The Siege

by Adrian Levy

  ‘Everyone hold steady. You’ll all get out,’ the Taj Black Suits urged, trying to keep things fluid and affable. But the mood was darker than in the Tower, where diners had elected leaders and scouts to escort them. ‘Everyone will make it, if you form a line. Turn your phones off. Absolute quiet.’ There were a hundred more guests here than in Souk, and they were narrating their own exits: calling, texting and Tweeting.

  Down at the front, through the open door, Bhisham could just about make out Chef Hemant Oberoi, who held his hands up for silence. Next to him was Chef Banja, who had kept up everyone’s spirits. Before them stood the white-jacketed chefs de partie, with their grey neckerchiefs, the most senior and accomplished in the kitchens, and their sous-chefs. Also present were the blue-, grey- and brown-uniformed apprentices, the plongeurs or dishwashers, and the marmitons, the young kitchen boys who scrubbed out the deep casserole dishes.

  Chef Oberoi marshalled his Kitchen Brigade, explaining that in a few minutes they would begin escorting guests through the kitchen, down the stairs by his cabin and out of the Time Office staff exit. He needed volunteers to form a human chain around the evacuating guests in case of any unforeseen disaster.

  Nitin Minocha, the Golden Dragon’s senior sous-chef, who wore a neatly clipped soldier’s moustache and had a pair of chopsticks perennially in his top pocket, stepped forward. He had already shown tonight that he could keep his head, having locked down his restaurant and concealed diners, before evacuating them to Wasabi, and then out of the firing line into Chambers. Chef Banja joked that tonight Minocha would become ‘a soldier in whites’, aided by Hemant Talim, his sous-chef, who also volunteered. Effervescent Talim, who was Amit Peshave’s friend and former room-mate, had worked at the Taj since 2002 but was still so youthful that in the kitchen he was known as ‘the Chicken’. As a result of working on the wok station he had developed a formidable forearm and was the hotel’s premier arm wrestler.

  Oberoi clapped Talim on the shoulders just as Thomas Varghese, a Syrian Christian, who was head waiter in Wasabi, raised his hand. Varghese, master of the night shift, was a favourite in the kitchens as he defended the Taj staff in the employee union and he could manage his restaurant almost single-handedly: eleven teppanyaki seats, nine sushi places, and twenty free-standing tables.

  Chef Oberoi called out for Boris Rego, the quick-witted sous-chef from Shamiana. Amit Peshave’s ‘Indefatigable Rego’ had escaped when the gunman had shot up the coffee shop earlier in the evening and fled through the kitchens to the first-floor service area. For the past three hours he had been helping muster guests in Chambers. Now he stepped forward, as did Kaizad Kamdin, a 6 foot 4 inch Parsi who worked in the banqueting halls and was known universally as Brother Kaiz, and Zaheen Mateen, a lithe, hot-tempered Rajasthani who worked in Zodiac Grill.

  As the chefs formed a protective line, the first thirty guests were called forward into the darkened kitchens, with the Indian politicians putting themselves at the front. Everyone was asked to remain calm. ‘There are coaches waiting for you at the other end,’ Chef Banja urged. The Anti-Terrorist Squad had turned up too, but only to escort the MPs. ‘They’ll take you to the President, where the hotel’s General Manager is waiting.’ Everyone nodded, but almost immediately the line snagged. A pantry-man came running up. Shouting could be heard from inside the Chambers. There was a tussle blocking the free flow of guests in the murky corridor and angry words could be heard floating out. Oberoi stepped up: ‘I’ll go in.’ The Executive Chef would straighten things out. ‘Keep everyone calm. Keep together. Keep moving,’ he shouted over his shoulder to Banja, Minocha, Talim, Varghese, Kamdin and Mateen.

  Ack, ack, ack. With his back to the Wasabi corridor and the service lift, Chef Minocha was standing adjacent to Oberoi’s cabin, hands linked with Kaizad Kamdin and Hemant Talim, urging guests along, when he heard what sounded like a mason knocking out tiles. ‘What?’ Exasperated he turned to see Chef Banja to his right, looking similarly perplexed, red rosettes suddenly blooming on his whites, before his knees gave way and he sagged to the floor. A fine spray of blood filled Minocha’s nostrils as he also fell, the realization finally dawning on him that the gunmen had just found their way into the kitchens and were firing into their backs.

  Ack, ack, ack. The Brigade broke apart, the human tunnel disintegrating, staff and guests bolting for their lives.

