I should not have invited Hasan to my house, I told myself, as my unease grew. Thank heavens he had declined. But I did go in search of Welcome Hotel the next morning.
When I reached the approximate area and asked around for Welcome Hotel, I found, to my surprise, that everyone was eager to show me the way. As I followed the directions given, I began to notice a crowd gathering on the road, and getting thicker as I neared the hotel. And, finally, there it was, Welcome Hotel, crumbled into a heap. On top of the mountain of debris, of concrete, steel and bricks, teetered a huge board that proclaimed ‘Welcome Hotel’, seemingly untouched by the surrounding destruction, like an epitaph upon a tomb. One half of the building was still standing, sort of propped up by the mountain of debris; I counted the number of floors, seven in all. I wondered if room number 412 was in the intact half. With my friend and the mysterious packet bearing my name still inside.
No, the fire brigade had already evacuated all the survivors in the undamaged portion and that portion too was slowly collapsing. Policemen were pushing the spectators away to a safer distance. The fearless firefighters were searching for bodies in the ruins, which were around three storeys high. Fenced in by buildings on all sides, the fallen debris had nowhere to spread. The smoke and dust had already settled. The crowd, though reluctant to disperse, was also calm. All one could hear were the shouts of the relief workers and the sounds of machines.
It was at night that the blast had occurred, I learnt. Going by the reported time of blast doing the rounds among the onlookers, it was not long after my friend had called me last night. He had said he was going down to the restaurant and bar situated on the second floor. Which were in the collapsed portion, I discovered. So he must be lying under this heap somewhere, I guessed. I will not be meeting him on a train a fifth time. He has left behind a mystery of transposed rooms and unexplained packages. The investigations on the blast are not going to shed any light on those mysteries. My own personal mysteries, to lose sleep over.
On an impulse, I crossed the pools of slush created by the fire hoses, and the dust and remains of the building, and found a police officer. I told him I had something to tell him.
‘You want to claim responsibility for this?’ was his belligerent response.
I could appreciate the stress he was under and did not retaliate in the same tone. I said quietly, ‘A friend of mine staying in the hotel had phoned me a few minutes before the incident.’
‘How do you know it was before the blast?’
‘Because he phoned me.’
He stared at me for some moments and then with his chin pointed me to another officer. More wading through the mud. The second officer was not much different. Still, I persisted and managed to convey my story of transposed rooms in a few brief words to him.
‘You are the fourth or fifth person coming to me with this nonsense. This is not April 1st, mister,’ he said, already turning away.
‘That doesn’t make it irrelevant,’ I insisted.
‘There is a register over there. You can leave your name and address there.’
He didn’t elaborate where the register was. I didn’t feel particularly inclined to ask for it, for I myself was having second thoughts about Hasan’s story. How could all those people have got the same kind of phone call? Or was it the same person calling them all — perhaps Hasan? Did he have a premonition about the blast? I left Hasan and the book with my address on it behind me and began to walk back. Then a thought struck me — My God! Could this horrible blast have been written on the pages towards the end of the book? The pages that would be torn out after the event … now lying among the ashes …
The official as well as the various unofficial versions of the blast filled the newspapers the next morning. Seventy-seven people had died in the incident. A number of missing persons, besides. Neither list contained Hasan’s name. The police were able to find the check-in register in the wreckage; Hasan’s name was not in it either. That gave some credibility to his story, as according to him he had checked into a different hotel.
The explosion had taken place on the second floor which housed the restaurant, the bar and the disco. At midnight, when all three were full to capacity and late-night parties were in full swing. The hotel had been a favourite among youngsters. The owner of the hotel, himself a young, flamboyant music lover, had been inside, the reports said. Body parts suspected to be his had been found. There was a big fire following the explosion; the fire brigade had had to fight for hours to bring it under control.
There were also two insets in the news reports. One was titled ‘The Game of Seven’. The blast had occurred on the seventh day of the seventh month, July. There were seventy-seven dead. There were seven unidentified bodies among them. They were mostly just bits and pieces of arms and legs, and they were likely to remain so. The missing were also seven. The papers claimed that this could be a new addition to the list of coincidences in history.
The second inset described what the police officer had told me at the site. A number of people had reported to the police that just before the blast, their friends or relatives who had checked in at other hotels were inexplicably moved to Welcome. As if they had been brought in for an execution. The police found in these stories a red herring, they said, created to divert their line of investigation.
I paused at that. Am I also, then, one of those trying to misguide the investigation? The distracters’ list would then include not only people like me who had told such stories to the police but even their dead friends and relatives who had initially propagated this ‘red herring’, in fact, the victims of the crime themselves. I couldn’t dismiss the anxiety and fear I had so clearly heard in Hasan’s voice.
A few days later news broke that the police had solved the case. The story was nothing short of unbelievable: the hotel owner himself was the bomber!
The hotel owner, Zainul Abidin, was a prominent name among the business magnates of the city. A handsome and charismatic bachelor, he had filled the fashion and gossip columns of the media and was always seen surrounded by beautiful women. On the fateful night, he had apparently entered the disco room around midnight with a guitar of extraordinary size; the party was already in full swing; he mingled with the dancers, traded jokes and became the life of the party as he always did. According to the police, his guitar was packed with high-grade explosives and metal objects. He detonated the bomb when the noise inside the hall reached a peak. This was the story of a girl who had been inside the disco moments before the bomb went off. Abidin had apparently blown himself up with a great cry.
Quite a number of the hotel staff had survived. But, mysteriously, there were no survivors from the reception staff and not a single guest had survived. This was attributed to the report that Abidin had extended a personal invitation to every one of the guests for the party in the bar and disco. Apart from the guests staying at the hotel, there were also some friends of Abidin’s at the party, according to the surviving staff. And yet, the unidentified seven bodies and the missing seven remained unmatched.
There was no dearth of anecdotes, of course, and the press paid great attention to them. The girl who had witnessed Zainul blowing himself up but had herself escaped by a freak chance claimed that her sister who lived in another city had died by lightning on the same evening. Similar accounts by survivors about loved ones losing their lives on the same day peppered the newspaper pages. The media and individuals joined together in giving a mystical aura to the whole tragedy.