A Banker's Duty in the Kill Zone
"Courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it." — Nelson Mandela
While my experience as General Manager in charge of overseas branches was primarily administrative, nothing could have prepared me for the day the ground shook in Colombo. It was a challenge that demanded instant, life-altering decisions, where every hourly report arrived with a desperate question: "What do we do now?"
The Blast
Our Colombo branch sat in a high-stakes location—directly across from the Central Bank of Sri Lanka. On a seemingly ordinary afternoon, a sound like a massive firecracker echoed through the streets. Staff members rushed to the glass partitions to look out, but the Senior Manager, thinking it was a rehearsal for the upcoming Independence Day, ordered everyone back to their desks.
Moments later, a cataclysmic explosion ripped through the air. An LTTE suicide truck, unable to breach the Central Bank’s gates, had detonated right between the two buildings flanking our branch. We were "sandwiched" in the kill zone.
The branch's glass shutters shattered into millions of lethal splinters. Pandemonium ensued. Staff fled down staircases in a near-stampede, regulated only by the steady hand of the Senior Manager. Outside, the air was thick with smoke and screams. Good Samaritans stopped their vehicles to pile the wounded into cars and trucks, rushing them to whichever hospitals still had room.
The Search in the Debris
In Chennai, we were frantic. Mobile phones were not yet common, and the branch was now a roofless shell. Our primary contact was Mr. K, an officer who had survived, and a local journalist friend of the bank. Together, they spent a grueling night scouring every hospital in Colombo to locate our sixty-plus employees.
The report that filtered back was grim. Faces and chests were riddled with glass splinters; many had suffered severe eye injuries. Most worrying of all: the Chief, Mr. C, and two others were missing. By the next morning, we found Mr. C alive, but unrecognizable. He had fifteen large glass shards embedded in his body, a fractured arm, and—the most heartbreaking news—one of his eyes had been lost in the blast.
The Debt to Devotion
We had to act. We coordinated the flight of Mr. C to Chennai for the specialized care of Dr. Badrinath at Sankara Nethralaya. But first, we had to find his wife. She was on a long pilgrimage on foot to the Pazhani Subramanya Temple. I coordinated with our Karaikudi manager, who sent a fleet of cars to track her down. They found her, she completed her darshan, and we rushed her back to Colombo to bring her husband home.
In Chennai, surgeons at Apollo Hospital performed a miracle—meticulously reconstructing Mr. C's face. They discovered a four-inch glass shard embedded between his liver and heart; it was so perilously placed they decided to leave it there rather than risk surgery (it was finally removed two years later). Through all of this, we kept the news of the missing eye from Mr. C and his wife until they were strong enough to bear the shock. Mr. C eventually recovered and, showing incredible courage, rose to become a General Manager before his retirement.
The Senior Manager’s "Silent" Fight
While Mr. C was recovering, I flew to Colombo to assess the branch. Mr. K shared a chilling story about the Senior Manager who had regulated the evacuation. After the blast, he had been injured and jumped into a passing vehicle for help, but that vehicle crashed on the way to the hospital, leaving him with even more facial injuries.
At the hospital, his mouth was plastered shut and his face bandaged. He lay there, conscious but unable to speak, as he heard doctors preparing for brain surgery due to a suspected "skull fracture." Knowing his head was fine and only his mouth was pinned, he began shaking his limbs violently to get their attention. The doctors, misinterpreting this as a seizure, administered more sedatives. It was only at the very last second, as they removed the bandages for anesthesia, that he managed to shout, "Stop! My head is fine!" He had narrowly escaped an unnecessary brain surgery by the skin of his teeth.
Glimpses of the Extraordinary
Despite the horror, there were glimpses of resilience. When I finally reached the ruined branch, I found that the UPS was still humming, the computer data was intact, and—most remarkably—the cash in the vault was accounted for to the last pie.
A loyal customer of forty years offered his own business premises for us to restart our operations immediately. I disbursed relief funds to every affected employee and ensured their insurance claims were settled with lightning speed. As I left Colombo, I discovered my own luggage had been ransacked and traveler's cheques stolen. But compared to what my colleagues had survived, it felt like a small price to pay.
This breathtaking experience of survival under fire - The missing eye, the embedded glass, and the "silent" surgery are not just memories of tragedy. It proved that even when a building is "roofless," the human spirit and the bonds of institutional loyalty remain unshakeable.