Stranger than fiction

The defining moment of the 26-29 November 2008 attacks on Bombay came the first night. We were a group of journalists standing at the Taj Mahal Hotel. We had rushed here from Chhatrapati Shivaji (formerly 'Victoria') Terminus, where we had earlier gathered on hearing the sounds of gunshots and explosions. Soon, we began to realise the enormity of what had hit our city. Just before the Taj, at the Regal Circle, stood a group of hotel staff still dressed in their uniforms. "No interviews," warned a well-built man among them. We stood staring for a while, but they looked away in silence. As we reached the Taj, two senior politicians were making their way to the site, surrounded by a mob of television cameras and journalists. We stood near the Gateway of India in darkness. "Don't use flashes or lights!" shouted the policemen. Ahead was the hotel, its side, near the famous dome, bursting into flames, blazing in the darkness, the windows of its guestrooms backlit by the fires raging inside. We were told that grenades were being lobbed on the road outside, and warned to keep a safe distance.

We moved slowly to the road in front of the hotel, on the edge of the waterfront. We could see people inside screaming for help out of the windows, some of which were open. They were waving bed sheets and towels. Faint screams penetrated the night air, when suddenly the fire brigade arrived, at around 3 am. The firemen tried to douse the fires; they put up ladders and some lucky guests were precariously escorted down. As they neared the road and TV crews lunged towards them, they screamed and warded off the media advances. Hotel staff refused to let journalists near their distraught guests, but no one stopped us from standing there and watching as the drama unfolded.

We later came to know that there were four attackers holed up inside the Taj, and what we had seen was only a small part of the raging drama taking place within. When the firemen arrived around 3 am, we found them peering intently at the ground. "What are you searching for?" I asked. They were looking for stones to use to break the hotel's glass windows. Unfortunately, on that immaculate footpath, stones were the last thing one would expect to find. It all reminded me of the communal riots of 1992. Outside the offices of the Times of India near Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, at one in the morning on a night of heated rioting, my colleagues saw a company of the elite Rapid Action Force pushing a public bus with a punctured tire, one they had been using to get around. That incident, as 16 years later when the firemen were looking pitifully for stones, was for me an indelible moment of truth.

Spilled chana
As dark clouds of smoke spiralled into the sky, creating a blanket over the Taj, deafening explosions continued inside. Of course, 26 November had begun like any other workday. At ten in the night, as we were about to leave office, my colleague Rahi Gaikwad received a message about gunshots from the famed Leopold Café, close to the Taj Hotel in the upscale area of Colaba. My first reaction was dismissive. "Did anyone important die?" Then came another message, this time for me, that there had been blasts at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. That decided it. Something was up.

In Colaba, the police had already cordoned off the area, and Rahi stayed there while I headed for the railway station. The taxi dropped me off at the General Post Office, which was dark and deserted, as was everything in the vicinity. It was very eerie. The only sound was staccato firing. A group of policemen with sticks came rushing towards me, screaming, "Stay off the road!" Just off the road stood a photographer and a panic-stricken man whose wife and child were trapped inside the station. He and his family had been catching a train to Goa. The police would not allow anyone to go inside until they were able to figure out what was happening.

More gunshots rang out, and then an explosion. Some camera crews rushed inside. Soon, other journalists arrived, and a little while later a high-level official with the railways police, in full battledress. A white car stopped in front us, and a burly policeman with an AK-47 jumped out. He looked around, changing places with his junior before driving off. That was Ashok Kamthe, the Additional Commissioner of Police. A while later, we heard that he had been shot dead, along with the head of the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) Hemant Karkare and Inspector Vijay Salaskar. Kamthe was wearing neither a bullet-proof vest nor a helmet. I still remember his face: commanding and composed as he stood outside the car, his hands weighed down by the heavy firearm.

Now there were others coming out of the Terminus, people who had managed to escape. At first, many had thought the firing was firecrackers, and so had not thought of escape. A lady whose husband had been killed in the firing inside said, in an interview much later, that the gunshots had sounded like chana spilling on the ground.

The show
In the span of about half an hour, two armed men killed 56 people and injured nearly a 100 at the Terminus. Brave photographers managed to capture images of the killers in their warlike gear, and some narrowly missed the bullets. None of us could keep pace with the events that unfolded that night. After standing outside the Taj and watching it burn, we headed off for an early-morning press conference by the then-Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh. He was as clueless as the rest of us.

