To some, memories donot fade.

We were sitting in a circle listening in rapt attention to a middle aged Tamilian relate his horrifying experience at the site of the bomb blast at SriPerembadur , the very place and the very instant Sri Rajiv Ghandhi was killed.

This narrator was a young reporter then and was very near the dias , covering the event and taking down the speeches delivered at that election campaign.

Suddenly he heard a ear splitting sound and saw huge flames leap up on the stage, before he fell down senseless.When he came around ,shortly, he saw utter confusion and mayhem . There was smoke every where . His clothes were singed and tattered and covered with grime. He slowly sat up and saw several pieces sticking to his body. They were warm, soft and sticky and when he brushed them away his fingers became stained with blood. With a shock he realised that they were all pieces of human flesh! Not his. He passed out again.

When he woke up next, it was in a hospital . He opened his mouth to speak to his anxious family surrounding his bed, but no words would come out . He couldn't move his body . He could hear and see every thing , but couldn't respond.

He was in this state for two years One day he came out of it but was still confined to the hospital bed as he felt excruiting pain in his back. It took him some more years to overcome this as well as the relentless questioning by the police, to finally walk out of the hospital.

He was taken back by his original employers . And when he was sent on assignments memories of that terrifying day always flooded back making him shudder and shake in fear . He just couldn't take down notes.

Then it took another couple of years to overcome his pshycological trauma ,through therapy and finally face the world, a full 10 years after that event and start working to support himself and his family , to clear the medical bills and to settle down to a normal life!

I heard this tale, a real one not in Chennai , but in a nondescript dabbha tucked in the Himalayas ,near Deva prayag, where we, a bus load of pilgrims en route to Badrinath were forced to stay put on that spot for a whole day and night, owing to the blocking of road traffic by land slides., last year.

Why am I relating this now ? The debates currently raging on in the media on the merits and demerits capital punishment has made me to do so.

That genial public figure has long since faded and evaporated from my memory so has the revulsion I felt for the prepetrators of the act. But to that man an unwary and unintended victim ,who was relating the intimate details of his traumatic experience to total strangers , it has not.