ALLEY OF FEAR: Despite the network of support in Zaveri Bazar (top), uncertainty stalks the busy marketplace (Pic: Gajanan Dudhalkar) , and (below) the blast site at Opera House

It’s peak hour at Zaveri Bazar, the country’s gem and jewellery hub. If the narrow lanes were once busy with milling crowds, they’re now filled with middle-aged traders, huddled together in groups, animatedly airing their anxiety or simply staring at the cops shooing away crowds.

This is the place where a bomb exploded on Thursday, bringing life and business to a shattering close. But for the traders and residents of Zaveri Bazar, the blast was nothing new. In the last two decades, there have been three such incidents in this south Mumbai neighbourhood where the famous Mumbaidevi temple is also located. The crowded area — packed with tiny buildings — is ideal ground for terrorists seeking to plant a bomb.

This, ironically, is also the place where trust reigns supreme. Deals are done at the local tea vendor’s or over the phone. One cannot walk into a shop to buy gems without a reference. “It is risky dealing with strangers as you have to keep a very close watch over your precious stones — many of them very tiny,” says Amarchand Jain, a silver-haired gem merchant at Zaveri.

Once the shutters are down, peace — along with trust — returns to the neighbourhood. R.P. Mishra, who runs a milk business in Zaveri Bazar, says nobody has ever touched his cans holding 250 litres of milk that the milkmen leave at his doorstep at 4am every day. Mishra’s milk and cold drink shop stays open till 1.30am and opens at 5 the next morning.

It’s also a place where people stand by one another. “Even if one of our tiniest diamonds — which could weigh less than a carat — falls to the ground, we all shine a torch and get down on our knees to look for it,” says diamond merchant Raju Jain.

But trust and support are no match for the uncertainty that stalks the busy marketplace. There is consternation in and around Zaveri Bazar, as indignant merchants blame the blasts on police and government apathy. “This blast is only a trailer,” warns Samir Shah, another diamond merchant. “The movie is yet to follow.”

But while the traders voice their anguish, work goes on as always in tiny, airless rooms, where bare-backed boys — mostly minors from Bengal and Bangladesh — deftly set fragments of gold and diamonds into ornaments with the help of forceps. Pockets of cow hide hang from their wooden worktables, placed so that they could collect slipping gems. They get paid Rs 150 to cut and polish a small stone, says a diamond broker. Work on a one-carat stone fetches them Rs 1,500-Rs 2,000.

The boys — called babus — form the backbone of Zaveri Bazar. According to one estimate, about 80 per cent of the craftsmen there are Bengalis. “But they have no security and can easily be attacked by thieves,” says Jiten Jhaveri, who owns a manufacturing unit in the market.

Zaveri Bazar is packed with tiny low-rise buildings. Spread over a radius of about a kilometre, it houses over 10,000 businesses, of which precious stone and metals form a large number.

The market is believed to have come up in 1803, after a huge fire in the Fort area prompted Indian trading communities to move elsewhere to set up their own homes and businesses. “The Muslims moved out of the Bazargate area of the Fort to places like Mohammed Ali Road and Pydhoni and the Gujaratis left for the neighbouring Zaveri Bazar and Bhuleshwar,” says Mumbai historian Sharada Dwivedi.

Businesses today are largely controlled by fathers and sons or brothers, unlike the high-end diamond export and retail market at Mumbai’s Opera House — a more professional and slick offshoot of it since the Seventies.

Most traders tend to deal with gold. Over the last year, the country’s gold exports have gone up by 19.87 per cent and that of diamonds by close to 13 per cent, according to the Gem and Jewellery Export Promotion Council. Even in the Sixties, when Amarchand was learning the ropes of the market, buyers usually headed for the yellow metal. “Diamonds were only for the rich,” he says.

A small diamond trader in Zaveri Bazar sells gems worth Rs 3 lakh in a day, with a profit margin of 50-75 per cent, he adds. A gold manufacturer will sell not less than 10kg of the metal in a day.

Yet Zaveri Bazar sees buyers coming only from Mumbai and the rest of the country these days. But Amarchand Jain remembers the time when they came from across the world.

But that was when Zaveri Bazar was at its peak. Amarchand vividly recalls his boyhood days when there were fewer people in the streets. The roads were washed every morning by municipality workers carrying water in leather skins — a practice that came to an end in the late Sixties. Street lights were powered by gas pipelines running underground. “A man would come and turn on the lights every evening and clean the lamps once a week.”

Horse-drawn carriages or Victorias congregated outside the neighbouring Cotton Exchange. “They were cheaper than taxis,” recalls Amarchand.

Today it is difficult to navigate through the narrow lanes and by-lanes without covering your nose — even as you step out of pokey air-conditioned shops and showrooms. Not surprisingly, many of the old-timers have moved out of Zaveri Bazar.

Like many other residents, B.M. Thaakar, 67, a cloth merchant from a neighbouring lane, is furious about vehicles being parked on both sides of the narrow alleys. And he can’t stand the smell of the place anymore. “Earlier, this was a vegetarian place. But with the coming of the Bengalis, we can smell fish here,” he grimaces.

The times, indeed, have changed. When Amarchand was young, business in Zaveri Bazar began at 8am. Now shops open only around 2pm. Those days, traders lived close to their workplace and went home for lunch. Today they come to work after lunch, from their homes in the western suburbs.

Some of the business holdings are changing too, with a few of the Bengalis who worked for other jewellers setting up shop.

Rajkumar Haldar, 42, learnt the trade from his father, and now runs his own business. Haldar fears that in the future, few workers from Bengal would want to work in Mumbai because of the recurring blasts.

“Nobody will want to come to Mumbai to die,” he says.