The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel (8 page)

For a few moments they chatted with him about Goa. He had been there once or twice and a cousin ran a bar. But soon he became distracted by the noise of firecrackers and shouting out in the street, and called over his manager, Amit Peshave. ‘What’s the kerfuffle?’ Amit shrugged: ‘It’s nothing.’ The manager was still fretting about his Italian report. When was he going to file it? He rushed off to see what was going on in Shamiana, at the rear of the main lobby.

Kelly and Will paid up and went to check in online for their flights home. Will sent a quick email to his father and siblings too. He was looking forward to a beer, some music and a game at the Arsenal. ‘Fancy coming over for a curry on Sunday?’ he signed off. ‘I’m cooking.’

Up on the sixth floor of the Palace, the critic Sabina Saikia was in her suite, dressed in a beautiful sari, a large Hindu
bindi
on her forehead and with her hair pulled into a tight bun on top of her head. She had made it out to the society wedding in Parsi Hall only
to beat a retreat back to the Taj, her head spinning, her kidneys aching. After three days of eating and drinking, her body had revolted, and when her butler had come over to help, she had vomited on his shoe. Unflappable, he got on with clearing up the mess, asking if she needed a doctor. Mortified, Sabina sent him out for medicine, needing to be on her own.

She texted Ambreen Khan for advice, sounding addled and upset. ‘Throw on your track pants,’ Ambreen suggested, adding that she would call round as soon as her function at the Trident-Oberoi was over. Sabina looked out of the window at a sleek yacht gleaming in the harbour. It looked like a party was going on. She texted Ambreen again: ‘Come over, I’ve lit candles, there are flowers and dinner. I’m waiting for you.’

A few paces away, in their sixth-floor apartment, Karambir Kang’s family was back after an afternoon shopping trip. Elder son Uday was busy working on a school project and Samar was preparing for his Cathedral School admission interview on 3 December. The boys seemed so happy and full of life, so Neeti made a snap decision to get new portraits taken as a surprise for her husband. She called down to the photographers in Taj Memories, a studio on the first floor. Pearl Dubash, the manager, arranged for someone to come at 8 p.m. Neeti called Karambir for a catch-up. The traffic had been grinding as expected, but he had arrived at the Taj Lands End party. They were putting on quite a show, he said, and there was a rumour that Bollywood top-draw Shah Rukh Khan might turn up. He promised to slip away as soon as he could. Neeti said she had something for him. ‘Well the kids do,’ she confided. The photo would be their surprise.

9 p.m. – the Tower lobby

Suited visitors and wedding guests in saris and gowns filtered in, heading for the Crystal Room reception or dinner, walking across the white Italian marble and apricot silk rugs. Guests sat in the
lobby’s scooped-back chairs sipping
nimbu pani
(lemonade) from heavy crystal glasses that rested on nests of onyx tables.

Outside on the steps, a scrum of noisy MEPs and their staff spilled out of their bus, greeted with marigold garlands. Propping up the check-in counter were six burly ex-commandos who worked for Nicholls Steyn & Associates, a South African VIP protection company that had many lucrative contracts, including providing security advice to the annual Oscars ceremony in Los Angeles. Hired by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), they were part of the advance team for the forthcoming Champions League Twenty20 cricket tournament and had arrived off the back of another job in Dubai. It had been a late night – fireworks and a performance by Kylie Minogue – and they were feeling groggy.

‘Go and dump the luggage,’ Bob Nicholls, the British-born boss, told his men. He had been in town for a couple of days already, meeting with Sunil Kudiyadi, the Taj’s security chief, Karambir Kang, the police and the BCCI. ‘Let’s eat and have a few beers.’ The new arrivals wanted Chinese. But the only available table for seven was up in Souk, on the top floor of the Tower. ‘More goat,’ one of the commandos muttered, as they went to freshen up.

By 9.15 p.m., the sleek, glass-walled Souk, in the crow’s nest of the Tower, with its big views out over the Gateway of India and the Arabian Sea, was filling up with diners. Nicholls and his team sat hunched in conversation around one of the glass tables by the windows. Mumbai police were taking their time to embrace the security needs of the forthcoming cricket tournament and over the next couple of days they would have to pile on the pressure.

