdish (35) had died in the blasts. She found his body at Sion Hospital on Wednesday. "I have no one," an inconsolable Vallarmathi said. "Who will take care of my family?" She has three sons. Her husband worked at a wedding hall in Mahim. Prabhakar S. Ghume (35), who worked with the Life Insurance Corporation of India, died on his way home to Virar. Ashwin Upadhyaya, Ghume's boss for the past 12 years, said he had identified Ghume's body at Sion Hospital from the red shirt he saw him wearing last.

"He was such a gem of a person," Upadhyaya said, holding back tears. "He was so polite. I don't know why God picked him. He never hurt anybody. So why would anybody hurt him?" Ghume is survived by his wife and daughter.

Outside the K. B. Bhabha municipal hospital in Bandra, Gulamuddin Gupta clutched onto the visiting card of his son, Shankar, a senior customer support engineer with Canon. "I can't trace him," he said, weeping.

Gulamuddin called his son last evening at around 6.15 p.m., but there was no reply. He did not return home till Wednesday morning. "I visited two hospitals, but in vain. My daughter-in-law is weeping. She has two small children," he added.

Like Gulamuddin, several people have been doing the rounds of hospitals and morgues to check for missing family members, since Tuesday night.

Last night, Bela Goyani and her husband Sanjay were searching for Bela's father Mansukhlal P. Shah. "We have no clue where he could be and no one is helping us," an anxious Bela said.

Umang Patodia waved a photograph of his uncle, Mohan Saraogi, and till late on Tuesday night, he had already visited three general hospitals. "He usually gets into the train at Bandra and travels to Goregaon by first class around 6 p.m. daily," said Umang.

Joseph Noronha caught the train at Churchgate just before 6 p.m. on Tuesday, but his sister Celine said he was yet to return home till Wednesday morning. "The whole night, we were roaming the city and we could not find him," she said, before rushing home to fetch his photograph so that he could be identified in the hospitals from among the list of unknown persons.

While uncertainty dogs some, in other cases, the searches have thrown up bad news. At Naupada in Bandra, the Sheikh family is mourning the death of Javed, a 52-year-old engineer with the Railways. His brother Nafis Ahmed said Sheikh used to catch the train from Churchgate to Virar daily as he lived at Mira Road. Though his relatives searched for him everywhere, it was only at 10.30 p.m. on Tuesday that they realised that he had succumbed to injuries after the blasts in a train at the Matunga station.

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