  As emergency lights flickered and dipped, Minocha saw the floor around him transforming into a crimson rink. Instinctively he crawled away from the firing, ankles and shoes flashing past his sight line, as still upright guests and staff ran, screaming like gulls. ‘Head for the Time Office,’ he urged himself, as he thought he saw a crowd retreating into the Chambers, while others plunged downwards, heading for the pitch-black cellars.

  To Minocha’s left, Thomas Varghese was running with his arms outstretched like a scarecrow. What was he doing? Minocha realized he was not escaping like the others, but shepherding strays away from the gunmen. Deliberately, Varghese ran into the line of fire, trying to narrow down the angle of the shooter, before staggering and falling. As he sank to the floor, Minocha watched an engineer who worked in the hotel’s plant room come out of nowhere and rush forward to take Varghese’s place. One of the Taj’s legions of invisibles, Rajan Kamble blocked the gunman’s path for a few, vital seconds before taking a round in his back.

  Minocha tried shutting his eyes. When he opened them nothing had changed. He snatched a look towards Oberoi’s cabin, and saw the Executive Chef had come out of Chambers and was standing on tiptoe, watching with a horrified expression as chefs’ pleated hats flopped down out of sight, like seals dropping into ice holes. Minocha felt himself floating away into unconsciousness, carried along in a sea of bloodstained chef’s whites. He wondered what had happened to the simple plan.

  Inside the chefs’ canteen, where Oberoi was taking cover, the ceramic tile with his kitchen prayer on it was flecked with blood: ‘So bless my little kitchen, Lord,/And those who enter in,/And may they find naught but joy and peace,/And happiness therein.’ Standing beside it, Chef Oberoi wracked his brains. How the hell did they know we are all in here? He was terrified by the thought that the gunmen had found their way in via the secret marble door on the ground floor, with its make-do napkin fastener. He was brought out of his soul-searching by screaming rounds that smashed into stainless steel cabinets and washstands.

  Edging out of the doorway, Oberoi spotted Banja, his friend and foil since 1986, lying prone and bloodied just a few metres to his right. He couldn’t reach him and felt sick. Was this how it would end? He had overheard Banja pledging to Anjali Pollack and others that he would rather die than let them suffer and he prayed that Banja was just concussed. Everything had a fix. You learned that at the Taj, where the tectonic plates of service frequently ran slightly out of kilter, overheating and colliding, only to be eased back into position with the helpful jolt of someone’s elbow.

  Just then a gunman locked eyes with Oberoi and let off a furious volley. Blind panic washed over the Executive Chef and looking around for a way out he glimpsed two assistant managers heading down towards the cellars and a third figure madly waving at him. It was his Food and Beverage Manager: ‘RUN.’ He was pointing to the stairs. A group of staff and guests pulled the dazed Oberoi towards them, all of them descending into an unlit warren of cabins, lockers and storage rooms. He tried to drag himself away. ‘I need to get to Banja,’ he cried. Someone stopped him: ‘Sir, please don’t go back, it’s too late.’

  Up above, Chef Minocha had come to his senses. Lying in a pool of blood, he knew he had to get up or die. But although he sent the command to his limbs, nothing happened. He looked down and saw one hand hung limply, the bones in his forearm shattered. With a dispassionate eye, he thought the arm was practically severed and unmendable. All he could think was that he would never work again, forced out of his metier by random firing. ‘I’m finished,’ he muttered, tears welling up in his eyes.

  Ack
, ack, ack. The gunmen were back. Using his good arm and legs, Minocha propelled himself crabwise, scuttling between stainless steel workstations, his feet sliding through the sloughed blood. Ahead, he could see Chef Banja, who lay gazing upwards, his curly hair matted with blood. Lying beside him, with his legs at awkward angles, was Zaheen Mateen, the brilliant young Zodiac chef whom everyone feted for his dreamy Kahlúa mousse. He was twitching and blowing saliva bubbles through cracked lips. Mateen had just scored exceptionally in his matriculation exams, ensuring him a place at any of the best graduate schools. Just yesterday, they had all celebrated his future success – but now there was no hope for him.

  Minocha glimpsed a figure dashing past, with a stocky frame and thick moustache. Was that Faustine Martis, the Sea Lounge’s head waiter? What was he doing? Martis bolted for cover in the meat store, pulling open the heavy door and drawing aside the hessian curtain. Minocha wondered, should he follow? But something pulled him away, back towards the Time Office, and the way out, where he came up against guests running in the opposite direction. They had tried to get out through the Tower fire door, they all screamed hysterically, but it was jammed. ‘Someone’s blocked the exit from the outside and we are all trapped.’

