The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel (37 page)

Tombstone-faced, they all entered Salaskar’s world, gawping at
the dead inspector’s paperwork and effects: suspects’ headshots and ‘wanted’ notices, bamboo
lathis
and bulletproof vests. Ajmal was put in a plastic chair, a handcuff on his left wrist. If a room could smell of coercion, Salaskar’s did. Maria, towering above the prisoner and flanked by the uniformed constables, began talking in Ajmal’s mother tongue, Punjabi. It was also the language of Maria’s father, who had migrated to Bombay in the 1950s.

Maria asked if Ajmal knew where he was. In his grubby beige and white T-shirt, a wrist and an arm bandaged, he looked a pathetic sight. He really was the most ordinary-looking mass murderer Maria had ever seen. Sallow and greasy, he reminded the cop of the kid manning the deep-fat fryer at the sweet seller’s in Zaveri Bazaar.

A good interrogator needed an opener, and Maria was ready: ‘You wanted to die and so, just so you know, I am
not
going to kill you.’ He pointed to the blunt knuckles standing beside him in Salaskar’s room. ‘They are not going to kill you either.’ He allowed Ajmal to digest the statement.

‘These guys,’ Maria said, pointing around the room, ‘want to do it. But I will not allow it. You have failed in your mission because you are
not
dead. Now the world will come to know how badly you screwed up. You told one of my men that you hoped to be a
shaheed.
Well, my friend, I have news for you.
Allah
does not want you. No one does. The story of your miserable life continues as it always has. No one gives a shit. You are a poor, pitiful failure, even in trying to die.’

Ajmal groaned as Maria struck home. A dust bowl of disappointment was opening up before the prisoner, harking back to his inability to win acceptance, even as a young child when his father could not wait to discard him. While his brothers still out on the streets tonight would strive to accomplish their mission, he could already see that he was to be kept alive until a day of India’s choosing, when, he had no doubt, he would be hooded and hanged. One last dismal thought occurred to him, something he would share with a lawyer on a chit that was signed and dated. He saw now that even after his execution no one would claim his corpse. In that moment, Ajmal knew something awful:
I am never going home.

Maria had many questions. ‘How many of you are there in the city? What weaponry have you brought with you? What is your plan? Who is coaching you?’ Ajmal had given answers at the hospital to the fat cop whose mouth had brimmed with scarlet paan. Now he was made to go over the same ground. Maria sat back, soaking up that accent, the nasal vowels, the sibilant ‘s’ and rolling ‘r’, a pendulous sentence construction and phrasing that sounded like a bow saw slicing through a trunk. It was the voice of the eastern Punjab: a vista of landlessness and poverty. Children there were born to sell, and lived to die, in Maria’s opinion.

Ajmal detailed the rough location of the fishing vessel MV
Kuber
, explaining that in the panic of thinking an Indian naval vessel was approaching, they had not had time to sink the
Kuber
or throw the corpse of the Indian captain overboard. The coast guard was alerted. He confirmed they had mistakenly left a satellite phone and a GPS handset and described the yellow inflatable dinghy that had brought them to shore. He gave more details of how he was recruited, trained and equipped by Lashkar and then launched from Karachi. That was where the handlers were, too, he revealed. At last, Maria had something new, a priceless nugget, and he sent word to Gafoor and the intelligence people: the whole show was being puppeteered from a control room in Karachi.

The only thing that Maria found difficult to accept was Ajmal’s claim that there were just ten of them in the city. How could so few cause so much mayhem? Maria’s mind ran through the
modus operandi –
settling on the bomb blasts. He thought about how the timed charges set in moving taxis, detonating all over the city, had projected a larger footprint for the operation. The sobering reality was that one man less than a cricket team had got an entire nation on the run.

Maria was done. The bits and pieces here would be buffed, pacifying any critics. He sent a message to his number two, Deven Bharti, and to the Joint Commissioner Law and Order, both of whom were in the Taj lobby. There were only four terrorists in the hotel, armed with four assault rifles, four pistols and forty kilos of
RDX, an arsenal that was surely depleted. He felt the tide turning, as an egg-wash of sunlight finally spread across the seven islands.

Inside the Taj, Deven Bharti had had a windfall. At 5.40 a.m. a Black Suit had emerged with a mobile phone that had been found near the pool. Bharti examined it and discovered it had only one number stored in its memory – with an international dialling code for Austria.

