The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel (43 page)

At the top of the stairs, both men were shocked by the extent of the damage on the still-smouldering sixth floor. The fire had burnt parts of the roof away completely and sunlight was flooding in. ‘You are not meant to be here,’ a commando bellowed, as they arrived in a tar-black passageway, standing before a charred door. Shantanu paused. Swallowing his pain, he edged into the Sunrise Suite. Sabina’s room was divided into three parts: a bedroom, a sitting room with a breakfast nook, and a bathroom. Nikhil could see that the sitting room had been incinerated. ‘It was reduced to ash and by ash I mean it was completely gone, there was nothing there except the frame of a chandelier that had fallen to the ground and the metal frame of the dining table that continued to stand, stoical, in the breakfast nook.’

Shantanu and Nikhil walked into the bedroom and were stunned. It had been barely touched, as the commandos reported, although a skein of soot covered everything. The luggage was ‘in typical Sabina disarray’ but intact. ‘It’s like even the fire was scared of Sabina, and had crossed over to Karambir’s room,’ Nikhil later joked grimly.

They sat, forlorn, on the huge bed, where Sabina had jumped for joy, amazed at Karambir Kang’s hospitality. Something caught Shantanu’s eye and he was drawn to the far side of the divan. He walked round and recoiled. Sabina was there, kneeling on the floor as if praying, her glasses propped up on her head, her forehead resting on the ground. In the early hours of Thursday, 27 November, his
irrepressible wife had got down on her knees, resting for an exhausted, sleepy moment, as the oxygen inside the room was devoured by the greedy inferno raging next door. And here, on her own, she had been slowly asphyxiated.

They pulled back the bed cover and a crisp white sheet lay beneath it, as if the housekeeper had just made it. While Shantanu slowly absorbed the scene, Nikhil rushed back downstairs, horrified and crying. ‘I want her down in one hour,’ he shouted at Taj security. ‘I want Sabina with us in
this
hour.’ Although they tried to put him off, the fierce will of a mourning brother got the job done, and soon after Sabina Sehgal Saikia came down the Grand Staircase for the last time, wrapped up in a pristine white bedsheet.

Ajmal Kasab talked and talked, spurred on by a promise that at the end of all the questioning he would be able to see his nine comrades, who, according to the authorities, were ‘being held elsewhere’.

When that day came, a Crime Branch officer entered his cell: ‘Are you ready?’ Ajmal was eager.

The prisoner was driven past the Gateway of India and the Taj, arriving at the JJ Hospital, in Byculla, where the victims of Chabad House had also been taken. ‘Are they all badly injured?’ Ajmal asked uncertainly, as the door was unlocked and opened. ‘You can see for yourself,’ the officer said, leading him into a white-walled room.

Nine stainless steel trays lay before him. The brothers who had fought inside the Taj were the hardest to look at. Ali’s and Shoaib’s faces had been crushed into hideous grins. Umer, the diminutive Taj leader, was burnt beyond recognition, and all that was left of Abdul Rehman ‘Bada’ was a mangled clump of burnt body parts and singed red material.

Ajmal turned furiously to his police guard, his world imploding: ‘Take me away.’ He was driven back to his solitary cell, where his interrogator was waiting for him. ‘So, Ajmal,’ he said, smiling. ‘Did you see the glow on their faces and smell the fragrance of roses rising from their bodies?’

Bitterly, Ajmal wept.

Afterword

Terrorism is often described as asymmetrical, and Mumbai provides a chilling illustration of what that means: ten resentful and misguided young men who were able to hold the world’s fourth-largest city to ransom, killing 166 and injuring more than 300 over three nights of horror.

Images from the ravaged city travelled the world. There were countless tragic stories. At Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, where Ajmal Kasab and his accomplice gunned down fifty-eight commuters, wounding another 104, a thirteen-year-old boy was saved from the firing and taken to a hospital where doctors calculated when to tell him that his parents, an uncle and three cousins had perished. Outside Chabad House, Sandra Samuel, a nanny, clutched the two-year-old Moshe Holtzberg as his parents, Rabbi Gavriel and his pregnant wife, Rivka, were murdered, alongside four other hostages. After the bodies of thirty-two staff and guests were recovered from the Trident–Oberoi hotels, a Turkish Muslim couple, Seyfi and Meltem Muezzinoglu, held captive for eight hours, recalled how they burst into mourning after watching the gunmen execute a group of female hostages. ‘We stepped forward, opened our hands and said our prayers out loud,’ Seyfi said. ‘And you know what happened? One of the gunmen was staring at us with big eyes. He didn’t believe it and started looking at the floor. He was ashamed. We spoke our prayers in Arabic, and we spoke them loud, hand in hand in front of those bodies.’ There were many more harrowing and life-affirming snapshots from the Leopold Café, from Cama Hospital, the Metro cinema and Rang Bhavan Lane. Also from the city’s port area, where one taxi bomb detonated, and at Vile Parle, where another exploded, all of these acts of inhumanity haunting police chiefs all over the world, who pondered how their forces would have coped.