  The crowd parted, one flank heading down into the dark cellars after Chef Oberoi’s party, the other carrying Minocha towards the Time Office. Ahead, he could see a bloody Chef Hemant Talim, who was being dragged out by Sunil Kudiyadi. ‘Call an ambulance,’ the security chief cried out, gently laying Talim down on the pavement. ‘Just hold on, you’ll be fine, stay with me.’ Talim, who had been shot in the stomach, answered weakly: ‘Yes, sir.’

  Down in the cellars, more than a dozen people were squashed up together in a dark, humid storage space. Chef Oberoi tried to calm the crowd, noticing that in their party were some children who were terrified by the sound of gunfire and heavy boots stamping about. ‘I don’t want to die. We don’t want to die,’ two young kitchen porters grizzled, unable to contain themselves, as the footsteps drew nearer. Someone pulled the porters closer, burying their faces. Oberoi wriggled free a hand and brought his BlackBerry up to his face, eyes adjusting to the glowing screen as a cluster of messages downloaded.

  Thomas Varghese: ‘I’m wounded, sir. Bleeding near the lift.’ Frustrated and terrified, feeling responsible, Oberoi passed Varghese’s text on to the Taj control at the President. A text from Chef Talim popped up: ‘Bleeding heavily, but made it outside. You OK, sir?’ How many dead?, Oberoi wondered. Many of these chefs had been with him for fifteen years or more. He envisaged the photo on the canteen wall of them all smiling in happier times. Several texts mentioned seeing Kaizad Kamdin, his towering banquet chef de partie, lying motionless by the cabin. You could not kill Kamdin! There was no news about Chef Vijay Banja, who was to the best of his knowledge still lying on the tiled floor. Maybe he was alive. What should he tell Banja’s wife, or Kamdin’s family? He could not write the two chefs off yet.

  Nitin Minocha texted: ‘Injured. But moving. Are you OK, Chef?’ Thank the Gods. Minocha was a hard man to finish off. Oberoi tapped out a reply. ‘Great. Get out!!’ There was also a message from Chef Rego’s father in Goa. He did not want to read it. ‘Where is my boy?’ Urbano Rego asked. What was the appropriate response? And finally, having contacted Karambir Kang, spelling out the disaster, the Executive Chef came to his family’s messages. They were desperate. First: ‘Dad get out!’ Then: ‘TV running a flash: Executive Chef Oberoi dead!’ He composed the same message to everyone: ‘Alive! Please don’t call or reply just yet.’

  Oberoi turned his phone off and asked everyone to do the same. Darkness and silence were their only friends. Outside the footsteps drew nearer.

  In an adjacent room, Gunjan Narang fiddled with his phone. Narang, who had gone to school with Bhisham and the groom, Amit, had come to the Taj with his family tonight to celebrate his thirty-second birthday in the Golden Dragon. All of them had survived the first onslaught and been led to the Chambers. But now following the stampede and the firing they had become separated, with Gunjan hiding in the store beside his father and a Taj staffer. He prayed for his sister, his wife and her parents, hoping they had made it out. ‘We are in the wine cellar,’ he texted. ‘Where are you?’ The Taj staffer beside him could hear footsteps. ‘We need a total blackout, sir.’ Gunjan ignored him. A text came in from his wife. He punched the air. She and her parents had made it. Where were his mother and sister Jharna? He messaged them again, his screen gleaming as he pressed the send key, and turned to the staffer, for the first time acknowledging him, brimming with anger: ‘If you do only one bloody thing,’ he said, jabbing his finger, ‘make sure this doesn’t happen again …’

  Before he finished the sentence, the door was kicked down and live rounds pumped in, shattering hundreds of wine bottles that glugged their contents on to the floor, a fountain of glass showering the staffer, who stifled his tears and prayed as he saw Gunjan and his father slump dead on the floor.

  Jharna Narang, hiding in a nearby vault, was chanting. A Buddhist, she believed that enlightenment did not come after death, but was a gift for the living, its secrets encoded somewhere deep inside her. ‘I have to believe,’ she told herself, blocking out the sounds of destruction by evoking a vision of the lotus flower. ‘I have to live … my work is not finished yet.’ She pushed herself on and inwards, wrapped in the scent and blossom. ‘I have a mission to fulfil.’ Jharna enveloped herself in a profound silence of her own making and focused on the words of Gautam Buddha: ‘We must kill the will to kill.’ She should not fear the gunmen or resent them.

  Click, clack. The door opened. One, two, three and four rounds pass through her hands and back, spinning her around, shattering her pelvis, sending a searing current throughout her body. ‘I cannot die. My work is not finished yet!’ she chanted, as the dead weight of another guest slumped over her.

