The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel (38 page)

He pulled Varsha away, intent on getting as far from the Taj as he could, as quickly as possible. He needed to get home to their Pedder Road apartment. If a policeman stopped him, he would hang around. That would be the only thing that could delay him. Amit was mad now. He wanted to detail everything. He wanted to see the gunmen hang. Over the last nine hours, he had story-boarded everything he had heard, observed, seen and smelled. Neither of them could forget the sound of the woman next door being hauled from her hiding place and killed. But the detectives he approached seemed irritable. ‘Indian rules,’ he said to himself, thinking how spectacularly bad the subcontinent was at endings.

As they walked away from the remnants of their wedding
reception, Amit glimpsed a figure he recognized. A man who lived by his fecund memory for faces, he struggled to recall the name. So much had happened this evening and his head was pounding. But the big man with a military countenance continued towards them. He appeared spectral as he drew nearer. Grey-faced, unshaven and his eyes ringed with dark lines, he reached out, offering his large hands. ‘If there is anything we can do for you, please go to the President hotel, where we will look after you.’ The man smiled, and while Amit had no doubt he was genuine, he looked frozen inside. ‘Who was that?’ Varsha asked, noticing the stranger’s striking eyes. ‘Karambir Kang,’ Amit muttered, incredulous, ‘his family live . . . lived on the sixth floor.’

Varsha looked up to the top floor still in flames. ‘They can’t have made it,’ she said, sobbing. Work is all that is keeping him together right now, Amit thought, recalling a story someone had once told him about how the Taj General Manager had got his name. His mother had gone to see a Sikh holyman, who came up with Dusht Daman, the ‘destroyer of demons’. That was no name for a child, she had said, settling instead on Karambir, ‘a person who does brave deeds’.

Amit called his brother, whom he had rounded on earlier in the evening. They met at the Gateway, and any bad feelings evaporated. ‘Glad you could join us,’ his brother quipped. ‘We were always in charge,’ Amit responded, smiling widely for the first time, his trademark laconic manner back in play. ‘Take us home,’ he said. They needed a shower and a change of clothes. He had to eat. Amit was ravenous.

As they drove off, a commotion started up further along the Taj’s front flank. A passer-by had heard groaning and gone to investigate, finding a prone figure. ‘It’s a foreigner,’ he shouted. ‘Get an ambulance now.’ A crew on standby pulled closer, investigating the young Caucasian man in his twenties, with a patchy beard and floppy hair.

‘He is alive,’ one of them said, listening to his laboured breathing. ‘Can you tell us your name? Your country?’ The injured man groaned, his eyes rolling. They tied a brace around his neck, and slid
a stretcher beneath him. He cried out as they lifted it and slid him into the back of an ambulance that headed for Bombay Hospital.

In a ground floor examination room, his clothes were cut away, while an A&E doctor investigated his injuries, a nurse on standby with sedatives. ‘Pelvis smashed,’ the doctor wrote, as the patient let out a wail. On closer inspection, he saw the pelvis had split in two, a break so severe that great force must have been applied to the top or bottom of the bone. ‘This guy fell or jumped,’ the doctor said, feeling his way around the patient’s body and joints.

‘Right elbow smashed,’ he wrote. Left hand fractured, where he had tried to break his fall. He would need X-rays and an MRI scan. The doctor worried that the spine was also broken, as his legs seemed insensate. The pain was concentrated in the upper body, which meant that the main injury was in the curve of his back. The doctor hoped his diagnosis was wrong, as a T12 fracture meant paralysis. A nurse prepared an injection and the patient’s eyes flashed open. Panicking, he tried to flail, before realizing his limbs could barely move. He began shouting at the top of his lungs: ‘Kelly, Kelly, Kelly.’

6.50 a.m. – the Chambers

Inside the Taj’s private club, sunlight burned around the edges of the blackout curtains. After almost seven hours of darkness, morning seemed like a blessing for Bhisham Mansukhani, lifting his mood, until he saw the evidence of what they had gone through: the flurries of bullet holes in the walls. The journalist wished it were over. He was sick of waiting to die.

A scuffle broke out somewhere. Sweary voices, a pot thrown or a pan dropped and the firing began again. A glass panel shattered. The gunmen were prowling. He looked over to his mother’s friend, Dr Tilu, who was still working on Rajan Kamble, the injured engineer. Everyone could smell the infection in the wound now. The patient was slipping. Bhisham seethed at the lacklustre response to this crisis. Why after all these hours was there no rescue party? He
stared at Dr Tilu’s wan face and that of his peaceful mother and an awful thought came to mind that threw him back into a sickening panic. Daylight had removed their only cover. He wondered, firing up his phone, what had happened to everyone else out there. ‘Amit, are you out? Is Varsha OK? Pls respond.’ Nothing came back.

