The Siege: The Attack on the Taj Mumbai

by Cathy Scott-Clark

Three transporter-loads of Black Cats from Manesar had now touched down in Mumbai, and more than a hundred commandos were deployed inside the Taj, building a perimeter around Wasabi. As Friday slipped by, they gradually tightened it, pushing in more men. But despite the overwhelming odds, the four fidayeen shrugged off the ferocious fire, one pair of gunmen emerging from the ground floor Harbour Bar, taking aim at the commandos, while two more, inside the Wasabi, kept up a constant barrage.

  Brigadier Sisodia needed to get eyes inside the north-eastern corner of the building. Outside the hotel, he ordered Black Cat marksmen to climb into the fire service’s cherry pickers and take aim at Wasabi’s toughened-glass windows with their Israeli sniper rifles. The windows were reflective, making it impossible to see in. ‘One shot to pierce them,’ Sisodia instructed his marksmen. ‘On my signal.’ With a staggered crack that reverberated around the docks, high velocity rounds hammered in. Grenade launchers were then jacked up on tripods, aimed at the fracture points and fired in a coordinated burst that created a wall of flames and smoke. With any luck the explosions had also cut the gunmen to pieces, Sisodia murmured, grabbing a pair of binoculars.

  When the smoke cleared, he had a perfect view inside the first floor, and could see the gunmen still scurrying around. Three of them took aim at the army outside, while one seemed to be waving a white flag. Or was he luring them in? The Brigadier was astonished.

  He ordered a Black Cat team to inch their way through Wasabi’s kitchens and hold a firing position at the service entrance to the restaurant, while Deven Bharti, the Crime Branch number two, accompanied a second team that wriggled towards the Harbour Bar entrance, one floor below. On Brigadier Sisodia’s order, the two teams opened up, firing in coordinated bursts, cutting up everything inside. Soldiers overheard a gunman crying out: ‘No more. For Allah’s sake no more.’ Outside, binoculars in hand, Sisodia studied the scene. The fidayeen were still alive. They retook their positions, firing on the Black Cats and the Gateway. ‘What the hell?’ Sisodia was stumped. He had never come across such determined fighters before. He walked the length of the Palace wing’s ground and first floors, trying to figure it out. He consulted Kudiyadi and Bharti. By the time he had finished taking in views, it was dark and they were losing their footing. Outside, Chief Dutt, also under pressure, advised reporters that the Taj would be liberated by sunrise on Saturday. ‘Why can’t we call in air support and flatten the entire structure?’ the Brigadier said to Bharti, only half joking. They had tried everything else.

  Saturday, 29 November 2008, 3 a.m. – the Harbour Bar

  Kudiyadi arrived, excited and apologetic. The Taj’s security chief had figured it out and was embarrassed not to have come to the answer quicker. They had all overlooked a glaring architectural oddity in this corner of the hotel that any waiter or chef could have told them about: a spiral staircase linking the ground floor Harbour Bar to Wasabi that was protected floor to ceiling by a vast, three-foot-thick impregnable concrete pillar. Every time the gunmen came under attack, they ran for shelter behind it.

  ‘Time for some improvisation,’ the Brigadier said to Bharti. If they could not level the pillar they could surely create a weapon with sufficient force to annihilate anything animate cowering behind it. Was it possible? The Brigadier called in the task force’s bomb detail. ‘What can we cobble together?’ The men spent an hour figuring it out. At 4 a.m., they had a plan but were short of components. They needed plastic-coated copper wire, tape, screws and ball bearings too – all of which sounded to Bharti like the components of a classic suicide bomb – but he was happy to take charge of procurement. The Crime Branch number two knew that in a city like Mumbai anything could be found at any time with a little bit of initiative and persuasion. He called in his men. ‘We’re going shopping.’

  In the small side streets around Apollo Bunder, they roused shopkeepers in their pyjamas and forced open steel shutters. By 5 a.m., they were back and the bomb squad sat with wire clippers and pliers, assembling their device. They placed a grenade at its core, around which they positioned sticks of TNT, filling the gaps with plastic explosives. Then they did what terrorists did, pressing in bolts and ball bearings to inflict maximum casualties. They now had the makings of a vicious bang, a blinding flash, and a blast wave loaded with shrapnel. By 6 a.m. they were ready. ‘OK,’ said Sisodia. ‘Now let’s build another.’

