The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel (17 page)

Her new husband could appear lumbering, the way he shuffled his large frame around town; however, Amit was anything but. Friends knew him to be methodical and wily. He was also calm. He got up, turned off the lights and put both of their phones on silent. Varsha went into the bathroom and began quietly calling up relatives and friends, while he stared out of the spyhole, working out their options. ‘Look, don’t be so tense, this is just a small thing,’ he murmured. ‘Once it’s over, our party can continue.’ His phone whirred. It was his brother, telling them to leave. ‘Too late for that,’ he said. Amit went back to the spyhole and recoiled: ‘I think I just saw a gunman walk by.’ He raced over to the window, looking down to see if the police had arrived. The only thing that caught his eye was a brightly lit yacht, out in the water. ‘Should have hired a boat,’ he said.

Out on the
Alysia
, its gleaming white lines festooned with scarlet Edmiston Company banners, Nick the yacht broker and his son had been greeting guests when mobiles started to trill at 9.48 p.m. One of the guests had switched his on to speaker and everyone crowded round to hear a crackle and pop of gunfire. ‘It’s my chauffeur, parked outside the Taj.’ They could hear the driver speaking: ‘Sir, there’s a gunfight. Can I move the car?’ In the UK, the driver would have run and not called, Nick thought. Ratan Kapoor, the Delhi socialite, came over. ‘Look, it’s a normal kind of Mumbai thing,’ he said. ‘It’s a heated city.’

Reassured, Nick went below deck to talk to the staff about serving dinner. The guests took another glass of champagne as an explosion echoed across the water and a ripple of excitement ran around the yacht. ‘We’ve got the best seats,’ one man joked, as the
waiters put the finishing touches to a huge teak dining table with raw silk napkins, silver cutlery and Bohemian crystal. Nick was worried about Andreas, whom he knew to be a risk taker, and asked the captain to call him: ‘Tell him we’re sending the tender over’ – as another explosion woofed throughout the city, and he felt the blast vibrate in his chest.

Undeterred, the guests sat down for dinner, taking calls and texts. ‘Fighting inside the Taj,’ one man whispered. ‘Isn’t that serious?’ Nick asked. He stared at the shoreline. He was fond of this hyperactive city, but irritated by its lackadaisical attitude to security. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Kapoor. ‘Everyone on the yacht is feeling safe and luxurious with lots of champagne and French food. You’re the host. This is an important party.’ The captain came over, frowning. ‘Mr Liveras says he’s fine and to tell you, “Enjoy the dinner.” He’ll be back later.’

Nick took Kapoor to one side. ‘We might just get away with it,’ said Kapoor weakly, as someone rang to ask him if Friday’s party was still going ahead. ‘Ya, sure. This will blow over and then you’ll be here, dancing with me, cheek to cheek.’ Nick went into the main saloon and tried to find
Sky News.
While the crew played with the settings, he read text messages from London. ‘It’s a terror attack.’ And another: ‘They’ve entered the city from the water.’ He thought:
My God. We are sitting targets.

By 10.50 p.m., the DCP Zone 1 was back down in the Tower lobby and his wireless operator was on the radio: ‘Zone 1 Sahib is in Taj. He
needs
help.’ After the exchange of fire on the Grand Staircase, they had lost the gunmen and Patil needed reinforcements to comb the vast, unfamiliar hotel. He grabbed two young constables, standing idly by a State Reserve Police Force van. ‘How many rounds?’ he shouted. They had ten shots each. ‘Not enough,’ he said to himself, shaking his head.

A spatter of bullets ripped up the porch canopy. He was sure from the muzzle flash that the gunmen were shooting from a third-floor guest room. Patil spotted Karambir Kang, the hotel’s General
Manager, who had just got back from Land’s End. The two men knew each other from the Taj security consultations and Patil was tempted to have a go at him right there in the street, but now was not the time. Karambir, looked ashen. ‘My wife and sons are on the sixth floor,’ he said, walking over, his eyes red raw, his immaculate suit dishevelled. What could Patil say? ‘Sir, we need hotel plans.’ Karambir said he would hunt around. He tried the CEO, who was trapped in his office, and called Chef Oberoi. Between calls he kept glancing up at the southern corner of the sixth floor, where his family were waiting for him. He came back to Patil: ‘The hotel blueprints are with someone who cannot be found. We are still looking.’ The DCP was irritated: ‘We can’t think of evacuating until we have located the gunmen, and for that we need to know where we are going.’ Karambir said he would ask Ratan Tata, the owner.

