The Siege: The Attack on the Taj Mumbai

by Cathy Scott-Clark

  As if on cue, they set down their bags and pulled out assault rifles.

  Up on the second floor of the Palace, Florence Martis was in the Data Centre when she heard what sounded like a lorry dropping a load of freight. It came from the direction of the lobby. She glanced at her computer: 9.48 p.m. Mumbai was a city of ruckus, she told herself. But tonight she felt unsettled. Tonight she was alone on the night shift, and she hated it. She tried singing her favourite Bolly-wood film tune but it did not help. Half an hour earlier, she had popped down to the Palm Court, one floor below, looking for her father Faustine, but he was nowhere to be seen. She had tried his phone: no answer. She wasn’t too worried about that, though, as the family had bought him a new handset for his birthday and he had still not got the hang of it.

  Florence pulled her thin cardigan tighter. Manish Joshi, who worked with the hotel’s computers, had got her going a few days back by spinning ghost stories about long-dead guests coming back to haunt the Palace corridors. What she needed now was a bright memory. Something came to her. To celebrate her new job at the Taj, the family had gone on its first holiday, to Mount Abu, a hill station in Rajasthan. They had hired local costumes and got their photos taken. Her father had been invited to a ‘gents’ party’: a few beers and one or two pegs of whisky. Tomorrow he was having a day off, to celebrate his wedding anniversary. She looked down at the smart white plimsolls that he had given her as a present that morning and smiled. Then her desk phone rang. ‘Florence, terrorists have come.’ She knew the voice: Manish, the office prankster. She wasn’t falling for it again. ‘Just stop it,’ she hissed, cutting the line.

  One floor up in the Palace wing, in room 316, Will was flicking through the TV channels, waiting for Kelly to finish getting ready, when he heard fireworks or gunfire. He went to the window but there was nothing to see. ‘Kelly, did you hear that?’ he called through the bathroom door. ‘What?’ she asked, coming out, wrapped in a towel. ‘I heard shooting.’ She pulled a face. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. This is a five-star hotel. We’re going for dinner.’

  Ack, ack, ack. This time Kelly, dripping water on the carpet, heard it too. It was hard to say where it was coming from, but it was near by. ‘What the hell’s going on?’ she asked, drying her hair. Ack, ack, ack. That burst was inside the hotel. The shots were echoing. Was it the Grand Staircase? They were fifty paces to the left of it, and three floors up. ‘Let’s see,’ Will urged. Kelly did not want to go but she did not want to stay on her own. Opening the door, they ran along the silent corridor in bare feet, keeping their heads low, ‘like people did in the movies’. The hotel no longer smelled of freshly cut flowers and expensive perfume but of fireworks, and when they reached the staircase, they gingerly poked their heads over the banisters to see smoke coiling up towards them. ‘Look at that,’ Will said. Kelly had no idea what she was looking at. It smelled of autumn in the park.

  Across the staircase they spotted a blond Westerner, who had had the same idea as them. They exchanged nods, their eyes drawn to two young Taj staffers who ran up from below. Will waved at them, but they kept going to the fourth floor then disappeared. ‘Some rescue party,’ he murmured.

  The bang-bang started again. This time there was no doubt that these were gunshots. The man opposite ran off and Will and Kelly scurried back, too. Should they hide or try to get out? ‘We don’t even know where the fire escapes are,’ Will said, starting to panic, looking for a map on the back of the door. ‘Look, the hotel will protect us,’ Kelly reasoned. That is how it went, right? The hotel’s security team would chase the gunmen out and then come for them. That’s what they did in Towering Inferno.

  They locked the door, turned off the TV and lights, wedged themselves between the bed and the bathroom wall, and took each other’s hands.

  From the top floor of the Taj Tower, in the sleek, glass-walled Souk, the orange flare from the city’s streetlights unfurled below like a fine silk carpet. Captain Ravi Dharnidharka, the US Marine captain, was no longer looking at the view but worrying about the great wave of text messages and calls crashing across the room. One of his cousins received a call: ‘Gang fight in Colaba, a couple of blocks away.’ An aunt rang next. ‘A crazy man is waving a gun around behind the Taj.’

