The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel (44 page)

Finding the retired banker K. R. Ramamoorthy was difficult. A quiet man, he had been fearful about talking to anyone about his ordeal, and continued to work in far-flung places as an adviser for the World Bank. When we sat down face to face at his home in leafy Bangalore, Ram, surrounded by his family, revealed how he had also narrowly escaped the 1993 bombings in Mumbai before searching for the right words to encapsulate the terror he encountered fifteen years later during 26/11. Ram has returned to Mumbai many times, although he has never shaken off his feelings of disappointment at being brushed aside by the authorities after he was rescued, even though he had spent more time with the four gunmen inside the Taj than anyone else. He persevered, finally giving a statement in the trial of Ajmal Kasab. When we last emailed each other, he was working in Uganda.

Amit and Varsha Thadani, whose wedding reception in the Crystal Room was pivotal to the Taj’s schedule on Wednesday, 26 November, went back to building their lives together as soon as they could. Sitting in their Pedder Road apartment, a new baby lying
beside them, they described how they decided to leave on a honeymoon to Australia, two days after being rescued, desperate to put the experience behind them, even though some friends thought they should have stayed in the mourning city. But Amit is not one for false sentiment and only he and Varsha knew what they had been through.

Jharna Narang, the sister of Amit’s school friend Gunjan Narang, who died along with his parents in the hotel’s cellars, still lives in Mumbai too and defied the odds from the moment she was pulled, near dead, out of the Taj. Doctors were staggered that she survived the slaughter, and then were confounded by her recovery. After spending months in hospital, treated with forty-eight bottles of blood, her bowel and kidneys having failed, with both legs paralysed at one stage, Jharna eventually learned to walk again. She put her remarkable survival and recovery down to her Buddhist beliefs, which enabled her to reach beyond the terror.

Bob Nicholls and Captain Ravi Dharnidharka stayed in touch after their escape from Souk. On the first anniversary of the Mumbai attacks, Bob – who stills runs Nicholls Steyn & Associates – and his team were guests of honour at a dinner hosted in the restaurant. His Indian operation is thriving: he still works closely with the Taj’s security chief, Sunil Kudiyadi, taking part in the Champions League Twenty20 that was eventually launched in September 2009. Ravi, who returned home to San Diego, became an executive at a Californian aerospace company, but still serves in the 4th Tank Battalion, US Marine Corps Reserve, and remains in contact with his Mumbai family. After his life-threatening experience in the Taj, he married his girlfriend and brought her for dinner in Souk on the second anniversary of the attacks. They now have a young child.

Ratan Kapoor and Nick Edmiston went their own ways after Mumbai, the former moving into India’s nascent Formula 1 project and the latter opening new offices in Mexico City, São Paolo and Moscow. They helped Dion Liveras repatriate his father’s body to London, where Andreas’s daughter told Nick that they felt that his ‘circle of life’ had been completed. The Liveras family held a lavish
funeral at a Greek Cypriot church in North London and in 2010 the
Alysia
was renamed
Moonlight II
and Edmiston sold it on behalf of the family for £60m. After recovering from his own injuries, Andreas’s cruise director, Remesh Cheruvoth, returned to work for the Liveras family, running a super-yacht that Dion had named after his father. When we last caught up, he had arrived in London, where he was managing the assets of a Saudi tycoon.

For Vishwas Patil the Mumbai attacks have still not been adequately explained or investigated and they represent anything but a failure of imagination. Despite his personal feelings, Patil became a hero in Maharashtra, a role model for provincial boys from ordinary families who previously viewed the police service as elitist, his public lectures about 26/11 winning millions of hits on YouTube. He was promoted to Additional Commissioner of Police West Region, moving to Bandra, Mumbai’s glamorous seaside suburb loved by Bollywood’s stars, where we met him in a seafront office with floor-to-ceiling windows. His batch-mate Rajvardhan Sinha was also feted, becoming the new Additional Commissioner Police (economic offences wing) in Mumbai, working from the Crime Branch offices, near Crawford Market.

The Black Cats created a forensic account of every minute wasted and submitted it to the Home Ministry. It is an astonishing document that still makes soldiers angry and details how a combined task force was unofficially mobilized at 10.05 p.m., on Wednesday, 26 November 2008, just twenty-two minutes after the first shots were fired in Leopold’s. By 10.30 p.m., the Black Cats were ready to deploy to the technical area of the nearby Palam airstrip, but it would take another seventy minutes for the Cabinet Secretary, the highest civil servant in the land, to contact the NSG Chief, Jyoti Dutt, warning of a mobilization without giving the go-ahead or revealing transport arrangements.