Across the room, Ravi Dharnidharka, a 31-year-old US Marine captain and fighter pilot of Indian descent, took a table against the far wall. He was with his brother and their Indian relatives. It was the San Diego-based Ravi’s first time in Mumbai since coming over with his father as a teenager. After his father had died unexpectedly young, Ravi had lost touch with the Mumbai side of the family and had not seen his grandfather for thirteen years. For a long time, he had ‘wanted to reconnect’, but he had got enmeshed in two
rough tours of Iraq, including flying combat missions during Operation Phantom Fury, the ferocious battle for Fallujah that began in November 2004. Led by the Marine Corps, more than a hundred US soldiers had been killed along with thousands of Iraqis. Ravi, who flew Harriers to soften up insurgent strongholds, had ‘literally hit the ground running’. When he eventually got home, he took a while to readjust.

Now he had found the time to make it over to India, and the past ten days had been a whirlwind of old and new relatives. Wrapped up for the past four years in America’s ‘war on terror’ as he had been, mixed feelings about his own foreign-ness and Asian roots swam around his head. Earlier this evening, he had gone to meet a cousin who lived close to Badhwar Park, off Cuffe Parade, and she had shown him the view from her window over the fishermen’s huts lining a small inlet where brightly painted boats were anchored. As he watched the sun set and the fishermen mend their nets, he had felt truly relaxed for the first time in years. Now he was looking forward to a good dinner and a catch-up with another cousin. Later, they had plans to meet up with relatives who were eating at the Trident-Oberoi hotel. His cousin pointed to it through the Souk windows, all lit up like a lighthouse at Nariman Point. ‘What an amazing view,’ he commented. ‘It’s like sitting in fishbowl on top of world.’

Down in the Tower lobby, a calm was returning as the diners and wedding guests dispersed. Moreno Alphonso, the Taj pianist, finished off ‘Always’. Six nights a week, this balding music teacher, whose father had played violin here in the thirties, manned the grand piano to the right of the main glass doors. ‘Al’ had worked at the hotel almost all his life; his earliest memories were of sitting with his brother on little wooden stools, their names inscribed under the seats, accompanying their father. He looked at his watch: 21.36. It was time for his mid-evening break. Al put down the lid and slipped out through an unmarked staff door.

2.

Prince David

When David Headley walked into the Taj for the first time in September 2006, he had been so impressed by its easy opulence, by the graceful staff and convivial regulars, that he wondered if he would be able to plot its demise. The grandeur reminded him of his own aristocratic antecedence, of his family’s great wealth and influence, stories he had learned on the lap of his mother.

The
chobedars
hollered greetings as they threw back the doors, saluting as if they were posted especially for him. The citrus and talcum smell of frangipani in the Tower lobby, not to mention the view through the Sea Lounge’s windows that made the crowded Gateway of India look like a well-crafted diorama, almost convinced Headley that the hotel was something secular and precious that was worth saving.

Headley found this city of insomniacs invigorating. He greedily ingested its history, how the archipelago of seven islands had been a gift to King Charles II as part of the dowry from his new wife, Catherine of Braganza, in 1661, although up until the nineteenth century it was predominantly inhabited by Koli fishermen. Then Parsi migrants like the Tatas built empires (and the Taj) out of the saline swamp, and transformed the city into the busiest seaport in Asia and the capital of the Bombay Presidency, one of the most prosperous and peaceful regions in British India. Headley was impressed by the Tatas’ determination. He loved the frenzy of Mumbai with its sharp-elbowed, entrepreneurial spirit. It was just the
idea
of India – the land of his paternal forefathers – he despised. And he used this hair’s-breadth chink, between the city and the country, between the people and what he described as ‘their Hindu rulers’, to justify his covert project to bring death and mayhem.

On his first visit, he could not afford to stay at the Taj, since his work had just begun and the budget was tight. But here, like most places where he had grafted, appearances were everything. He found himself a Grade-A address, a private rooming house in the upmarket Breach Candy neighbourhood four and a half miles away, bandying it about the Taj, where he became a fixture. Waiters, managers and guests saw him regularly quaffing a glass of Dom Pérignon in the Harbour Bar or entertaining someone he would introduce as ‘a client’ up in Faustine Martis’s Sea Lounge, telling his companions in his loud American voice about his ‘cool Breach Candy bachelor pad’.