Just before dawn we reached the Oberoi-Trident Hotel. Again, it had been cordoned off, and we were again greeted by the already-familiar sounds of gunshots and explosions. A bald tourist in a pink silk bathrobe was being pestered for interviews. His face blackened by soot, he was clearly in a state of panic, trying his best not to speak. Still the journalists persisted. He had run down the fire escape, more than 20 floors. Another tourist, an Australian, had managed to escape in his shorts and t-shirt. Journalists milled around Marine Drive and were able to prise some guarded interviews from a few Trident staff members. One security man had actually seen the attackers enter from the hotel's lobby. They began to fire their guns as soon as they got out of their vehicle, he said. Once inside the lobby, they unleashed a bloodbath before heading upstairs.

It was 6:30 in the morning and we had virtually nothing to eat all night. A friend had kindly lent us his office for a short while, where we immediately recharged the batteries of our mobile phones, all dead. It was there that, for the first time, we saw televised footage of the attack – which completed the pictures of fear and drama. We heard of the blasts in Wadi Bundar and Vile Parle, but only managed to do stories on these incidents much later. The hospitals were off limits for journalists that night. I shuddered at another explosion emanating from the Trident, and decided to go home.

As we walked to catch a taxi, we could see early-morning joggers on Marine Drive, apparently unfazed by the terror that had gripped the city. Actually, the city's much-glorified resilience had been clearly subdued by the gunmen. The next day, and for nearly a week thereafter, the people of Bombay largely stayed indoors; the buses and trains ran empty, and the roads were free of the city's infamous traffic jams. But the next day, there was overwhelming curiosity. The siege continued, and by the morning the public had come to the realisation that the television coverage was not good enough. They had to see the show for themselves.

Outside the Taj, at Nariman House and the Oberoi, onlookers milled around chomping on popcorn, sipping cold drinks and taking in the excitement. An enterprising few had gotten binoculars, and would excitedly point to windows when they thought they had spotted some of the attackers. Some of the onlookers did go home to bathe and change, but others spent practically the whole time in the area. According to some of the onlookers, they were impelled by a need to see with their own eyes what had happened. Leopold Café, which opened soon after, has by now become a temple of sorts, with people arriving to see the bullet holes on its walls and glass, and to hear the owner describe the saga of the dreadful evening that killed some ten people at his café.

No guidelines
In the high drama that was captured moment by moment on live TV at the Taj, the Oberoi and Nariman House, people somehow forgot Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. The stories of death and disaster from the historic landmark became known only later, but they were no less traumatic. An announcer who cleared the suburban concourse saved many lives; a motorman who was able to keep his wits suggested the announcement; a railway policeman who fired at the attackers with an outdated rifle – these and other stories of alertness and caring came later. In the rush to cover the siege, we had all but forgotten that 56 people were killed in that railway station, named after Queen Victoria and renamed after Maharashtra's most famous king. The reason seemed to be that, at the station, the killing was over all too quickly for the television cameras. That, and the fact that commoners caught the bullet, perhaps.

Throughout the dazed days of late November, journalists by and large remained clueless, even with the sporadic briefings during which TV crews, onlookers and anyone who cared to stand in the shot jostled for space. Little information was forthcoming from the authorities; as for guidelines for coverage, in the heat of the moment there were none. Anyone was tapped for information – right or wrong – and speculation ran rife. Few knew or could say anything about it. Indeed, the full horror of what these days represented is yet to sink in for many of us who stood witness.

In the aftermath, it is beginning to look like a complete intelligence and security failure. The city police, proud of having caught one armed suspect alive, have little else to claim. Yet even when I went to the D B Marg Police Station to interview the group of braves who captured Ajmal Amir Kasab, I heard an intriguing story. The two armed policemen who had shot another attacker, who was driving a hijacked Skoda, had never before fired their 9 mm pistols. One policeman trying to grapple with the captured Kasab did not realise that the gunman had an AK-47 along his prostrate body, and died after taking five bullets. The policemen used lathis to subdue the lone gunman.

As for us journalists, we came out the poorer. We were at a dual disadvantage, strapped by lack of both information and access. We did not know where to keep our distance, and did not know enough to realise the enormous risk we were at, standing so close to the breakneck events in front of us. A sense of numbness engulfs me when I think of that night. We just did what we had to do. That we survived is destiny.

~ Meena Menon is deputy bureau chief of The Hindu in Bombay.