  She was conscious of someone flipping bodies and finishing the job. She had to go deeper still, almost to the brink of death. She chanted, relaxing her spasming muscles, her eyes screwed tight, erasing all external signs of life, feeling as if she had drawn a shroud over her skin, so all that could seen from the outside was her punctured, seemingly lifeless body.

  Bullets released from a muzzle travel at supersonic speeds, compressing the air before them and creating a shockwave shaped like a bow, a round smooth form striking a conical sound wave that some hear as a whip crack, or even applause. A Wasabi waiter, who had just reached a junction in the corridor, where he had to decide whether to go down into the cellars or on to the Time Office, heard a supersonic snap that stopped him in his tracks. ‘Don’t go down,’ he told himself, dashing for the staff exit.

  His phone rang. He muffled it with his palms, fearing it would give away his position, then pressed it to his ear, as he jogged on. ‘I’m bleeding,’ said the caller. It took a few seconds for him to realize it was his boss, Thomas Varghese. ‘I am shot in the leg, lying by the lift in the kitchen. Please send help.’

  The panicked waiter stopped running. Should he go back? Rooted to the spot, he listened. All he could hear at the other end of the line was someone walking about, bare feet slapping against the wet kitchen floor, the sounds getting rapidly nearer. ‘Sir?’ he whispered. The waiter knew that whatever he could hear, his boss was seeing. There was a metallic click and then ack, ack, ack.

  The waiter belted for the Time Office, collapsing outside. He dialled his friend Amit Peshave, the Shamiana manager, and cried into the phone: ‘Varghese Sir is finished. They have executed him.’

  4.45 a.m. – Merriweather Road

  By the time Nitin Minocha had dragged himself outside, rooks were cawing, praising the dawn. Street sweepers were already at work, even on this day, after the worst carnage Mumbai had ever seen, building small mounds of fallen leaves, sluicing the road, tamping down the dust. Dazed and in pain, Minocha sat on the pavement, watching them, shivering in the cold morning air, as strangers milled about wearing confused e
xpressions.

  So much blood had run through the city tonight that one more injured man was no longer remarkable and he felt as if he were invisible. Minocha staggered to his feet. He was filled with a rage at what he had just seen. He weaved off in search of a policeman, determined to give evidence, provide a witness statement, nailing the killers to the mast. He wanted to help build the case, despite the agony of his shattered forearm.

  Along the way, he found a Taj napkin lying in a gutter. He tied it around his arm, using his teeth to pull the knot, so that it became a tourniquet. Minocha could live with the discomfort. He walked with his arm held aloft, attempting to stem the bleeding, until he reached the nearest police post. Bang. Bang. He rapped on the door. ‘How could it be locked?’ he said to himself in disbelief. Dejected, he slumped down on to the pavement. All night they had waited for assistance. And now where were the cops? At home in bed screwing their mistresses? A passing motorbike stopped, with two men aboard. They looked aghast. ‘Hey, man, you look like shit,’ the driver said. ‘You need to get to a hospital.’

  Minocha’s chef’s whites were scarlet and his arm was mangled. ‘Make a call for me,’ he implored, pointing with his head to his phone, inside his trouser pocket. He wanted someone to know that he had survived the bloody grinder. The driver found the phone and pressed last-number redial, getting through to Minocha’s Uncle Kamal. ‘I’m alive, going to the hospital,’ Minocha croaked. Kamal had just enough time to tell him about the dismal news reports. Chef Oberoi and many of his kitchen colleagues were thought to have died in the shootout. The motorbike riders took Minocha’s phone off him and wedged him between them to make sure he did not fall. ‘We need to go now, buddy,’ one of them said, fearing that all of the blood had drained out of him.

  5 a.m. – the Chambers

  Inside the Chambers, staff had worked feverishly to close the doors behind the retreating guests. Four pumped-up gunmen were still out there, circling the club like wild dogs, battering at every entrance and service hatch, rattling locks, smashing glass panes, looking for any way in. Chef Raghu Deora, who worked with Kaizad the giant in the Chambers kitchens and was one of Chef Minocha’s closest friends, had volunteered to stay outside, acting as a buffer and a distraction. He was not going to hide from anyone. As he waited, the sound of gunfire revved up like a chainsaw and several people came crashing through the doorway. As they sprawled on the floor he realized they were not gunmen but guests. He had planned his last stand but there was no time to get these people into the locked club. Instead, they would have to remain with him in the danger zone. ‘We are all going to survive,’ he reassured them, adjusting to the new reality. But he was no longer sure. ‘We have to be silent. Take courage.’ But Chef Deora was fearful.