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"We now know what a battlefield looks like!"

In any other place, at any other time, it would have been just another vehicle, parked for a few minutes while its owner went off doing his own thing.

But not in Coimbatore. Not now.

Any stationary vehicle is immediately suspect. In fact, any object any larger than a pinhead, and which appears to have no visible provenance, is immediately suspect.

And it is this paranoia that appears to have saved Coimbatore from more devastation.

. The car in question, an early model of the Premier Padmini range, bore the number 'MSQ 1347'. And was parked on Lokamanya Street in the R S Puram area -- the precise location of the earlier serial blasts.

Cops, under instructions to check out every parked vehicle, routinely peered into the interior. And saw -- explosives, and wires.

That was sufficient to summon the bomb squad, which in the trouble torn city is now in a state of high alert.

"It would have blasted an area of radius one kilometre," says an officer who was part of the bomb squad.

"There were six bombs, each weighing 20 kg," the officer clarified. The defusing operation lasted all of 36 hours.

Special Inspector-General of Police Ravi Arumugam told newsmen here that the bombs, made of gelatine and packed in a highly sophisticated fashion, could not be detected even by scanners. "A wire was either not connected properly, or had given way, and that's what really saved the city," says the top cop.

However, the actual job of defusing a bomb is only the tip of the peace-keeping iceberg. The real nightmare, for cops and civil administrators alike, is the question of safety of the people who reside in the vicinity.

Do they call for mass evacuation, risking panic and chaos? Or take a risk on being able to defuse the explosive in time? That, for the administration, is the devil's alternative.

The actual job of defusing the explosive was no picnic either, given the sophistication that went into its making. At the time, of course, the bomb squad had no idea that defective wiring had made their job a shade easier. "Even given the wiring defect, one false move could have triggered the whole thing off," a member of the squad says.

Thus, as the administration on one hand mobilised lorries and other modes of transport to ensure smooth evacuation, more lorries streamed into the zone, bringing sandbags that were packed around the car.

"In retrospect, we are relieved it worked -- but at the time, we were on the edge of our nerves, what the effect would have been had the bomb gone off is anybody's guess," says one of the experts involved in the task.

The experts, incidentally, are drawn from the National Security Guards, the Bombay Engineering Group of the Army and the Tamil Nadu Commando School. "We did not expect a hands-on training of this kind, but then who wants it anyway, at such a cost in human lives and misery?" says a recruit from the commmando school.

Simultaneously, ambulances, fire engines etc were being rushed to the region, including a snorkel from Madras, just in case the flames leapt sky-high.

Once these preparations were in place, the experts spent the next 15 hours studying the bomb, with the help of X-rays and other sophisticated infrastructure, before deciding on their strategy.

The bombs were all packed in the back seat and the boot, though all of them were not inter-connected. And the car's own batteries provided the power.

The original fear was that the bomb would detonate if the doors were opened. What underlined it was the revelation that the front door had been deliberately jammed. In effect, it made things more difficult for the bomb squad, since they could not operate from the front seat.

The boot was locked, which meant that the bomb experts had to experiment with another machine of the same model and make before figuring out how to safely implode the catch. This, in turn, required enormous courage on the part of a commando in a safety-suit -- though, given the amount and nature of explosives in question, the word 'safety' was a misnomer -- who had to physically connect the wires to the remote-control equipment, before the squad could blast the boot open.

That done, there began a journey into the unknown. Six bombs, each packed in the sort of containers that you find in on the side of motorcycles. Each box was roped, then shifted, an inch at a time with the kind of care that you use when trying to sneak a rat through a cageful of hungry cobras -- the least little jerk could have triggered off cataclysm.

Once clear of the car, the boxes were carried into trucks and taken, in procession with police escorts clearing the way, to the Madukkarai firing range, where the experts arranged for their controlled explosion.

One positive fallout is in the area of citizen-police relations. The natives were, thus far, in a combative mood, tending to blame the police for their troubles. However, the incident -- and nothing is as sobering as 100 kilogrammes of high explosive on your doorstep -- has suddenly shocked the average native, and given them a better perspective of what the police are up against.

"They were literally living on borrowed time, and they understood it when we explained the situation," says Arumugam. "They cooperated entirely after that, taking the responsibility for removing themselves to homes of relatives or friends elsewhere in the city."

Thus, if the streets were deserted when the bomb squad was at work, the start of the procession towards Madukkarai was the signal for the citizenry to flood the region, their cheers and congratulations compensating the police and explosives personnel for 36 hours on the borderline of nervous tension.

"Those of us -- and that means pretty much all of us -- in the city who didn't have an idea what a battle zone looked like have now seen it for ourselves," says 18 year old Chaya. "The uncertainty of our lives, and the battle-like preparations that went into defusing the car-bomb, all made it very lifelike," she adds.

"We are relieved, and we have also learnt our lesson," says Shobha. "We know now what can happen if we encourage terrorism, we know what it means to fight the unseen enemy, to fight the kind of battle that goes on in Punjab and Kashmir."

It is a sobering knowledge, that. And Coimbatore can perhaps count itself lucky that the price tag attached to that lesson was not higher than it already is.

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