  ‘Told you,’ Ravi said to himself, recalling earlier misgivings about security in the hotel’s main entrance. When he had walked through the security cordon half an hour back, a metal detector had beeped, but no one had stopped him. That had really got him going. Why did people have systems and then pay no heed to them? Who else had got through unchecked? He hoped that his paranoia was simply the prolonged repercussion of battle fatigue.

  Across the room, Bob Nicholls, the VIP security boss, was sharing a joke with his commandos when the people at the next table leant over: ‘Do you know what is going on downstairs?’ Bob shook his head. ‘Our friends are trying to get in and they’re saying there’s shooting.’

  Everyone heard the explosive growl from deep inside the hotel reverberate up through the floor. One of the commandos got up, but a waiter asked him to return to his seat. ‘Two men are shooting at each other in the lobby, sir,’ he confided. Bob gathered his men around. ‘If it gets any more serious, I am going to have to do a Die Hard and bust us all out of the hotel,’ he said, raising a laugh. Bob was great at settling people down. Stout, with copper hair, he was the anti-Willis.

  Down in the Crystal Room, on the first floor of the Palace wing, the names of the bridal couple, Amit and Varsha Thadani, were picked out in gold writing on a noticeboard by the door but they had not yet made their grand entrance. Some guests were grumbling as it was already 10 p.m. and the wedding reception was supposed to have started at 9.30 p.m. But this was a city of latecomers. There was also the fatigue. The wedding was into its fourth day, having started the previous Sunday afternoon with a sangeet (music) party and culminated with rituals the previous night at a Sindhi temple. Tonight’s reception, a buffet for 500, was a chance for the bride and groom to entertain a wider group of friends and family.

  The Crystal Room shone with money, elaborate pink and grey table decorations, and frothy centrepieces. A journalist, Bhisham Mansukhani, thirty years old, dressed all in black, had been one of the first to arrive. An old school friend of the groom, he had reluctantly brought his mother along, hoping he would not have to mind her all night. She had wanted to stay downstairs and sit around in the lobby, people-watching. But he had persuaded her to come up, hoping to score a large Bloody Mary after he heard the host had paid for a free bar.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a friend of the family, a consultant anaesthetist at Bombay Hospital, and wandered over, trying to park his mother with her. ‘It’s typical Bombay style, everyone coming late,’ he remarked, as what sounded like firecrackers fizzed down below. The guests gave each other a look. ‘How gauche. Did the groom set that up? An indoor display?’ Seconds later, a dozen Taj staffers rushed in and the anaesthetist turned to her daughter, pulling big eyes: ‘It looks like the couple has decided to make an entry.’ But they began bolting the doors. She grabbed a passing waiter: ‘What’s going on?’ He looked shaken: ‘Ma’am, please stay calm. We don’t know.’

  At 10.05 p.m., down by the hotel’s poolside café, the manager of Aquarius, Amit Peshave, was serving a bottle of wine to a Canadian couple, chatting about their holiday in Goa, when he heard an explosion in the main lobby that could not have been part of the wedding celebrations. Instructing his waiters to escort the Aquarius guests inside the smaller Palace lobby, from where they could exit on to the street, Amit raced a hundred metres across the pool terrace towards Shamiana, where dozens of guests were seated for dinner. Shamiana overlooked the main lobby and he feared for their safety.

  Adil Irani, in charge at the Aquarius, was in the middle of shepherding people away from the pool when he saw the glass doors separating the terrace from the Tower slide open and a man cradling an assault rifle step out. It was one of the two gunmen who had entered through
the front and, seeing the huddled guests ahead, he aimed and let loose with cold, clinical bursts, felling single guests, before finding another target, aiming and firing again.

  Adil’s heart thumped so hard he felt it might burst. Guests were scattering, some diving ahead into the Palace lobby, others back into the bushes around the pool. Trying to corral them, he saw out of the corner of his eye that the silver-haired Canadians were still at their table. Trying to get their attention, he screamed: ‘GET OUT.’ Before he had a chance to grab them, another waiter shouted from inside that all the street exits had been locked, meaning they were trapped. As the two waiters began ushering guests up the Grand Staircase, Adil realized he still had a tray with two empty glasses on it in his hand. ‘Keep moving up,’ he urged, worrying for the Canadian couple outside.