They studied Mumbai’s days of reckoning, and picked up on Lashkar’s unnerving innovations. Handlers in Pakistan had guided their gunmen in real time using a cheap Internet telephony network, while disguising their location. Equipped with satellite TV and Google Earth, these invisible controllers had simply sat back in Karachi, zooming in and out of the stricken city with the flick of a mouse or remote control. Everyone in Mumbai who called or texted in an interview with a rolling news channel gave these men insights into the strategy of the Indian security forces, alerting them also to fresh targets. Hours of chilling, eavesdropped telephone conversations revealed the cold calculations of the masterminds who pushed their men into a slaughter, before ensuring that they were consumed by it. These extraordinary tapes also exposed the child-like nature of the gunmen, teetering between mania, self-doubt, sadism and exhaustion.

All of the above are compelling reasons for us to write about 26/11, as the attacks became known in India, and we began researching
The Siege
soon after the assaults were over. However, a common reaction among the authorities in Mumbai when we first sought them out was fatigue and suspicion. Rakesh Maria, the city’s most famous cop, who was promoted in 2010 to chief of the Anti-Terrorist Squad, replacing his murdered colleague, Hemant Karkare, insisted that those three days in November 2008 simply represented a failure of imagination on the part of the police and intelligence agencies. ‘Everything’s been said that needs to be,’ Maria initially claimed, after we had waited hours to see him in his first-floor office at the ATS headquarters, in Nagpada.

But once we had begun trawling through the evidence the opposite seemed true. While the 9/11 commission of inquiry in the United States enlisted a ten-man bi-partisan board of politicians to probe every facet of the attacks, and the 7/7 inquests in London spent six months recording every detail and witness statement, 26/11 received only a cursory grilling from the Pradhan Commission, a two-man panel formed in Mumbai on 30 December 2008 to explore the ‘war-like’ attacks on the city.

Having been precluded from cross-examining the intelligence services, politicians or the National Security Guard, it produced a sixty-four-page inquiry report, which was widely lambasted for lacking depth. Pradhan exonerated Mumbai’s police force, although it did accuse Police Commissioner Hasan Gafoor of failing to be more visible. Even these weak words were rejected by the state legislature. Gafoor, who responded by blaming other senior officers for the mistakes of 26/11, died of a heart attack in Breach Candy Hospital in 2012, by which time the majority of the Pradhan Commission’s recommendations to better detect future attacks (and thwart them) had still not been implemented.

The National Security Guard was also wary of speaking out, eventually confirming in writing to us that it did not want to participate in the book as ‘an organization’, fearful of India’s draconian secrecy laws. Subsequently, many individual officers, some still in service, were so horrified by the fiasco of the NSG’s mobilization, which had made them one day late for India’s worst ever terrorist attack, that they agreed to tell their stories. The spooks were twitchy and the state-appointed prosecutors self-serving, but they too spoke to us, on condition of anonymity. But none of these responses was as daunting as the Taj’s. Caught, tremulously, between needing to create an image for itself once more as the ‘House of Magic’, and remembering the sacrifice of staff and guests, the hotel as an institution was unresponsive at first, something especially worrying for us as it stood at the dead centre of the book we wanted to write.

Of all the targets hit that night, the Taj was the most iconic, and for that reason it was the first to be chosen by Lashkar. For us the Taj’s story, and those of its assailants, staff, guests and liberators, was also a porthole into Chabad House, the CST massacre, and the Trident–Oberoi, giving insight into what was lost and also what was endured and overcome by everyone from the police to
chawl
dwellers, from the gunmen assailing the city to the NSG’s gunslingers who eventually neutralized them.

