The defining moment of the 26-29 November 2008 attacks on Bombay came the first night. We were a group of journalists standing at the Taj Mahal Hotel. We had rushed here from Chhatrapati Shivaji (formerly 'Victoria') Terminus, where we had earlier gathered on hearing the sounds of gunshots and explosions. Soon, we began to realise the enormity of what had hit our city. Just before the Taj, at the Regal Circle, stood a group of hotel staff still dressed in their uniforms. "No interviews," warned a well-built man among them. We stood staring for a while, but they looked away in silence. As we reached the Taj, two senior politicians were making their way to the site, surrounded by a mob of television cameras and journalists. We stood near the Gateway of India in darkness. "Don't use flashes or lights!" shouted the policemen. Ahead was the hotel, its side, near the famous dome, bursting into flames, blazing in the darkness, the windows of its guestrooms backlit by the fires raging inside. We were told that grenades were being lobbed on the road outside, and warned to keep a safe distance.
We moved slowly to the road in front of the hotel, on the edge of the waterfront. We could see people inside screaming for help out of the windows, some of which were open. They were waving bed sheets and towels. Faint screams penetrated the night air, when suddenly the fire brigade arrived, at around 3 am. The firemen tried to douse the fires; they put up ladders and some lucky guests were precariously escorted down. As they neared the road and TV crews lunged towards them, they screamed and warded off the media advances. Hotel staff refused to let journalists near their distraught guests, but no one stopped us from standing there and watching as the drama unfolded.
We later came to know that there were four attackers holed up inside the Taj, and what we had seen was only a small part of the raging drama taking place within. When the firemen arrived around 3 am, we found them peering intently at the ground. "What are you searching for?" I asked. They were looking for stones to use to break the hotel's glass windows. Unfortunately, on that immaculate footpath, stones were the last thing one would expect to find. It all reminded me of the communal riots of 1992. Outside the offices of the Times of India near Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, at one in the morning on a night of heated rioting, my colleagues saw a company of the elite Rapid Action Force pushing a public bus with a punctured tire, one they had been using to get around. That incident, as 16 years later when the firemen were looking pitifully for stones, was for me an indelible moment of truth.