At 00.12 the Joint Secretary Police (Internal Security), called the NSG, also warning mobilization was likely, without giving the green light, but promising to get a plane from the Chief of the Air Staff. Three minutes later, Brigadier Govind Singh Sisodia (DIG
Ops) moved the task force to Palam airstrip. At 00.34 the most senior civil servant in the ministry, Madhukar Gupta, the Home Secretary, called with news that Maharashtra’s Chief Minister had finally called for the NSG. They had a ‘go’ three hours after the first shots had been fired in the Colaba Causeway, the review concluded.

However, when Dutt called the Air Chief asking for their plane, he was informed the transporter was 156 miles away in Chandigarh, leaving him to call the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), India’s insular foreign intelligence service, for help. RAW agreed to lend an Ilyushin 76, parked at Palam airstrip. But it could only carry 120 troops and their kit, meaning the Black Cats would have to make three trips to Mumbai to scramble a force large enough to counter the raids. The crew were also missing, RAW revealed, and the transporter had not been fuelled. Finding them and filling the Ilyushin would delay the mission further.

Dutt was so anxious that he called the Home Secretary at 00.54, only to find that he was stranded in Pakistan, on government business, and could not get a flight until the morning. ‘Don’t let them take you hostage,’ the NSG chief joked bitterly.

Finally, at 01.45, when chief Dutt tried to leave for the airstrip he was requested to pick up the Home Secretary from his residence, despite advising the minister’s household that this meant a significant deviation from his route. When they arrived at Palam, they found the Black Cats humping their heavy kit by hand into the Ilyushin as no lifting gear was available. The plane took off around 02.30, with a flight time of almost three hours to a city where the slaughter in the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus had started and finished, multiple bombs had exploded, and sieges had set in at Chabad House, the Trident–Oberoi and the Taj.

Around 05.30, Thursday, 27 November, the NSG finally touched down in Mumbai, one hour after the gunmen inside the Taj had begun hunting guests down in the hotel’s darkened cellars having shot up the Kitchen Brigade. However, the report concluded, the promised convoy to transport them downtown did not show. Although a flurry of white Ambassadors and armed outriders turned out for
the Home Secretary, there was no convoy to transport the NSG. It would take several more hours to unpack the plane, by hand, commandeer local buses and ferry the Black Cats to the city.

The NSG report also repeated earlier warnings that had been submitted to the ministry as far back as 2006. Then Dutt had written to explain that its mobilization strategy was ‘critically flawed’. From Delhi it took more than two and a half flying hours to reach most other cities. The NSG proposed creating four regional hubs, but the proposals went unanswered. So did a second report advising the ministry that the Black Cats were ‘limping along’ because of corruption and lethargy in procurement. Presently the men were ‘woefully ill-equipped’. Applications for lightweight boots, Kevlar helmets and modern body armour, as well as hands-free communications sets, were in limbo. They were short of high-powered thermal-imaging units; their lightweight ladders dated from 1985; and they had no useable night vision devices, with one ministry official conceding that the NSG was ‘as good as blind’ and ‘could only work effectively in daylight’.

When the Black Cats flew into Mumbai it was a triumph of men over machinery, chief Dutt reflected to us. The only thing the NSG could be glad about, touching down in the city, was that eight months earlier when they had been deputed to secure a meeting in Delhi, chief Dutt had insisted that thirty Black Cats don their civvies to mingle in a five-star hotel, the first time any of them had been inside a luxurious establishment.

While the public sector floundered, the private sector marched ahead. On 21 December 2008, three weeks after the siege ended, and after surveyors reported that the hotel had not suffered any significant structural damage, the Tata Group took out newspaper advertisements to announce the hotel would soon be back in business: ‘Welcome Home Again . . . Mumbai will rediscover its nesting place and will play host to the world.’

Brigadier Sisodia retired from the NSG and was recruited as Head of Physical Security by the Tata Group. As we walked around
the Taj with him, every nook was a foxhole, and every landing a victory relived, all told of in visceral re-enactments. At the Taj, the Chambers, the Tower and most of the restaurants reopened before Christmas that year. The restored Crystal Room, Sea Lounge and other public areas of the Palace wing reopened the following March. Some rooms were renamed, Sabina’s Sunrise Suite becoming the Bella Vista Suite. The hotel staged a grand relaunch in August 2010, after spending £24111 getting itself straight, having become, in the words of the US President, Barack Obama, who visited that November, ‘a symbol of the strength and resilience of the Indian people’.

