FOR two minutes yesterday, exactly a week after the first of seven explosions ripped through Bombay’s commuter train network, the city that never stops, stopped.

As 270 sirens sounded across the city at 6.24pm, Bombay’s 17 million residents, and tens of millions more across the country, remembered the 207 people killed and 900 injured in the attacks.

At Crawford Market, a place usually undeterred in its 120-year-old mission to sell everything from silk and spices to vegetables and goats, stall-holders fell quiet. Fruit-sellers put down their pomegranates. Taxis switched off their engines. Packed buses stopped in their tracks.

For once, Bombay was eerily quiet. No car horns beeped; no business was conducted. In a port city where making money is the bottom line, humanity’s value briefly rose.

Nabjod and his wife and two children observed the twominute silence in the middle of the road. Above them a billboard from the Youth Citizen Forum condemned the blasts, thought to have been caused by Islamic militants, as a “conspiracy of international politics”.

Dange, a Hindu market porter, paused in solemn thought next to Omar, his Muslim colleague. In the bazaar district, on the edge of the Muslim neighbourhood and Victoria Terminus, which is the busiest section of south Bombay and through which 2.5 million commuters pass daily, religion is not the divide that the terrorists hoped it would be.

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, the Indian President, joined thousands to hear Last Post at Mahim station, the site of one of the explosions. Trains on the affected Western Line, which resumed service hours after the explosions, were suspended.

On Marine Drive and Chowpatty Beach, ordinary workers turned their backs to the sea to face their city. On film sets, the Bollywood stars paid silent homage to the dead. Diamond traders, who lost 11 colleagues, huddled together. The co-workers of eight dead rail staff joined ceremonies at the affected stations, where black granite plaques honouring the victims had been erected.

Pralhad Kusuma, 35, a graphic designer who was two carriages away from one of the bombs, said: “Silence is important because only then can we have unity.”

In Calcutta, students held a candlelight vigil at the Victoria Memorial. In Delhi and Madras, there were condolence meetings. Airport staff stopped working and no flights took off or landed.

At the sound of the first siren, it seemed that Bombay would carry on regardless as confusion reigned about the right moment to stop. The last time the city attempted a two-minute silence was on July 27, 2002, in commemoration of the victims of a cross-border conflict with Pakistan.

Newspapers had flagged the ceremonial silence and the state Government sent out millions of text messages as a reminder. But memories of the bombing casualties were still fresh.

For two minutes Bombay remembered before returning to business as quickly as it had stopped.

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