Around 5:30pm on May 21, 1996, Pinky Sood was going about her day at home when a phone call from a relative shifted the ground beneath her feet. A blast had rocked Delhi's Lajpat Nagar market, where her husband Rakesh Kumar Sood had a framing shop.
It has been 30 years since the blast, in which 13 people were killed and 39 were injured. According to police and court documents, a Maruti car packed with RDX detonated near a park in Lajpat Nagar Central Market.
Pinky, now 60 years old, has not once stepped inside court premises as the blast case went on – and doesn’t regret it. “I was suddenly the head of the family, both a mother and a father to my children, and I had to run his business. Who had the time to pursue justice? I had to make peace with what had happened... These are painful memories and I had a life to rebuild,” she said.
For Kuldeep Kumar, 52, general secretary of the Federation of Lajpat Nagar Traders Association, the horror of that afternoon remains equally vivid. Kumar, who owns a fabric store in Lajpat Nagar, was near the blast site when the explosion occurred.
Three decades later, the visuals remain impossible to erase. “The sight was horrific, dead bodies and people bleeding everywhere, the tears and people crying everywhere, a slipper here, a piece of cloth there. I can never forget,” he said.