Clutching a bottle of water, Karambir contemplated how his family should not even have been here at all. A few months back they had decided to shift to a private apartment and Neeti had stocked up on interior-decorating magazines, excited to be moving out of the hotel. They were supposed to have been in at the beginning of the month, but the contractor was still not finished. Karambir cursed the delay, but tried to banish his darkest thoughts. He said to himself: ‘
You
are the face of the hotel.
You
are the representative of the Tata family.’ Everyone was looking at him and what they saw needed to inspire hope.

On the lobby steps, Patil spotted his batch-mate Rajvardhan. He was just the kind of hard head he needed and Rajvardhan did not need any persuasion to enter the stricken hotel. Slipping into the now silent lobby, where bodies lay strewn about, he made his own thumbnail assessment. ‘Random injuries, multiple head shots, a slew of ammunition.’ He was sure his earlier gut feeling was correct: Pakistani
fidayeen.
He called out the first stages of a plan: evacuate the ground floor while the gunmen are elsewhere, set up an improvised command post beside the Shamiana, close and guard all the exits to stop them escaping and blockade the lifts. He commandeered a service revolver and nine rounds. ‘Call me up when
you are ready,’ he shouted to Patil, vanishing down a corridor, the weapon gripped in both hands.

Up in the first-floor kitchens, straddling the Palace and the Tower, Chef Hemant Oberoi had had a plan. After his restaurants had been thrust into the front line, guests and diners scattering all over, many of them had been brought, or made it on their own, into the parallel world of the service areas. The American hedge funder Mike Pollack, his wife Anjali and their friends had locked themselves into the chef’s store of Wasabi, on the first floor of the Palace, and Andreas Liveras was on the ground floor, eating lentils, spinach and cottage cheese on an upturned
handi
in Masala Kraft’s prep room, keeping everyone’s spirits up by cracking jokes.

Chef Oberoi realized that his Kitchen Brigade could, unseen by anyone front of house, probably utilize the hotel’s labyrinth of service lifts, stairs and passages to move guests into one central and protected location. He called Karambir Kang, who was pacing outside the hotel, to sound him out. The hotel’s invitation-only Chambers club was ideal, he argued. Consisting of a suite of rooms, a bar and a library, it occupied a large area on the first floor, between the Crystal Room and the kitchens, overlooking the Gateway of India. It was not marked on hotel brochures and only the most frequent Taj visitors would have noticed it at all, perhaps glancing at the discreet plaque beside the Tower’s lift buttons as they headed up to Souk, although the stop could only be accessed by staff, or by using a club key. Karambir agreed. The Chambers was an invisible refuge. He suggested Chef Oberoi begin immediately, starting with the people who were nearest to the Chambers, the wedding reception guests in the Crystal Room.

Shortly after 10.30 p.m., chefs and waiters had guided a column of guests down a service corridor, popping out into the club’s foyer, which Bhisham, the journalist, instantly recognized. He had been here once before, for a press junket thrown by Ratan Tata. Emboldened, he asked if staff could open the bar. Writing about food and drink, he regarded himself as a connoisseur. ‘Look, you got the best, bring it out,’ he teased. But the Chambers manager politely refused.
Bhisham mournfully texted his friend: ‘Best single malt collection in the country and not a drop to drink.’

Another group of guests was led in, among them a huffing Andreas Liveras, accompanied by Remesh and the spa girls. They saw that in one of the smaller rooms a group was conducting a business meeting. ‘Look, everyone’s carrying on as if nothing is happening,’ Remesh whispered to his boss. Mindful that many guests had not eaten, the kitchens produced trays of mint chutney sandwiches. Andreas asked Remesh to grab some extra rounds. ‘Hide them in case the food runs out,’ he said, plonking himself on a large chaise longue, fielding calls from his office and family in London, as well as the
Alysia.
‘Everything’s fine,’ he assured Nick. ‘We’ll sit tight until the army get here.’ He rang his son Dion: ‘It’ll all blow over, don’t worry.’

The mood darkened when someone switched on the television, blaring facts mixed with conspiracy theories: more than sixty terrorists were roaming Mumbai’s streets, the police were overwhelmed and hundreds were dead. Footage of the bloody station concourse at CST stopped the chattering. Bhisham walked over to his horrified mother and took away her phone. An insensitive message would tip her over the edge.

More guests arrived, including Mike and Anjali Pollack. She was frantic. The normally cool financier looked agitated, too. A few minutes before, one of the gunmen had tried to get into their hiding place in Wasabi, prowling outside the locked service door. A chef had brazened it out, redirecting the gunmen, saying the room was empty, narrowly escaping with his own life. Now all that Anjali could think about was their two young sons, staying with her parents in another part of the city. ‘We could have died,’ she cried.

