Mumbai: Wednesday looked like just another day in the City of Dreams. But Mumbai also has its nightmares, only these are enshrined in film, fitting perhaps, in India's showbiz capital.
Director Anurag Kashyap's Black Friday remains one of the most enduring images of the 1993 blasts.
The film and journalist Hussain Zaidi's book on which it is based, are perhaps the only few memorials that Mumbai will allow as markers of the tragic day.
"There was a 10,000 page chargesheet, they were cops and investigators, there were lawyers, there were others -- even some of the accused were close friends of mine. These were the people who were helping me write the book. There were also thousands of pages of court evidence. So when I saw all this, I had no idea that if I made a film o n this, there would be any problem" recalls author S Hussain Zaidi who wrote Black Friday.
Anurag Kashyap directed Black Friday, a film that lay in limbo for years. He recalls, “The book gives the perspective of the entire blast. He gave me a book and said we would want to do a series on it and if I could write a script. I was so moved by the book that I said why not make a film."
At a time when news channels were yet to make a mark, several moving pictures from the Indian Express were the first to bring home the magnitude of the blasts into Mumbai's households the next day.
Photographer Mukesh Parpiani pins down the spirit of a city that's conditioned to simply move on. "There will be a mini-mall at the petrol pump that was damaged. So life has to move on," he says.
Today, the city offers no memorials to the past. Only few images. Mumbai forgets in order to survive.
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