We began slowly, building the confidence of nervous institutions,
reaching out to hundreds of individual Taj staff, guests, police officers and members of the Special Forces, to eyewitnesses and participants of every kind in Mumbai and Pakistan, in Europe, the United States, South-East Asia and the Gulf States, using their memories to construct a time-line. Once we had a location and a ticking clock, we came back to several dozen crucial interviewees, many of whom have never talked before, and most of whom have undergone a remarkable change as a result of their experiences.

We first met Bhisham Mansukhani at the height of the rush hour in 2010, grabbing a table at the crowded Pizza by the Bay, on Mumbai’s Marine Drive, not far from his Breach Candy home. He revealed that no sooner had he got out of the Taj alive than he began working out how to quit India too. Bhisham’s narrow escape left him feeling contempt for the authorities that he and many others accused of prolonging their ordeal, and disillusioned with the political impasse of cross-border relations with Pakistan. While we sipped fresh lime sodas, Bhisham took us through his memories from the Crystal Room into Chambers, talking non-stop for hours, disdainful of the Friday night crowd that seemed to have forgotten about the assaults which brought the city to a standstill at shortly after 9.40 p.m. on 26 November 2008.

Savitri Choudhury, who spent much time with the food critic Sabina Sehgal Saikia during her last days, was still freelancing in Mumbai, this time for the Australian Nine Network, when we emailed each other arranging to meet. Sitting in her high-rise apartment, with its bird’s-eye view over many key locations, from the Bombay Hospital to the jail where Ajmal Kasab was then still incarcerated, she recalled Sabina’s last hours, dipping into their shared past too, stories that encapsulated their friendship. Savitri had arranged for her friend to be embalmed by Danny Michael Pinto later that day. ‘Dead Centre of Town’, the sign still says outside Pinto’s, marking his funeral parlour as the city’s necropolis, where Rajiv Gandhi and Mother Teresa were prepared for burial. Savitri
had smiled at that board, knowing that Sabina would have loved it. She bid her a final farewell at the airport, with her husband Vikram at her side, both of them watching as the casket disappeared into the hold of a waiting passenger jet.

Politicians, dress designers, journalists, TV stars and artists attended Sabina’s funeral in New Delhi – as she would have wished. Nikhil Segel, her brother, told us: ‘As a family we joked that if Sabina had to go, it had to be like this, in a blaze of glory. She would have hated every moment of a slow and uncelebrated death.’ Her widower, Shantanu, was more circumspect with us. He still lives in New Delhi with their sixteen-year-old son Aniruddha and their daughter Arundhati, aged nineteen.

Mike Pollack, who took us on his journey from the Tower lobby to the Harbour Bar, and via the Wasabi restaurant to Chambers, told us how he had embraced the opportunity to change, a decision consolidated by finding a photo of himself cowering from bullets outside the Taj splashed on front pages. Staring at the photo, he saw a man who believed he was about to die. When he and Anjali returned to New York, he dissolved the hedge fund he had co-founded in 2001 and they set up the SCA Charitable Foundation to promote ‘venture philanthropy’ and provide financial backing to social entrepreneurs, primarily in India. Mike also became an adjunct professor of philosophy and business studies at New York University Stern School of Business and he manages his family’s investment firm, Pollack Holdings.

When we contacted Will Pike it was initially through his Central London lawyer, who was marshalling a lawsuit against the Taj. At first, Will was reluctant to tell his story. The aftermath of his fall from the third floor felt as though it would never end, he said. After more than a dozen operations and six months at Stanmore Spinal Cord Injury Centre, in North London, Will was told in February 2009 that he would never walk again. He and Kelly Doyle split up in 2011 and he has still not developed a Super 8 video film of them on the beach together in Goa before the attacks, the only surviving
record of their ill-fated holiday. After five years of battling the British government, he finally won compensation as a victim of terrorism in January 2013 but his battle to come to terms with life as a paraplegic continues.

Line Kristin Woldbeck, the Leopold Café survivor, escaped physical injury, but has never shaken off the trauma of those days. She and her boyfriend, Arne Strømme, stayed in Mumbai for a month after the attacks, an act she described as an effort ‘to heal with the city’. During this time, doctors reattached Arne’s severed fingers and sutured his slashed face. Afterwards, Line established a survivors’ network and she remains in touch with many she came into contact with on that night, including her ‘angel’, Amit Peshave, although not the family of Meetu Asrani, her Facebook friend, who bled to death in the café. Line still travels widely, most recently to Cambodia and the Andaman Islands, and describes 26/11 as her ‘rebirth’.