As Bharti puzzled over the meaning of it, the phone rang.

An incoming number was displayed. It was also an international code, but not for Austria. The prefix was +1 201. Bharti was confused. That was the code for New Jersey, he thought. Bharti recalled that IB was probing the US/Austrian connection to the gunmen in Mumbai. What should he do? He answered the phone.

‘Salaam Alaikum.’
A voice greeted him, asking where he was and what he was doing. The language was Urdu, but Bharti also recognized the accent as from the Punjab. He could not believe his luck. He was certain it was the gunmen’s handler. He had to think of something to say, someone to be, something to offer, to prolong the call.

‘I’m a waiter, sir, apologies,’ Bharti blustered, seeing where the conversation would go. ‘I am with one of your men and the phone rang so I answered it.’

‘Why didn’t
he
answer it?’ a suspicious voice replied.

Bharti had to think quickly. ‘Your man’s injured, sir.’ This was proving difficult. ‘He cannot talk, sir. He motioned that I should answer.’

The caller hung up. Had Bharti done enough to prick his interest, or was that it? The Crime Branch number two was intrigued and nervous. This entire operation was surreal: men landing by sea, taking a city hostage, calling Austria and being remotely manipulated by handlers who seemed to be in the US. It was unlike anything they had ever imagined.
Is that a problem too
?, Bharti wondered.
Our lack of imagination
? He needed to pack up the phone and get it analysed.

Bharti called Maharashtra’s monosyllabic spy chief and an IB
liaison officer in New Delhi. The US intelligence community was already assisting, he was advised, having given its opinion that Lashkar was using an Internet call system, which meant all of the numbers were virtual or leased lines, rather than actual locations.

Bharti was impressed. It was cheap to implement and easy to run, only slightly more complicated than Skype. Lashkar was ahead of the game. But for all this planning, it had slipped up. A basic human error threatened to expose the whole group. A gunman, who was supposed to die with his knowledge, had been captured alive.

Gunshots snapped Bharti back to the here and now. Four gunmen were still free to roam inside the Taj killing and maiming. He prayed that the National Security Guard would arrive soon.

5.58 a.m. – fifth floor

Five floors above the police command post, the banker K. R. Ramamoorthy came around in a burning room.

He wasn’t sure how long he had lain unconscious, but somehow the fire that raged around had not consumed him. Everything was blackened and steaming as the sprinklers poured down, a poisonous stench and the roaring up above reminding him that at any moment the ceiling might collapse. He had to get going and forget the stabbing pains in his back and neck. He had to stop worrying about his irregular heartbeat and his shortness of breath.

He got on to his knees, and crawled along, feeling his way with his fingertips. Billowing smoke obscured everything and stung his eyes. Occasionally, he lay down flat, like a basking fish, to suck up air. He needed to find a staircase going down. ‘Take a break,’ he said to himself, scrambling into a corner, gulping. Or was a break the beginning of the end? Up again, he crawled on, his legs feeling cramped, his arms weak, as the fire took its toll on his body fluids, heating him up, and grinding him down.

Finally, Ram recognized the fifth-floor business centre. In normal times this was his second home. But pushing his way in, he strained
to see in the half-light and his feet crunched over broken glass. He reached down to touch it and his hand became sticky with blood. He stopped. There was nothing left of the plush chairs and workstations from where he had once sent emails. ‘This is hell,’ he said, backing out, even more afraid of what lay ahead. Down another blackened, smoke-logged corridor, he crawled, eventually finding some railings running downwards. ‘Count the landings,’ he said to himself, gasping, until he was certain that he was on the third floor, where the smoke began to clear.

‘Light.’ He spotted a glare of daylight through the smoke. He crawled towards it, reaching a guest room with its door ajar.
Who is in there
?, he thought, creeping in, praying he had not reached another terrorist control room. There was no one inside. Ram collapsed against a wall and listened. Nobody tells you how loud an inferno is, he thought, as the fire behind him growled, gobbling up all the air. The light was streaming in from the windows. Ram had lost track of time but now realized that it must be day. His hands touched the glass. ‘Here I am,’ he said, pushing the window open and sucking up the breeze.