  As the guests climbed, a deafening burst of automatic fire rang out. Adil spun round and saw the gunman close behind him. Panicking, he jumped over the banister and pelted off along the ground floor corridor towards La Patisserie and the Northcote side exit, drawing the gunman away. Ack, ack, ack. As he ran, his shoes slapping against the marble floor, he felt a rush of bullets flying past, nicking his clothes and kicking up plaster and marble. He charged for the door as the gunman turned back towards the guests on the staircase. ‘Open up,’ Adil shouted at the Black Suits ahead of him, who were locking the exit. ‘We need to get out.’ As they looked up, confused at the sight of a staffer running at them, holes punched through the door from the other side. More attackers were outside in Best Marg, trying to get in. Adil and the two Black Suits turned on their heels, heading back down towards the Palace lobby seconds before the Northcote door was shattered and two men burst through it, one wearing black, the other in grey. It was the two gunmen who had shot up the Leopold Café and they gave chase.

  Adil, followed by the two Black Suits, dived into the hotel’s Louis Vuitton shop, halfway along the corridor, the waiter remembering that it had a service lift at its rear. As he banged the buttons, he could see the gunmen entering the shop: ‘Shut, shut, shut.’ The gunman in black lunged for the doors, trying to get a boot in to stop them closing. Adil watched him raise his gun, just as the doors slammed and the lift juddered upwards. He slumped down in relief, expecting to exit on the second floor from where he knew a way out. But when the doors opened, he found himself on the exclusive sixth floor, where Karambir Kang and his family had their apartment. The Black Suits motioned: which way? He didn’t have a clue and they ran off, leaving Adil rooted to the spot, listening to the sound of firing moving up the Grand Staircase towards him.

  Behind the hotel, DCP Rajvardhan had grabbed a police walkie-talkie and was shouting into it. Where was the backup? It was 10.10 p.m., almost twenty-five minutes since the first attack, and he could hear shooting coming from inside the Taj. He cautiously peaked through the rear wall of the hotel into the gardens and pool terrace, overlooking the Aquarius. Nothing. How many are dead already?, he wondered, hearing a duet of assault rifles spraying rounds. For the past ten minutes his radio had relayed reports about other incidents too. ‘21.56. Marine Drive 1: Hearing firing sounds near Oberoi.’ That was the Trident–Oberoi, where Rajvardhan’s batch-mate Vishwas Patil, the DCP of Zone 1, had spent the day, discussing the impending prime ministerial visit. How many gunmen were out there? The police were in the process of setting up checkpoints across the city. ‘21.58. South Region Walkie-Talkie: block all the roads.’

  Rajvardhan ran round to the Northcote side entrance in Best Marg to see that it was wide open. He entered cautiously, noticing that the boutiques along the marble corridor had all been strafed with bullets. When he reached the Grand Staircase, he could see a dead security guard slumped by the lifts beside a prone dog. It was the hotel’s sniffer dog team and they had been shot at point-blank range. Ahead was a sound so intense he could also feel it. Someone was strafing the lobby with an AK. He turned around, exiting the way he had come in, and shuffled along the front wall of the Taj, towards the Gateway and the main Tower lobby, where an agitated crowd had gathered at the now locked main doors. They were still trying to get into the hotel, terrified by the reports of a gun battle in Colaba, not yet understanding there was also shooting inside the hotel. A bellboy lay on the steps, his white uniform drenched in blood, the corpse buffeted by the terrified crowd, while hotel security guards linked arms, trying to keep the scrum back. The Black Suit Puru Petwal was there, holding the line, shouting: ‘There is firing inside too. It is not safe. Move back.’

  For the next ten minutes, Petwal and his colleagues stared through the glass, watching helplessly as two gunmen picked off anything that moved as they gradually cleared out the lobby. Petwal watched as one of the apprentice chefs, a friend who had recently been accepted on to the Taj’s management trainee scheme, led a group of diners out of the Zodiac Grill to the concierge station near the front doors, before returning for a second sweep. Petwal was silently cheering him on when he saw one of the gunmen turn around. Petwal banged on the glass and screamed out, trying to attract the chef’s attention, before watching in agony as he was shot in the head.

  Rajvardhan was at Petwal’s side now, pressing his face against the glass, his radio buzzing with reports of firing at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST), the central railway station, used daily by Florence and Faustine Martis and several million others. ‘South Control: send help to CST.’ Two gunmen had stormed the concourse, spraying gunfire into crowds of commuters, killing many. Then, another message: firing at Chabad House, the little Jewish hostel, around the corner from the Leopold. ‘South Control: come immediately. Firing is on. We need help immediately.’