  At 7 a.m., two Black Cat teams wriggled into place, above and below the concrete pillar, their devices rigged on long detonation leashes, ready to be thrown into the Harbour Bar and Wasabi. ‘Two blasts, simultaneously,’ Sisodia instructed, beginning the countdown. Bharti watched from Wasabi as the pitcher braced himself, a man beside him with a radio counting down in time with the team below. ‘Three. Two. One.’ Both teams bowled in their IEDs and a blast wave shook the hotel, followed by a howl as the air was sucked in and then forced out, sending great spirals of black smoke and flames shooting into the sky.

  A blackened human figure came flying out of the hotel. His legs cycled in mid-air as if he were pelting for freedom, the long black trousers he wore shredded into ragged shorts. He landed with a clatter on a concrete road divider, a dead pigeon falling beside him, where a waiting marksman delivered a shot to his head. A commando ran over, stooping to confirm the kill as Brigadier Sisodia hovered, studying the man’s face that was caked in gunpowder and a tar-like residue. His hair was seared, his fists clenched as if in pain. His shirt, blackened by soot and soaked in blood, was fused to his back.

  It was Abu Shoaib, the gunman dressed in grey who had attacked the Leopold Café before shooting his way into the Taj. Before landing in Mumbai, Shoaib had been the one who held down the legs of the captured Indian skipper of the MV Kuber while his throat was slit. As a young man he had been turned over to Lashkar by his preacher father, the youngest of all the recruits. And before Lashkar, Shoaib had lived in Barapind, a ring of mud-and-brick houses in northern Punjab, that had for as long as anyone could remember lost lives in the cross-border firing, a boy born in a room with a view over the mountains of Kashmir.

  Sisodia pulled himself away, as a wave of exhaustion crashed over him. Was this finally over? Fire crews pressed forward to douse the flames flaring out of the corner of the hotel. ‘We’re going to need the sniffer dogs in there,’ Sisodia ordered. Somewhere inside the smouldering bar were the remains of Ali (yellow), Umer (black) and Abdul Rehman ‘Bada’ (red). While the dog team was called forward, the Black Cats began filtering through the Taj. After almost fifty-eight hours, the gunmen were finally dead but it would take another eight hours to make the hotel safe.

  Beside the Gateway, Karambir Kang stood with Chef Oberoi, two men overcome by grief, trying to focus on the future as if it were a life raft, ringed by what was left of their staff, including Amit Peshave and his dorm mates. ‘Who has a strong stomach?’ Oberoi asked quietly. ‘I want it to be us that cleans the kitchens. It has to be us.’ There was a murmur of agreement.

  Vishwas Patil, the Zone 1 DCP, still manning the Taj perimeter, felt relief and irritation as he heard the news that it was over. He was inundated with requests from national and state politicians who all wanted to be escorted to the Taj, posing for photos outside the liberated hotel, looking for a bounce in the opinion polls, men whom he blamed for failing to secure the city in the first place. Patil stared up at the blackened windows, thankful to see that for the first time in three days no one was waving for help. He wondered if he would ever lose the wretched feeling that all this bloodletting had been preventable. The Mumbai way of doing things meant that there would be no searching inquiry to test the force’s response, measuring the success of the intelligence agencies and the efficacy of the Black Cats. Patil predicted ‘a song and dance show’ run by needy retirees from government service, who would sacrifice a few minnows to shore up the whole shaky edifice.

  They would not have it all their own way. Not after what the Deputy Commissioner of Police and his colleagues had been through. Patil had already
begun to plan a report in his head, outlining what he knew in the five months leading up to the assault on the city, and what his colleagues had known stretching back to 2006. Sketching out his dialogue with the Taj and his higher-ups, Patil began composing the opening sentences as his car drove him back towards his home opposite the Brabourne cricket stadium, where his wife and two children were anxiously waiting. He would send it to the Commissioner on 19 December 2008, the report numbered 23/DI/Zone1/08. And, having learned the Mumbai game, he would simultaneously leak a snapshot of it to a local journalist who had been hounding him for a story – just to make sure that the file did not vanish.

  Sitting inside Brabourne was Bob Nicholls. The stadium was the quietest place in town, a refuge in which he had thought through his experiences inside the Taj and also the fate of the Champions League Twenty20. Shane Warne and Kevin Pietersen had already cancelled and the whole shebang needed to be pushed back to allow the city to mourn and re-secure itself. If they were lucky, the tournament might run late next year, but the set-up would have to be razor sharp. Against the odds, this city always bounced back, Bob thought. In his opinion, Mumbai could overcome anything, especially the incompetence of its rulers.

