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We were watching TV when the sounds splintered the silence outside — one after another they came, loud explosions that on an ordinary day could be mistaken for firecrackers. Only this wasn’t an ordinary day, but we would know this only later.

At the first explosion, my husband was off his seat and at the balcony, jaw set. Into the blackness we peered, I was a bit taken aback as I remember, because my husband has never reacted so sharply to firecrackers before. I didn’t know it at the time, as strongly as he did — his Rajput upbringing, acutely clued-in to the sound of firearms had already identified the gunshots that I thought were mere firecrackers.

The news channels, meanwhile, were speaking of unconfirmed reports of firing at a Colaba cafe, which at that moment, they supposed, was a bar brawl gone wrong. By the time they started showing the horror of what was really going on, phone calls and SMSes ensured that I already knew.

It is termed flashbulb memory, that recollection of where one was when life-changing events (bad or good) occurred. The people of Mumbai, certainly South Mumbai, will perhaps always recall where they were the night the horror of the 26/11 terror attacks unfolded.

This week, Saturday marks three years to that date. Time might have allowed for analysis and introspection but the eternal question still holds sway — do we feel safe enough now?

In the dark days that followed, there was a sense of unreality about it all. How inconceivable it appeared, that a group of trigger-happy malcontents could just walk into eateries and rail stations, places of bonhomie and laughter or routine commute and conversation, and just level out lives in a single instant. There was abiding grief. And so many stories, stories of both terrible tragedy and somehow, hope in that altered timespace. I live in South Mumbai. People we know lost members of their families.

People we know had been caught in the hotels or around CST and what ensued. Some made it. Some didn’t. All our lives changed.

Today, as a result of that change you cannot enter a hotel/mall/cinema without going through special security. Maximum city’s tourist hallmark, the Gateway of India, became a fortress; since recovered but it is not as it once was. We have substituted carefree lifestyles for safety precautions.

And the innocence is gone. News of terror attacks in other cities keeps our nerves on edge. As do headlines, warning of the possibility of militant insurgencies and sleeper cells nestling in the city once believed comparatively safe. Each time one steps out with loved ones to a public place — a movie, a mall, a dining hall — there is that niggling trepidation.

In the aftermath of the 2008 attacks followed conflicting reports about the gunshots we heard down at Napean Sea Road that night. Some reconstruction of events placed terrorists down the road firing indiscriminately before continuing on to the other locations. Some say the shots we heard were echoes, over the bay from the Taj attack, though I’m not sure how those sounds could’ve travelled so far, so insistently. I don’t have answers, I wish somebody did. What I do know is, I cannot forget.