There were diamonds on the railway tracks last Tuesday. No gold paving the streets, as the old quip goes, although a number of public works departments continue to drill and dig and search relentlessly, perhaps hoping someday to unearth the legendary fabled riches buried beneath the city’s ravaged streets. Neither the fabled gold paving stones and the mythic buried treasure are real, of course. They’re euphemistic jokes used by frustrated citizenry to laugh away the unending roadwork that riddles the city’s infrastructure like trails of termite tunnels across a wooden house.

But the diamonds were real. As were the blood, body organs, twisted metal and intimate personal belongings splayed across the railway tracks. An urchin boy drawn in the aftermath of the blasts, like the hordes of other passersby and slum dwellers who rushed to help the victims, was drawn by the glint of promised treasure amidst the gravel paving the tracks. So intent was he on picking out the precious glimmering stones that he failed to see the train rushing headlong at him.

? When she was good, she was very, very good ?

The old joke about gold-paved streets wears bitterly thin today. You could even say that the city has lost its sense of humour about itself. Whether you travel to work by local train, BEST bus, or airconditioned chauffeured private luxury car, you dare not turn to your colleague and crack the perennial joke about Bombay living up to its name. Perhaps because, there is no Bombay left. The protests of the anglicised South Mumbai elite notwithstanding, it was not the name change to Mumbai that altered the character of the city. Bombay herself had long since begun to lose her character, her personality, her very soul. The ShivSena-instigated name change to Mumbai was in fact a merciful step for a city that had already lost its cosmopolitan multi-cultural international identity.

Bombay as she was until less than two decades ago was still a beacon of infinite opportunity. Back in the late Eighties, you could still feel the excitement and thrill of possibility in the air as you rode a Western Railway local to Churchgate station, as if the gargantuan iron rollercoaster was racing to meet the future, a future of infinite hope and possibility.

When you walked from Churchgate station to your office, met someone for lunch at a steak house, or at an Udipi restaurant or Irani caf? for refreshments, you could feel the electric thrill of being part of this great metropolitan experiment nearing fruition. Whether it was the stockmarket boom, the promise of greater economic liberalisation any day now, or simply the energy of the city itself, the sense of promise was palpable. This was a city going places fast, her future so bright that, like the hit song said, she had to wear shades. She did wear shades, enormous hot-pink go-go sunglasses and went to town with her lifestyle, night clubbing, day partying, living free, thinking free. And paying for everything in cold, hard cash.

This was ground zero for the edifice that was the Great Indian Dream. A towering, glittering monolith that would kiss the belly of the sky and make the world gaze Eastwards in awe one day. She was the answer to the problem of brain drain. The laughably simple solution to the tussle of Left-Right economics. She defied Nehruvian planning, outgrew Gandhian philosophies, made Keynesian naysayers look foolish. While terrorists ravaged Dublin and London, race riots and earthquakes took turns tearing Los Angeles apart, even proud New York struggled to control her drugs-and-crime syndicates, and Beijing ran down peaceful protestors with military tanks, Bombay grew round-faced and prosperous.

Diamonds glittering on her neck, her heavy gold mangalsutra weighing down her considerable cleavage, clad in a scintillating gaudily coloured chiffon saree, she danced with the abandon of a middle-aged heroine playing a college girl in a Bollywood dance-comedy-police-thriller-everything-goes masala movie. Her intellectuals aired their intelligence through entertaining, even risque, journals and provocative publications that dared to mix nude centrefolds with intellectual prose. High society parties made news, yes, but only the anonymously penned ‘society’ columns in stardusty glossies. Journalism was still about real news and real people. We were happy and hopeful and heading for the future at full speed, fearing nothing, and nobody.

? When we dragged her to the gutter ?

What happened then to the city that was Bombay? That beautiful, bombastic city by the sea that was once an inspiration, an iconic symbol of hope and unending possibility to Indians everywhere?

That Bombay is long gone. Who waylaid her, dragged her into a dark alley and gang-raped her, then disfigured her and left her half-dead? Who broke her spirit, day by day, piece by piece, until she turned into a haggard alcoholic shadow of her former scintillating self? Who turned her into the unemployed dance bar whore she is today, the sycophant reporter who follows celebrities around like a pet dog so loyal, she doesn’t need a leash, the young businessman burdened with crushing credit card debt? Who turned her Colgate smile into a grinning skullface?

We did. All of us.

We, the young, future-gazing professionals who earned money hand over fist and grumbled about corrupt politicians and incompetent bureaucracts ? and then went ahead and bribed them to get our ration cards or passports.

The media barons, editors and advertising heads who sold the very integrity of the Fifth Estate out from under our own feet to earn more advertising rupees, paving our plush offices and padding our international travel accounts while passing off blatantly sycophantic, editorially compromised, overtly brand-promotional features as ‘news’.

The state government, nationalised banks, insurance corporations, city administration, civic and municipal departments, police and other governmental organisations that milked her for every last hundred crores, lining their own pockets, facilitating scams, designed to earn conniving contractors more money than to benefit citizens, pillaging and raping the city in every way imaginable ? repaying political favours, doling out licences for taxis and autos and tow truck services, selling public lands to powerful builders and developers, permitting illegal immigrants to squat on public land in exchange for votes, indulging in a thousand different variations on the use of public office for private profit.

We’re still doing it. Still selling pieces of the city, one precious square foot after another. Even as public interest litigations pile up and the sanctimonious celebrities mouth clever quotes on TV news channels in the wake of public tragedies, the rape continues. We’re all responsible for it, we’re all profiting from it, we’re all accomplices in the crime.

Terrorists can kill hundreds, disrupt the city for a few hours or a day, cause panic and terror and dispiriting fear. But what we, residents of this once-proud city, continue to do to her ourselves is far worse. She lies bleeding and ripped apart and we bend to pick out diamonds from the gravelled railway tracks on which she lies. This is all we are reduced to today ? plucking profits where we find them.

Look out for the oncoming train of karma.

Too late.

Ashok Banker, the writer, lives in Mumbai