The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel (4 page)

Agha Shahid Ali, ‘Tonight’, in
Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals
(W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 2003)

Prologue

Wednesday, 26 November 2008, 8 p.m.

A sliver of moon hung over the Arabian Sea as the dinghy powered towards the ‘Queen’s Necklace’, the chain of lights strung across Mumbai’s Back Bay. The ten-man crew of Pakistani fighters rode the black waves in silence, listening to the thrum of the outboard motor and hunched over Chinese rucksacks, printed with English logos that read: ‘Changing the Tide’. Ten AK-47s, ten pistols, ammunition, grenades, explosives and timers, maps, water, almonds and raisins – they laid out the contents in their minds. It barely seemed enough to take on the world’s fourth-largest city. ‘Surprise will get you in and fear will scatter the police,’ their instructors had assured them. They had practised night landings, and planting timed bombs in taxis set to explode all over the city, hoping to create the illusion that an army had invaded Mumbai. Brother Ismail, the team leader, held high a GPS unit, programmed with landing coordinates, as the sea sprayed over them, stinging their sunburned faces.

They had volunteered for jihad a year before, and been put through religious indoctrination and military training that had taken them from secret mountain-top camps in Pakistan-administered Kashmir down to safe houses in the swarming port city of Karachi. Four days ago, at dawn on 22 November, they had finally weighed anchor.

One day out in open water, they had hijacked an Indian trawler, the first test of everyone’s mettle. The second had been saying farewell to their handlers, from whom they had become inseparable, and who melted away into the sea mist, heading back to Pakistan. The third was forcing a captured Indian captain to navigate the seized trawler on towards invincible Mumbai, 309 nautical miles
away, in the knowledge that this was the first time they had been alone.

In reality they were not by themselves. A satellite phone linked them back to a control room in Karachi that called regularly with updates. But these were landlocked boys, from impoverished rural communities, who knew only about chickens and goats, and they were stupefied by shooting stars arcing above them. On the second night, 24 November, they had all lain up on deck and imagined being sucked up into the heavens, while one of the ten had told the story of Sinbad, who had explored the Arabian Sea, where ‘the rocky shore was strewn with the wreckage of a thousand gallant ships, while the bones of luckless mariners shone white in the sunshine, and we shuddered to think how soon our own would be added to the heap’.

Finally, on 26 November, the GPS had sounded their arrival off the coast of Mumbai, and they had called Karachi to find out what to do with the captured captain. It fell to Ajmal Kasab to act. He had just turned twenty-one and felt compelled to prove his worth. Two others held the Indian sailor down, while Ajmal slit his throat. Blooded, they jumped into a yellow dinghy that pulled them onwards towards the glistening Indian city.

Each of them, Ajmal recalled, seemed lost in thought. This was a one-way journey that was supposed to culminate with their deaths. There would be no hero’s return, no village
tamasha
(celebration) to fete their victory, and no martyr’s poster in the local mosque to immortalize their bravery. There would be no ringing eulogy printed in a jihad magazine. As they approached the city, Ajmal’s mother, Noor Elahi, was crouched at home by the fire in Faridkot, frying stuffed
parathas
for his younger brother and sister, a pot of thick curd sitting up on the kitchen shelf. She had no idea her favourite son was staring at a rapidly nearing foreign shore, his head filled with instructions to ‘kill relentlessly’.

Ajmal had started on this road in November 2007, with another boy of his age, both of them pledging,
mujahid
-style, to fight for each other until the end. But this boy had had a family who had
talked him back home, while other cadres got homesick and were also fetched by concerned fathers, brothers or uncles. By May 2008, half of the would-be warriors had changed their minds. Ajmal had waited at the camp gates, but no one had come for him. In the end, and alone, he had given himself over to the outfit, signing a testament in which he pledged to ‘cut open the kafir’s jugular to quench my anger’.

Then, the handlers had packed his rucksack and put him to sea with nine others, all of them wearing new Western clothes, sporting cropped hair and carrying fake Indian IDs.

At 8.20 p.m., dry land reared up. As he slipped on the pack, Ajmal remembered a promise made by their
amir
, the cleric who had sent them on their way, conjuring up their deaths: ‘Your faces will glow like the moon. Your bodies will emanate scent, and you will go to paradise.’