Headley was unmissable: six foot two, his blond hair scraped back in a ponytail, broad-shouldered like a prop and with a fair complexion, dressed in crumpled Armani jeans and shirt, a leather jacket hung over his shoulder. He carried himself like he might be dangerous, with a £10,000 Rolex Submariner poking out of his cuff. But he mingled easily and in the Starboard Bar, in the Taj lobby, and in the Aquarius, by the pool, Mumbaikers argued over who knew him best, and told stories about the women who fawned over him. David would listen to your troubles and high-five you. ‘Yeah, no problem,’ he’d say. ‘Whatever you want.’ David was cool. ‘I can help you.’ He was resourceful and generous. ‘Let me get that.’

But anyone who knew him as David – an American entrepreneur from Philadelphia – only had half the story. To his sister Sherry and half-brothers Hamzah and Danyal, to his wives Portia, Shazia and Faiza, to his cousins Farid and Alex, his Uncle William, his best friend, Tahawwur Rana, and to Major Iqbal, a spy employed by the ISI, Pakistan’s pervasive Inter-Services Intelligence, he was Daood Saleem Gilani – an American of Pakistani descent.

This mixed heritage and muddled ancestry that had got him to India in the first place, doing reconnaissance for a terrorist assault, was strikingly represented in his mismatched eyes: one blue and one brown.

Daood’s father, Syed Saleem Gilani, was a renowned Pakistani radio broadcaster from a well-connected Lahori family. Serrill Headley, his mother, was an heiress and adventuress from Maryland. Her
great-aunt had been an American philanthropist and maverick who funded women’s rights and even Albert Einstein’s research. But Serrill’s privileged childhood was struck by tragedy in 1952 when her father, a former college football star, died after being hit by a bullet while trying to break up a bar fight. Serrill’s mother and her four children made a fresh start in neighbouring Pennsylvania, buying a large farm in the Main Line, an affluent suburb of Philadelphia. But Serrill, who was thirteen when her father died, became uncontrollable. When she met Gilani, who was on secondment to Voice of America, she was a nineteen-year-old undergraduate at the University of Maryland and it had been like ‘two flints striking’. Gilani, cultured and sophisticated, was famed in Pakistan as a connoisseur of traditional ghazals and he wooed her with music. After Daood was born in 1960, in Washington DC, Serrill agreed to move to Pakistan, excited by the prospect of an adventure. But what had worked on the East Coast, in a Federal-era town house, fizzled out in the gated Abbas House in Lahore, Gilani’s ancestral home. In 1966 they divorced, and Serrill married an aged Afghan insurance executive, leaving Daood to be brought up by Gilani’s second wife, a well-connected Lahore heiress.

Feeling rejected, Daood became as uncontrollable as his absent mother had once been. To straighten him out his father enrolled him at a cadet college in a small town in the western Punjab, popular with military families. Although Gilani was not an officer, he shared their milieu. He was a
mohajir
, a migrant from India, his family originating from Kapurthala in the Punjab, from where they had been forced out in the pogroms kickstarted by Partition. Its bloody spectre hung over the Gilani dinner table, while hostilities with India were also framed in the cadet college classroom and re-enacted on its parade ground.

Like his American mother, Daood was reluctant to buckle down, and was constantly reminded of his foreignness by his Pakistani family, which was soon augmented by two new brothers, Danyal and Hamzah. At the first opportunity, when he was sixteen, Daood flew to the US to be reunited with his mother. Serrill had moved back to Philadelphia after her Afghan husband had died and bought a former speakeasy
on Second Street near Chestnut, in what was then a rougher part of town, transforming the place into the Khyber Pass Pub, rigging a Pakistani
shamiana
(wedding tent) in the garden. She was, however, distracted by a new man, a reporter with the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, and left her long-lost son to the care of pub regulars, who tagged him ‘the Prince’. Daood, a conversative Muslim teenager living above a pub, struggled with his new life. His Uncle William, Serrill’s brother, recalled that he spent most of his time transfixed by
Happy Days
on the pub TV, waiting for his mother to come home. But eventually he embraced what America in the seventies had to offer. A local TV channel came down to make a programme about the pub and filmed Daood with his crewcut grown out and his hair to his shoulders, his long legs flapping in flares, Serrill resplendent in a full-length fur coat. Within two years he had moved to Manhattan, using family money to rent an upmarket apartment on the Upper West Side, opening a video store.