The Hindu Business Line : Shell shocked!

It is called late evening in Mumbai. Yes, 9.30 pm is called late evening in a city which works, enjoys and celebrates all 24 hours. And that is when the first shots were heard on Wednesday.

Our home is 400 metres from the Leopold Café on one side, 500 metres from the Taj and probably 800 metres from the Trident, 200 metres from Nariman Bhavan, 3 km from CST station and just 100 metres from the place where the brutes landed to create one of the most scary and fateful evenings in Mumbai.

The same shots, again and again

Caught in the midst, I became a sound witness to each shell being fired and each grenade being lobbed. The first gunshots were heard around 9.30 pm and I dismissed it as crackers in celebration of a wedding or the cricket match that was on then. But at 11 pm there was a big noise from a massive explosion and even as we were wondering what it was, a friend living in an upstairs apartment with a better view called to inform about the explosion at the Taj.

We immediately switched on the TV that was already beaming footage of the action at the Taj, Oberoi and CST. The channels were creating much cacophony, showing long shots of CST station, the scattered limbs and the bloodied clothes of the wounded, repeating the same statements, the same shots again and again.

Statements such as “we understand that 80 people are stuck inside the Taj hotel on one floor, and so you can imagine how many people are stuck in all” reminded me of unitary method exercises we used to do in Class 8 to solve arithmetic problems. If a terrorist can be defined as somebody who creates terror, then the media fitted the bill perfectly! The events at Vile Parle were not known then.

Landmarks under attack

We tried to sleep but there were intermittent blasts through the night and then we saw smoke billowing from the top of the beloved Taj and the fire was clearly visible. The Taj and the Oberoi are like the twin towers of New York and when you see that the landmarks are under attack and don’t know the extent of what is happening right in our backyard, the chaos and confusion is very scary indeed.

We slept for barely 3 hours and were up at 5 am but it was still more of the same on TV which was reporting a city under siege but the scene outside our house in Colaba was normal. Buses were running as were other private vehicles. And, then, at 6.30 am the seriousness of the situation seemed to have finally sunk in on the authorities who called in commandos.

Bracing for the worst

Meanwhile, the action was hotting up next door at Nariman Bhavan where terrorists were supposed to have jumped off from the adjacent Chopra House. A chill ran down my spine; if they could jump into Nariman Bhavan then they could also jump from there into our building which was close by.

There was a lot of speculation about the number of terrorists, how they were armed to the teeth, taking hostages… even as we were bracing for the worst, came the image on screen of our neighbouring petrol bunk blown apart by a hand grenade. One more such blast there and the whole of Colaba would have been blown up thanks to the fuel stored in the underground tanks.

By 9.30 am, the roads were deserted as people decided to stay indoors. Even then, a full 12 hours after the first attack, there was nobody from government explaining what was happening. The TV said a Cabinet meeting was scheduled for 11 am but President-elect Obama was done with his meeting well before even our Cabinet met! Almost 20 hours later as I write this piece, we can still hear gun shots and blasts from the Taj and the Oberoi. There goes another blast in the Oberoi…A long night to go but we will survive, if for nothing but only to show to such forces that the Indian spirit is indomitable and that Mumbai, despite all it faces, still rocks!

(The author is a corporate executive.)