The higgledy-piggledy fishermen’s
chawl
(tenement), close to the tourist mecca of Colaba, was deserted when they leapt ashore. Residents were distracted, watching an India-England cricket match on TV. Only local resident Bharat Tandel challenged them, as they ran up to the road: ‘Who are you and where are you going?’ A shouted answer came back: ‘
Hum pehle se hi tang hain. Hume pareshaan mat karo
[We are already stressed, so don’t pester us].’

An hour later, the growl of gunfire and the bark of explosions reverberated across the city.

1.

Jadu ghar
(House of Magic)

Faustine Martis wanted a memorable death. But the senior waiter, who had worked at the Taj for more than two decades, could not find the right time to broach the subject with Florence, his dizzy, 21-year-old chatterbox of a daughter. On their way into the city, Florence loved to talk and normally Faustine was happy to listen. Recently he had got her a job at the hotel, but often their shifts were incompatible. Even when they were on the same roster, they had to contend with the geometry of their commute.

Most mornings, Florence, her black hair streaming, clung on to her father as he weaved on his Honda motorbike through Mumbai’s deafening north-eastern suburbs. Parking up, they then plunged into Thane train station and the crush of the central line. She sat for an hour, humming a
filmi
love song, while he stood jaw to jaw with the other commuters, stacked up like
parathas
in a tiffin.

At Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, one of the busiest stations in India, they took a moment to check their watches beneath the old Victorian railway clock, before picking their way across the heaving concourse to catch a bus to Colaba. Getting off at the Regal cinema, Faustine, decked in his broad-brimmed hat like a cricket umpire, and Florence, fine-boned, tall and picky like a wading bird, strode past the invitation-only Bombay Yacht Club that smelled of stale bread and lemon cake, before entering the heart of tourist Mumbai. Ahead, the Taj rose up, like a grand sandcastle tipped from its mould.

At the hotel’s staff entrance, the Time Office on Merry Weather Road, Faustine, forty-seven, placed a thumbprint on his staff card, while his daughter, just three weeks into a probationary contract,
clocked in, using the antiquated machine on the wall. Kissing her father goodbye, she set off for work in the second-floor Data Centre, from where the Taj Group’s global systems were monitored, while he descended to the basement to change into his white jacket and black trousers, before heading to the first-floor Sea Lounge, where guests took breakfast and high tea.

The next opportunity for talking would not come until evening, around 9 p.m., in the Palm Lounge, an airy conservatory adjacent to the Sea Lounge. Florence liked to sit there on her break, admiring the crowds of honeymooners and tourists swirling around the brightly illuminated Gateway of India, while the chefs spoiled her with a scoop of coffee ice cream.

Faustine had been dwelling on his death for many days now, while Florence had avoided listening to ‘his mawkish thoughts’. The idea had come to a head in the lead-up to his copper anniversary, twenty-two years wed to Precilla. Now, on 26 November, the date was upon him and he had renewed his wedding vows by presenting his wife with a new
mangalsutra
, a gold pendant strung on a yellow thread, and a shimmering gold and green silk sari. To celebrate, he had given Florence a pair of white plimsolls, which she had put on straight away. Faustine had promised to bring something special back for Floyd, his sixteen-year-old son, later that night.

The Taj had been in Faustine’s life longer than he could remember. A Christian, originally from Kerala, he had started working there when the city was still Bombay – a name coined by sixteenth-century Portuguese settlers who had marvelled at its
bom bahi
(good harbour). This view lit up many of the hotel’s restaurants and bars – and could be seen from the best suites, which nowadays commanded up to £5,000 a night.

Faustine had begun, his head crowned with a luxuriant mane of chestnut hair, in room service, where he had remained until the city was renamed Mumbai in 1995 by the Shiv Sena, a Maharashtrian grass roots party, who, railing against migrants and Muslims, turned base chauvinism into political gold. Soon after, he had become a
waiter, and finally the balding Service Captain of the baby blue Sea Lounge, a place for a tryst, with its lucky lovers’ seat, a ying-yang coiling chair. There he was paid to be whatever the customer wanted. It was for this reason that when the time came he wanted to be served by others, his invisible life celebrated by a great and uproarious crowd of mourners. Now all he had to do was pin Florence down, and make her understand.