  As far as Rajvardhan could tell, at least four separate incidents had been called in and casualties were rapidly mounting. Just as he wondered if it could get any worse, a taxi driver from the Gateway rank ran over, wide-eyed. ‘I saw two gunmen placing a bag over there,’ he said, pointing. Another officer walked with him and peeked inside, seeing a mess of wiring and tiffin tins. ‘Call the bomb squad,’ Rajvardhan screamed into his radio set. ‘We need nakabandis [roadblocks] and backup. Send maximum bandobast [cordon].’ The bag bomb had a timer inside it and was set to blow.

  *

  Inside the Harbour Bar, to the left of the main entrance, Mike Pollack, a New York financier, was crouched under a flimsy table, alongside his wife Anjali, Mike’s college friend Shiv Darshit, and his wife Reshma. They had arrived a few minutes before the firing began and while they had been able to hear everything, they could see nothing. All of them had their heads down, listening to screams, footsteps and deafening ricochets, drawing their own pictures of mayhem.

  The Pollacks had a special affinity with the Taj. Anjali, originally from a wealthy Mumbai family, had partied here in her teens. She and Mike had married in the Crystal Room in 2004, following Anjali’s family tradition. An American hedge funder, Mike had clicked with her at a party in New York, but she surprised her family when she brought the six-foot, clean-cut Wharton business school graduate to India. These days the Pollacks lived in New York and had a two-year-old son and six-month-old baby. As a co-founder of Glenhill Capital, a global investment fund that Mike had helped grow into a $2.5bn business, he was overworked, while Anjali missed her family. They were over for just a week, squeezing in as many friends and family as they could. Tonight they had had a special pass as her parents were babysitting. Waiting for a table to become free at the Taj’s Golden Dragon Chinese restaurant, the last thing they had expected was to end up cowering from a terrorist attack.

  Mike looked around, taking in the bar. It was open plan and furnished with rickety aluminium tables and leather sofas. There was no cover; that much was clear. ‘We have to get out,’ he urged, as he grabbed a table and attempted to hurl it through the window. It bounced back. They had all been glazed with toughened glass after a bomb exploded at the Gateway of India in 2003.

  A hostess emerged from behind the bar. She had served them ice-cold Kingfishers earlier and now she m
otioned for them to stay put while she stood as a lookout by the door, feeding back whispered snapshots. ‘A man carrying a machine gun is shooting everything,’ she said. ‘I can see a body.’ The hostess had an idea. She ran towards the back of the bar, signalling for them to follow her. They ducked behind a thick concrete pillar that concealed a spiral staircase. It rose to the first floor, and they came out in the Japanese restaurant, Wasabi. ‘I’ll take you into the kitchens,’ the hostess said. ‘No one will find us there.’

  Moments after they had departed, CCTV footage showed the gunman dressed in red looking into the Harbour Bar. Seeing it was empty, he carried on along the marble corridor, stopping outside Masala Kraft. Its door was locked and the restaurant was in darkness. He shattered the glass anyway and pumped in some rounds. The restaurant was packed, diners beneath their tables, dazed and tearful, listening to the bullets smashing into the banquettes above them. Among them was the Alysia’s owner, Andreas Liveras, who was putting on a brave face. Remesh, his cruise director, was beside him, comforting the terrified Filipino spa girls from the yacht. Ack, ack, ack. Wump. Gunfire and a grenade. Glass smashed all around them. The room glowed with sparks kicking off the metal serving trolleys as bullets bounced around the restaurant. There was a pause and Remesh sat up. He caught a glimpse of a man dressed in a red T-shirt, ‘running with a gun past the glass doors’. He urged his boss to hide in the kitchens. But Andreas was livid. ‘I haven’t even eaten yet.’

  Grumbling, he got up and they all squeezed into a small store, diners standing shoulder to shoulder. A woman whispered that she had been held hostage two years back in Kabul. ‘How could it happen to me twice?’ she said, stunned. ‘Pull yourself together,’ Andreas snapped. The tension made him unforgiving. Then he walked back out into the firing zone of the restaurant to grab one of his two mobile phones, which he had left on the table. He was in the middle of a deal to build the biggest yacht in the world, a 395-footer, and a gunfight was not going to get in his way.