He messaged his friend Anahita at 6.52 a.m.: ‘There’ [sic] heavy firing outside.’ Had she heard anything about a rescue on the news?

Bhisham felt as if he were sinking. Friends on the outside sensed it too and rallied round. At 7.23 a.m., another friend, Antoine texted: ‘Hang in there, we’re all waiting for you.’

Three minutes later, Bhisham replied limply: ‘I hope I get out I hope everyone does.’

At 7.38 a.m. Antoine got back to him: ‘Im sure u will. The police are almost in control.’

How did he know? The Chambers still vibrated to automatic-weapon fire. Bhisham looked over to his mother, eyes half closed as she prayed. He resented how she twisted the ordinary as proof of the extraordinary, how her goodness made him feel bad. He was irritated by her proselytizing teetotal lifestyle and unwavering vegetarianism, while he could think of nothing better than a glass of ruddy Montepulciano. Their continued presence here, trapped in Chambers, with gunmen firing around them, demonstrated to him that there was no ultimate being. It was all in the roll of the dice. But in her expression he could see the opposite. She thinks that we have all survived so far
because
of her beliefs, Bhisham told himself.

Down the hall in the library, Anjali Pollack was also wondering what daylight would bring. Her children would be awake soon and she was not around to get them up. She texted Mike in his bolt-hole as the
ack, ack, ack
wound up again. How long could this go on for? He replied instantly. He was safe. That was as good a piece of news as she could hope for.

Slumped against a sofa on the other side of the room, Andreas’s cruise director, Remesh Cheruvoth, had managed to remain conscious, although his shirt and trousers were drenched in blood. His shoulder and back burned, where two bullets had struck. He needed
to make a move, if he could, and he wanted to get Andreas Liveras up too, but the boss had dozed off on the couch. A mobile alarm went off. ‘Pah. Pah. Pah.’ A wave of shushing and tutting broke across the room, as terrified guests urged for the noise to be silenced. It was Remesh’s phone. ‘My fault,’ he groaned. He looked about him, seeing testy, resentful faces. He wanted to sit up and scream: ‘I’ve been shot and never made a sound.’ But making a fuss was not his style.

Naomi, one of the
Alysia
’s spa girls, gently squeezed his arm. ‘Remesh,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t talk now,’ he replied, wincing. She tugged at his sleeve again.
‘Remesh.’
He did not understand. She crawled over to him. ‘Mr L.,’ she said. He nodded. ‘Mr L. is
dead
.’ Remesh shook his head. ‘Look,’ he said, pinching Andrea’s leg. But there was no reaction and the flesh felt cold. Remesh ran his hands over his boss’s body, praying that she was wrong. He reeled as he saw a bloody clot on Liveras’s ashen temple. A single bullet had passed through his head. He had been dead for two hours already and Remesh had even not realized.

Remesh was devastated. They had known one another for almost a decade after first meeting at the Dubai boat show, common love of the sea bringing the calm Keralan and the upstart Cypriot together. He had worked for Mr Liveras for four years, and come to love his irascible boss who gave up every Christmas and Easter to fly down to the Maldives for a special lunch with all of his staff, from the deckhands to the captains. Now, in their greatest hour of need, Remesh felt he had betrayed him. He wriggled his phone free and rang the captain of the
Alysia.
‘Mr L. is dead,’ he whispered, crying gently, adding that he and the girls were trapped. Then he called Dion, Liveras’s son, whom he knew well, in London. ‘Mr Dion,’ Remesh urged, barely audible, and now lying down on the floor of Chambers, the only position in which he felt no pain: ‘I am so sorry, but your dad has gone. Mr L. has gone. Please believe me, we tried our best.’ He said nothing about his own injuries as Dion inhaled. ‘Oh God,’ he said, ‘Remesh, are you OK?’ He was floored. ‘We have to update our people, and the family. I’ll get on to it now.’

