It was the second escape for cinema director N. Shankar, who had married just three days earlier at the Shalimar Function Palace in Nampally here. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary that cold Wednesday morning, yet by 11.50 a.m., a deafening blast turned Jubilee Hills into a scene of chaos.
A black cloud of smoke rose over the hillock at the edge of Jubilee Hills as debris and fire scattered across the road. In an instant, a quiet morning became a scene of horror, leaving onlookers stunned and roads littered with the aftermath of destruction.
Among those caught in the havoc was Sattiah, who was working on chiseling rock at Kondapur. “By lunch time, the road and surrounding area were covered with legs, arms, burnt body parts, clumps of hair and the stench of flesh,” he recalls, the memory still raw nearly three decades later. He still lives yards from the blast site.
Even today, visitors to the Writer’s Room cafe pass by the spot without a second glance. “Was there a bomb blast here,” asks a householder overseeing construction work near the spot.
The explosion, on November 19, 1997, triggered in a parked Premier Padmini CKM 646, killed nearly 25 persons and maimed dozens. The car had been purchased for ₹30,000 that September from a car dealer in Karnataka.