  In Titan Towers, Breach Candy, Captain Ravi Dharnidharka was torn between wanting to get back to his girlfriend in San Diego and needing to stay for his Indian family. From an upper floor, he could see multiple funeral processions already wending their way around the lanes below. He had three to attend himself for the relatives who had been killed inside the Trident–Oberoi. But while the residents of this city that he loved looked after themselves, what could they expect from their leaders, who had already begun papering over the cracks, repositioning the catastrophe of the Taj and the sacrifice of guests and staff as India’s finest hour?

  At Bombay Hospital, Kelly barely took in the news that it was over. She was overwhelmed by the future. A remarkable Indian surgeon had fused some of Will’s vertebrae together and placed a cage around his pelvis to keep everything immobile, so that he was ready to be flown back to the UK. But this task was proving the most difficult to organize. Will’s father Nigel, who flew in just as the Taj siege was lifted, could not get the attention of overworked British consular officials, who prevaricated over repatriation arrangements and promised but failed to make adequate preparations with hospitals in the UK. Kelly’s travel insurance company refused to cover medical bills or anything else, pointing to an exception for acts of terrorism. After they missed their existing return flights, the airline claimed it had no available seats for many weeks, leaving Nigel looking for any carrier prepared to take a stretcher.

  Then there was the medical prognosis. It was unknowable, Kelly was told. All she could be sure of, as she looked at her heavily sedated boyfriend, was that the life they had hoped for was gone for ever.

  At 10 a.m. on 29 November, Sabina’s husband, brother and friend, Savitri Choudhury all stood outside the Taj. The text messages supposedly sent by Sabina early on Thursday morning, combined with the NSG finding an empty suite, suggested that the food critic had escaped the hotel. However, Airtel, the phone company, was currently investigating the phenomenon of ‘ghost calls’, whereby Sabina’s texts could have been displaced to remote towers in the city, and distributed long after they were sent. It was also possible her phone had latched on to a distant mast as the network became inundated with calls on the first night of the attack, giving the impression she was in another location. Nikhil, her brother, had found no answers in the city morgues. ‘I have seen bodies that nobody should have to see – burnt, shot, bloated,’ he told Savitri. Instead they had pressed family contacts to get them inside the Taj. Even though the hotel remained off-limits, the three were escorted into the lobby, their nostrils stung by the smoke-logged corridors. Black Cats pounded up and down the Grand Staircase, while stretcher-bearers whizzed by carrying disfigured corpses. Savitri stopped. She could not do it and turned around, while Shantanu and Nikhil pushed on.

  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.

  Illustrations

  1. The Taj hotel, Mumbai, overlooking the central dome and the Arabian Sea.

  Taj Mahal Palace Hotel Collection

  2. The Taj from poolside.

  Taj Mahal Palace Hotel Collection

  3. Jamsetji Tata (third from right), who built the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, with his family.

  Taj Mahal Palace Hotel Collection

  4. Indian princes forming a guard of honour to welcome the new Viceroy, Lord Willingdon, on his arrival at the Gateway of India, 1931. Photograph taken from the Taj.

  Taj Mahal Palace Hotel Col
lection

  5. Original architectural plan for the central dome of the Taj.

  Taj Mahal Palace Hotel Collection

  6. Faustine Martis (left) in his early days working as a Taj waiter.

  Florence Martis

  7. Portrait of the Taj chefs that hangs on the wall in the kitchens, with Nitin Minocha (far left) and Hemant Oberoi, holding a tomato (centre).

  Ian Pereira

  8. Kaizad Kamdin, one of the chefs who died during the aborted evacuation of Chambers, in the Taj kitchens.

  Kamdin family

  9. The Chambers Club, where many were trapped.

  Taj Mahal Palace Hotel Collection

  10. The Crystal Room, where Amit and Varsha Thadani were due to hold their wedding reception.

  Taj Mahal Palace Hotel Collection

  11. Amit and Varsha Thadani on their wedding day, 25 November 2008, the day before the attacks.

  Amit Thadani

  12. Uday and Samar Kang photographed in the Taj Memories Studio just an hour before the hotel came under attack.

  Taj Memories (courtesy Sarosh Engineer and Pearl Dubash)

  13. (Left to right) Florence Martis, Faustine Martis, Precilla Martis and Floyd Martis.

  Florence Martis

  14. (Left to right) Ambreen Khan and Sabina Sehgal Saikia.

  Ambreen Khan

  15. Andreas Liveras in Monaco.

  Remesh Cheruvoth

  16. Kuttalam Rajagopalan Ramamoorthy, who was held as a hostage, with his granddaughter.