As Chambers filled up, Bhisham and his mother moved down the corridor to one of the smaller VIP suites, the Lavender Room, just as an explosion shook the floor. Had they been found already? The lights and TVs cut out. Sitting in the dark, Bhisham messaged a friend: ‘Heard the blast. What is happening?’ The friend replied that the top floor of the Palace was now ablaze. Bhisham panicked: ‘Is it serious? Is the army inside the hotel?’ He turned to his mother, who
was praying. ‘What a great wedding.’ There were now 250 people locked in Chambers, and only six policemen inside the hotel.

Outside on the pool terrace, Amit Peshave was getting more anxious by the minute. It was 11.30 p.m., and despite the dozens of calls he had made nobody seemed to know where the transformer room keys were. The bleeding British guest was getting weaker and his shirt was soaked in blood.

Amit’s phone buzzed. It was his old room-mate Hemant Talim, a trainee chef in the Golden Dragon. ‘Amit, how’s things?’ he asked calmly, warned about his friend. ‘Look, we’re all in Chambers now. We need to know your exact location.’ Amit explained his predicament. Call Chef Oberoi, his friend suggested. Amit got Oberoi on the third go: ‘Chef, I’ve got a Brit guy here who’s going to die, drunk MPs out of their minds and a missing boy.’ Oberoi tried to calm him, saying he would contact maintenance people to bring the key. Then Amit noticed out of the corner of his eye that one of the MPs was staggering into the open, and over to a statue of a lion that he attempted to climb. ‘I’ve got to go,’ he rasped.

Thirty minutes later, he heard hollow knocking. Someone
was
now on the other side of the transformer room door. The guests jostled anxiously. Then the doors were flung open, and everyone pushed forward. Amit noticed a man jumping down from the top of the transformer room roof, a European guest, wearing a red bow tie and a dinner suit. He must have been hiding up there all the time and hadn’t said a word. ‘James Bond!’ Amit said to himself, watching in amazement as the man hared off. Now he had to get the injured British guest to a hospital. He shouldered the man’s weight and stumbled out into Merry Weather Road.

Up in Souk, on the top floor of the Tower, Bob Nicholls and his South African commandos were in security mode. There were upwards of fifty people in the restaurant, including the wife of the Taj Group’s CEO, feeding back updates from her husband, who was trapped in his office eighteen floors below. ‘He says we are in the safest place,’
she assured them. Bob had been receiving his own updates, from a Mumbai-born business partner, watching things unfold on TV back in Johannesburg, Bob’s wife Melaney sitting beside him. ‘There’s firing all around the Palace but the Tower looks untouched,’ the first message said. ‘The whole city is under attack. Stay put.’

Across the room, the US Marine captain Ravi and his brother went through their wallets, taking out US dollars and driving licences. They needed to erase everything that identified them as Americans or connected Ravi to the US military. He stuffed some essentials, including his stars-and-stripes credit card, into a sock. He thought about ringing his girlfriend back home in San Diego but decided against it. When his sister called, he told her he was nowhere near the action. What could she do? From now on he would also stay apart from his Indian family, worried that if he were caught, he would contaminate them, too.

Coming from San Diego, Ravi and his brother planned to fake Spanish accents if they got singled out. ‘I hope to hell we never get to that point,’ he murmured. But there were some things Ravi could not change, especially the fact that so many years spent in the US Marines rubbed off on a person. Now his neck was as wide as his head, which was scalped into a distinctive buzz cut. Everything about the way he carried himself, and especially his sloping shoulders and lean frame, said military.

Ravi strolled over to the South Africans’ table. He reckoned the gang of square-jawed, close-cropped men were from the same tribe. ‘Look,’ he said to Bob, without giving anything away about himself, ‘I’d just like to help if I can. I have some
experience
in this kind of situation.’ He didn’t volunteer any more information and the South Africans didn’t ask. Bob put him to work, accompanying one of the ex-commandos on a recce. They needed to find somewhere safer than Souk, with its wrap-around windows. If a bomb went off in the lift lobby, everyone would be cut to shreds by flying glass. Through the kitchens, Ravi found a conference hall that occupied the rear portion of the top floor, the Rendezvous Room. He threw back the door and to his amazement there, sitting quietly, were a hundred Koreans.
He tried to question them, explaining that they all needed to bed in together, but they spoke only a little English. They were badly spooked and could not be left alone. Ravi rushed back to Bob with the bad news. The Korean delegation swelled their numbers to 150-plus.