He climbed up on to the sill, from where he could see firefighters moving ladders up against the seaward walls of the Taj and pulling guests out of their burning rooms. For the first time in almost seven hours he felt hope. Looking up, he saw a fireman quenching the inferno on the sixth. ‘I am here. I am here.’ The fireman turned and peered down. He manoeuvred his hydraulic ladder to investigate. Finally, he gestured. A raised thumb: ‘Got you!’ The banker was overcome. ‘I have you,’ the fireman roared, swinging down and lifting Ram off the ledge and into the serge folds of his jacket, hugging the old man like he was his father. ‘Thank you,’ Ram said, trembling. Then he caught sight of something below him. ‘There.’ Pointing to the second floor, he could see a woman waving wildly behind a closed window. The ladder moved down to her, and the fireman smashed her window with an axe. Shards sprayed over Ram, who hardly noticed. The woman scrambled into the basket, crying. He spotted her mobile phone. ‘The phone,’ he croaked. ‘Please.’ Ram’s
hands shook as he dialled home. When he heard his wife’s sleepy voice, he found himself babbling: ‘I am safe. I am safe.’ He broke down, tears choking. ‘It is OK. I am OK.’ He could have roared with pain and joy but she seemed nonplussed.

Ram’s son came on the line and explained that his mother had gone to bed early and only just woken, so knew nothing of events in Mumbai. Rather than feeling relief, Ram was devastated. How would he ever explain what he had endured, his journey, real and imagined, the terror that had seen him hark back to his ancestral village of Kuttalam, and to a vision of his resourceful mother, a flight to the Wish-Yielding Temple of Mylapore where he had called on the
devi
to help him, memories he sought to shield him from the pain of being beaten and bound. Then he had come round in the jaws of an inferno, his sense of self crushed, his physical self stripped naked, the ordeal forcing him to find a cool, quiet place inside his head that he never knew existed, and from where he nearly did not emerge. ‘I need to get away from here,’ he muttered, beginning to panic, as the ladder finally touched down.

First Ram wanted to do his duty. He strolled, shivering, to the nearest policeman and introduced himself: K. R. Ramamoorthy – banker, hostage. He explained every moment of his capture and escape, as if in a spreadsheet of detailed evidence. But the exhausted officer showed no interest. ‘No one cares,’ Ram told himself. He walked on, into the waking city, furious, downhearted and crushed.

A car, its headlights still on, pulled over. Staggering, Ram in his shredded and burnt pyjamas must have looked on the verge of collapse. Did he need a lift? He nodded gratefully and climbed in, the soft seats seeming luxurious after the hours of pain. He sat quite still, and breathed in and out, inhaling the vivid, domesticated smells of vinyl and petrol. ‘Please can you take me to Khar Mumbai?’ he whispered, referring to the suburb where a nephew lived, Ram once more reliant on the comfort of strangers. ‘Indians,’ he said to himself, ‘are
still
Indians.’

On the second floor of the Palace, Amit and Varsha Thadani were still trapped in 253, watching the teetering hydraulic ladders moving
to and fro like swaying giraffes. The inferno bellowed in the corridor outside like a train passing through a tunnel. From the window, they could see guests being plucked and taken down. Some were near enough to call out to, but the newlyweds dithered and waved, keeping their mouths shut for fear of a sniper’s bullet. Then Amit picked Varsha up and put her on the window ledge. They seemed to be prioritizing women and children. He waved more furiously and pointed at his wife. A man on the ground talked into a radio and Varsha told Amit to fetch a white towel that she flapped above her head.

A ladder was rising, and she hoped it was for them. Amit held on to Varsha’s waist as they watched the ladder flex. It was coming for them. An officer in the basket pointed in their direction. There was no mistake now; a fireman was coming for the Thadanis. He lifted Varsha out, light as a feather, and Amit climbed down, hugging her, both of them giddy. With a swoosh and a judder, they were on the ground in minutes, in the maelstrom of the perimeter, surrounded by journalists: How many dead bodies did you see? Did you witness any executions? What was it like to be threatened by the gunmen? Did you think you would die? How does it feel to be alive? That’s how Amit heard it. Low on blood sugar, wanting to tear chunks out of all of them, he suddenly felt an overwhelming love for Varsha and was sick with fear for Bhisham, Gunjan Narang and all his other friends who remained trapped.