Remesh’s head swam with grief. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a small group of guests slipping out into the corridor. What
were they thinking?
Ack, ack, ack.
Those still inside the room could smell the woody notes of splintered panelling, as the same guests hurtled back, diving on to their bellies.
Ack, ack, ack.
The firing seemed to be coming from all sides with renewed vigour. Rounds were pouring into the corridor outside. Remesh covered his ears, not sure how much longer he could go on, seeing guests pull out their phones as the library came alive with text messages. One woman piped up: ‘Government has launched an operation. NSG is in the city. The Black Cats are coming to the Taj.’ A shiver of excitement went around the room.

Remesh fell back, allowing his mind to drift to Calicut, his home town, the city of spices on the Malabar Coast in Kerala, where his wife and six-year-old son were waiting for news. In the panic of last night, he had not even called them. ‘Good morning,’ he said, ringing now. ‘I mustn’t be long as I’m stuck in the Taj. But it’s nothing to worry about. Got nicked by some broken glass. Can mend it. Pray for me. Love you all.’

Out in the harbour, the guests and crew had begun stirring on the
Alysia
as the sun began to warm the deck. All of them were immediately transfixed by the still-burning Taj. The night had passed but not the danger. For the first time, they could see the extent of the chaos around the grand old hotel: flames coiling and writhing, fire trucks manoeuvring around police cars, camouflaged lorries and khaki jeeps revving. Huge crowds heed and hawed, as firemen plucked guests to safety.

Nick Edmiston stared in the opposite direction, into the sea mist. He had barely slept: all night the navy had been firing flares, anxious to illuminate the dark waters lest more gunmen were sailing in. Every purple and crimson burst had lit up the
Alysia.
What if someone shore-side had taken a pot-shot at them, as the largest, most alien thing in the water? Or would they be boarded? A boat filled with enough fuel to go 5,000 miles would make for a handy escape rig. They had spent a desperate night calculating where to hide and working out what could be utilized as a weapon. All they had found was a small space that would have made a tidy
priest hole and housed an emergency generator and an axe. Nick wondered who was capable of wielding it.

Now, staring into the mid-distance, watching small fishing vessels emerge from the horizon, returning with their catch, he had different concerns. They would have left last night without knowing what had happened and were returning to a city that did not exist any more. There could also be gunmen among them for all he knew. Everything looked hostile.

The Estonian captain came over, drawing Nick aside. ‘Sir, I have terrible news,’ he said. ‘Mr Liveras is dead. I’m truly sorry.’ Nick blanched, unable to take it in. They had not heard from Andreas for a while but had simply assumed his phone was flat. ‘Don’t say anything for now,’ Nick said, dry-eyed, his logical head taking over. ‘Let’s get this boat cleared out, and then we can work things out for Andreas.’

A launch pulled up to relay guests ashore. Nick’s Indian partner, Ratan Kapoor, had pulled some strings and got his wealthy, entrepreneurial father to call Vijay Mallya, the brewery and airline tycoon, a man with considerable maritime resources. Mallya employed a retired commodore as head of his fleet and this man had requested his serving navy colleagues to grant permission for an evacuation to begin. Some of the ‘Ultras’ were ferried for thirty minutes across the bay to Alibag. They, too, had been calling their contacts all night, telling their drivers to set off for an agreed rendezvous out of the city. Their diamante belt buckles and patent shoes, their leather trousers and satin gowns, struck a discordant note in the rude daylight. ‘They don’t want to get snared in Mumbai’s chaos,’ Ratan explained to Nick. All the guests who had the resources to make it happen had been calculating how to shake loose from their burning city.

Finally the
Alysia
was calm. With the boat powered down, only the Edmistons and their staff remained aboard. Nick found his son Woody. ‘Andreas is dead,’ he said. His voice sounded confessional. Woody gulped. ‘How the hell . . . ?’ Irrepressible Andreas had led a charmed life. ‘It doesn’t seem possible.’ Woody looked at his buttoned-up father. Why did he never show any emotion? ‘Don’t
you care?’ Woody raged. Nick suddenly let out a roar, his eyes welling up, as all the tensions of the night gushed out.

Watching the Taj burn in daylight on their television screen, a distraught Chef Urbano Rego prayed for his son. He had heard from Boris, the Shamiana chef, sometime in the twilight hours, when he had called to confirm that Boris had, somehow, escaped the kitchen slaughter. Urbano had been euphoric. His 25-year-old son had only joined the Taj in June.

The family had received another call at dawn, an unmistakeable voice whispering into the handset. ‘I’m still safe. Don’t worry about me.’ It was Boris once more. The young chef had slipped the gunmen again. ‘I am in the cellar,’ he said. ‘There might be hundreds of us down here.’