On Thursday, November 27, I made the ride from Express Towers to the domestic air terminal at Santa Cruz in 45 minutes flat. Since this was with the black and yellow taxi, I suspect the new models would have done it even faster. Sunday ko bhi eisa traffic nehi milta, my taxi driver noted gleefully. Corporate India had basically shut down although no curfew had been officially declared. If you wanted to meet anyone in South Mumbai on Thursday without confronting crowds, you just needed to tap two places?the sea front off Trident and the Gateway of India. The army personnel, NSG and police made up the rest of the population till Peddar Road. The remaining, including 25 terrorists, were in the two hotels and at Nariman House.
It will be debated for a long time, why these terrorists did not get more corpses on Wednesday evening. Like most other days, the Taj and the Trident were playing host to at least eight events each on that night. As I left Trident just a few minutes before the carnage began, I had counted off nine events listed for the evening including an IIMA do that the Financial Express was partnering. In fact, 200 odd metres off the Taj promenade, there are another three hotels, in whose roadside lawns there were a large number of foreigners chatting away over their dinner, while the rest converged at the Kebab joints and at Leopold and Mondegar.
About two hours later, when I returned at 11.30 pm, the only sounds I could hear were the ricocheting noises of automatic rifles and the whistles of the traffic police frantically waving cars away from the area. It was still business as usual at Express Towers, its nearest neighbour just across the road. The seriousness of the attack became apparent only after a grenade exploded from the direction of the Taj. In front of the front gate of the Taj, there were about 50 press persons, mostly camera people and just about two police jail vans and five police men with .303 rifles. As the gun fire would intensify sporadically from the general direction of the building, my colleague and I would move back towards our vehicle and so would the policemen. The enormity of the strike was just not comprehensible to me at least, and to the policemen on duty I suspect. One of them explained that two guys had landed at the Taj but they had been ?neutralised? by now. It was then that the gun fire erupted again.
Of all the vignettes of that night that stay with me as I travelled past the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus and other places, the one that remains dominant was the look of surprise on the faces of the policemen. In any case, once past Colaba, upto Mahim, there was only one check point just before the station. The Mumbai police seemed to have made up their mind that the terrorists would not try to escape from their positions. They were right as it turns out, but how did they know then!
As I saw it, the operations against the terrorists did not really take two nights in Mumbai. Wednesday night was just a long endless night of discovery for the Mumbai police and for everybody else. The scale and the magnitude of the attack was only just getting unravelled as the dawn broke. The people of Mumbai woke up to find that the nightmare they had slept through had become a bad reality.
Last nights? cameramen were now joined by literally an army of reporters from every news organisation in India and abroad, forming a respectful semi-circle outside Taj. At the other end of the street were firemen endlessly going up and down the snorkels to douse the next burst of fire. Along with some stragglers who were taking it all in with their mobile cameras, the lathi wielding policemen also watched and ate their tiffin.
The staff at the airport was lining up passengers for a detailed security drill that one associates only with El Al, the Israeli airline. Yet, no one complained.
?subhomoy.bhattacharjee@expressindia.com