Backstage, Hemant Oberoi, the hotel’s Grand Executive Chef, was reinstalled in his cabin on the first floor and the Kitchen Prayer was put back on the wall of the chefs’ staffroom, along with the group photograph by Ian Pereira that shows the senior chefs in their whites, wielding the tools of their trade. With the help of Nitin Minocha, the Golden Dragon chef, whose arm was eventually saved, Oberoi’s Kitchen Brigade returned to work, stepping into the blood-logged kitchens to hold a multi-faith puja or cleansing ritual, then organized new uniforms, crockery and menus for all the restaurants. Chef Oberoi also had a marble slab engraved with the names of those who were killed. Chef Raghu came back from the dead, too, and returned to the Taj after making his stand against the gunmen assailing Chambers.

Others looked further afield, including Shamiana’s manager, Amit Peshave. Immediately after the attacks, despite having lost so many friends, including Hemant Talim of the Golden Dragon, who succumbed to his injuries four days after the attacks, he returned to the Taj. However, he quit and married in 2009, to try his hand working in Europe, although he hopes to return to Mumbai in the near future. We spent three long evenings with him in London, reliving 26/11 and all that he had witnessed. Amit told us how the six-year-old boy he tried to rescue from the Harbour Bar toilets was eventually reunited with his parents and how he is still in touch with the British man whose life he saved but who wanted to remain anonymous.

Florence Martis also distanced herself from the hotel. Awaking from a deep sleep several days after being rescued by the Black Cats, she finally learned that the body of her father had been located in the Sion Hospital mortuary, where he had been identifiable only by the ring he wore. More than 2,000 people turned out for his funeral, which was widely reported in newspapers and on TV. ‘He got the death he wanted, but not in the way he imagined,’ Florence said, showing us local newspaper cuttings that had been laminated. A year after the tragedy, she returned briefly to the Taj kitchens to stand in the meat store where her father had been shot. ‘It was so cold,’ she told us, ‘I could not last there even one minute.’ Florence now works at the Thane headquarters for the Tata group’s Ginger hotels. Her mother took a job at the Taj Public Services Welfare Trust – working to help other victims of the attacks.

Karambir Kang is also still with the Taj group, but no longer in India. One year after 26/11, he married Priya Nagrani, an old college friend, in a tow-key ceremony in Pune, and moved to the United States, where he became director of Taj Hotels in the Americas and General Manager of the Taj Boston. He remains in touch with Nikhil, Sabina’s brother, both of them having shared many thoughts on loss and grieving.

We discovered many of the most important pieces of the story over the border, in the villages of the Pakistani Punjab, where Lashkar continues to thrive. After months of gruelling exploration, we located many relatives of the team of ten gunmen and found that all had been told the same story by Lashkar in the weeks after 26/11, one that had been later rammed home by the ISI – which warned them of the severe consequences of talking. Their sons/brothers/nephews had been martyred in Kashmir, they were told. Some had been killed in battle. Others had drowned in rivers or were frozen to death crossing mountain passes. None had been killed in Mumbai. ‘That’s a fiction created by India and America,’ one father told us, unswervingly, even when confronted with photos of his son’s body lying in a Mumbai morgue.

In the Punjab, Sindh and Islamabad, we shadowed Pakistan’s internal inquiry into the Mumbai assaults, which was a hamstrung affair. The Federal Investigative Authority, the Islamic Republic’s would-be FBI, staffed by diligent investigators, had never previously been allowed to probe Lashkar. But following the global outcry generated by 26/11, the FIA was given the go-ahead, although in a limited way, tracing the Mumbai cash and procurements operation, probing the careers of three of the gunmen and several of their controllers, as well as the outfit’s quartermaster. One of those at the heart of the investigation, the FIA lawyer and prosecutor Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali, who provided much insight and many legal documents, told us that the Mumbai inquiry was an albatross. He was gunned down on his way to work in Islamabad in May 2013, and the case remains unsolved. Along the way Pakistan blamed India for failing to present clear and admissible evidence, a gripe that was true in several important instances, although FIA investigators privately wondered at the complexity and reach of Operation Bombay, which many of them believed could not have been carried out without official knowledge and sanction.