Tuesday, 25 November 2008, 7 p.m. – the purchase department

A grand hotel such as the Taj was like a galleon inserted in a bottle, a private world that, once entered, the well-heeled need never leave. It consisted of the Palace, the original U-shaped grand hotel, built in 1903 facing the harbour, originally five and later six storeys, plus a modern Tower added in 1973. On the lam from south-west France and fancying a
croustade
, why not try La Patisserie, in the southern corner of the Palace? Back from Af–Pak and needing a book on Gandharan sculpture? The bellboy would show you across the Tower lobby to the Nalanda bookshop. A chiropractor was on call, while Pilates classes were by the pool and depilation and detoxification could be done in the privacy of your room. On the top floor of the Palace, where the most exclusive suites were located, teams of liveried butlers catered to every whim.

The Taj was a beacon, conceived of in the Belle Époque, when its unique grey-and-white basalt façade had become the first landmark visible from the deck of approaching Peninsular & Oriental liners. A confection of ornate balconies and bay windows, topped off by triumphant pink cupolas and a central dome, it had shimmered in the early-morning haze for more than a hundred years, and was described as Mumbai’s
jadu ghar
, the House of Magic.

In the old days, as the passenger ships came into view, a bell rang in the bowels of the hotel, alerting the staff to the imminent off-loading of wealthy travellers, who would be welcomed with the
ethos
atithi devo bhava
(the guest is god). This idea was conceived by the hotel’s founder, Jamsetji Tata, a Parsi industrialist and philanthropist, who had wanted to build a hotel that pointed to the future, making everyone forget the dying years of the nineteenth century, when Bombay had been ravaged by plague. Today, new recruits like Florence Martis were issued with crib cards that they carried in their shirt pockets and that set out Tata’s historic values.

This entire spectacle took martial organization, overseen by the man described by his staff as the god of the backstage, Grand Executive Chef Hemant Oberoi. Small, portly and poised, with a salt-and-pepper moustache and a high forehead that glistened when the kitchens galloped at full tilt, Oberoi ruled his realm from a tiny cabin he called his
adda
(sanctuary), which was crammed with more than two dozen Ganeshas, flags and citations from leading chefs around the world. It was situated at the heart of the first-floor service area that straddled the Palace and the Tower, and a ceramic tile hung on the wall: ‘So bless my little kitchen, Lord,/And those who enter in,/And may they find naught but joy and peace,/And happiness therein.’

Planning for the day ahead started the evening before, after Faustine Martis and the Sea Lounge day shift had gone home. Oberoi had to make sure there was just enough of anything perishable (kept in walk-in cold stores) to get them through the lunchtime and evening sittings: sole for the French-themed Zodiac Grill, shellfish for Masala Kraft’s signature prawn skewers, and fatty tuna flown in daily from the Maldives for Wasabi’s sushi chefs. For meat and poultry alone there were more than twenty suppliers kept on call to ensure that nothing ever ran out.

Serving fresh dishes from around the world – in a city where temperatures sometimes reached 38 degrees Celsius and the air could be laden with 80 per cent humidity – required special measures. Supercooled containers from the city’s docks fought for space outside the delivery entrance with lorries filled with sticky Alphonso mangos from down the coast in Ratnagiri, and musty truckles of Kalimpong cheese from the hill stations of the north-east. Cycle rickshaws and
handcarts darted in and out, delivering fruit, nuts and herbs from local markets, with spice mixes like masala powder ground to each chef’s taste. In the delivery hall, boxes were sorted and dispatched by hand: chickens and lamb to the butchery on the first floor of the Palace,
charcuterie
to the cold store behind. Too much, and it would all turn to mush. Too little, and Oberoi’s chefs would grind to a halt.

By midnight, on the cusp of 26 November, when the sleeping crows were propped up like dominoes in the trees around Apollo Bunder, Chef Oberoi was still working. The hotel was in the jaws of the wedding season and he knew that tomorrow every one of the Taj’s dozen restaurants and bars was fully booked for breakfast, lunch and dinner. His kitchens would be expected to turn out thousands of meals that broke down into 100 kilos of rice, 20,000 eggs, 200 kilos of prawns to peel, hundreds of fresh coconuts to chop, 200 kilos of flour and six trucks of vegetables and fruit. Later, there would be 30,000 pieces of linen to wash down in the laundry, soaking up 100 gallons of cleaning products. He wearily ticked the boxes, signing off on everything.