By Bhisham Mansukhani

I had wandered into the Lavender Room, chancing on a British couple that preferred to squat on the floor sitting atop blankets. I tried to comfort them saying this was a temporary hold up and that the gunmen were probably already overwhelmed and taken out by the response by Mumbai’s cops. Just about then, I heard a huge explosion which was significant because the Chambers floor was virtually sound proof and we hadn’t heard gunfire since we had been there. Just then, i received two messages. My friend, a journalist texted me that Karkare, Salaskar and Kamte had been assassinated. Then another friend, also a journalist and a colleague texted me, urging me frantically to duck because the Taj was on fire. I began contemplating the worst and began calling. Panic had arrived. Everywhere in the Chambers, people slumped to the floor.

The next few hours saw more people slipping into impatience, paranoia or frustration and it took a resolute staff to keep things together. At about 4 am, an evacuation was called for. As I waited with my mother and everyone else, tightly packed into the corridor, people in batches of four were let through the corridor to what I was given to believe was an elevator or stairway and that there were commandos at the head who had secured the area. As the first lot left, the crowd began moving. As I got close to the corridor, the sound of bullets reverberated through the packed corridor, followed by screaming and a stampede. It was the loudest I’d heard and I ran back only because everyone else was. Everyone dispersed into different rooms. I followed my mother into the Lavender room. Just about then four people along with a Taj employee ran out back out. Some one had been shot. Apparantly, one person was shot and killed. Another, an old maintenance staffer of the hotel was lying on the staircase. He’d been shot. I think he was a little ahead of me in the line before the firing began. My friend’s father is a doctor and he bandaged him but had no medicine or penicillin. We bolted the door with an oval table and chairs, shut off the lights and the air conditioner. We were waiting. I was sitting opposite the man who’d been shot and heard him call for help in agony. he was bleeding to death. My mother was in the room at the far end. At that point, I thought we were not going to make it. In fact I had little doubt that it was just a matter of time before the sniper from the floor above us came to our floor, going room to room, spraying us with ammunition. I took strange comfort in laying my head on the wall that separated the room from the corridor, knowing the bullet could pierce the wall and all that rested on it. I sent a close friend of mine an SMS saying this was probably it and to another, I stole his favourite two words : “So what?”

The silence was constantly interrupted by gun fire exchanges which almost always ended in a grenade being exploded. after a point, it didn’t even distract us from our busy SMSing. All the while, I was looking at this man, bleeding, throwing up, begging for mercy. All I could do was urge journalists outside to inform the commandos to at least rescue him first. At about 9.30 am, the unexpected came to pass. We heard sharp knocking on the door — some one claiming to be state police. no one wanted to open the door until we were sure. Then a female voice from the outside was met with familiarity by the Taj service staffers who had probably saved us from dying in an act of panic and the door was torn open. The injured man was let out on a stretcher into an ambulance and we all had our hands raised as we walked through the corridor down towards another service stairway. I saw blood and spent ammunition on the very spot that I’d been drinking Coke and chatting away before midnight. On the corner of the service stairway, another pool of blood stood beside a rumpled commando cap. the effect of the blood was sharp and burning. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. As we came down to the main lobby, the shattered glass panels and cracked tiling was the grim reminder of the madness that had ensued before. But as we stood outside the lobby and two police vans were loaded with some of the survivors, there was more firing from probably the fifth floor and more panic. This wasn’t over. they herded us into a BEST bus, I was in the back, with four Russians, all of us crouched like tormented creatures, I sat up with my head between my knees, watching the hotel windows as the bus pulled away, still waiting for the worst which didn’t come. The city was ghastly. Straight slivers of people looking like zombies populated the streets and a strange black car behind seemed like it was in pursuit. we were taken to the Azad Maidan police station and let off in 10 minutes. No food, no water, no transport to go home. Still, an interesting day to be alive.

Walking out with my mother, I felt no elation, no sense of relief, just bittersweet blankness and cynicsm. I wanted to talk. I wanted to talk directly to the terrorists. I wanted to tell them that they didn’t get me in a physical sense but that in a metaphysical way I was already dead. That I was already somewhere else. I didnt quite get the world anymore. not the one i had walked back into. I wanted to tell them that i will go every place they intend to strike. I’m waiting. Not because I have any courage. I don’t. I am a coward. I am conceited and I live a pointless life. In the evening I heard that the Taj GM Karambir Kang’s wife and two young sons had been burnt alive in the suite next to the dome. I don’t know how to react when my friends who have been calling and messaging me all through, say, “Thank god, you’re alive and unharmed”. I don’t believe in god and i didn’t pray even when we were all holed up in that room with the gunmen outside at some point before 9.30 am. I didn’t think I’d see 9.30 AM. And I retain my atheism. Sitting there as the light began to shape the concrete webbing that filled our windows, I saw and heard the crows, indifferent to the terror of the night, going about their lives. There’s wasn’t much fear to go around. There was nothing to do. There’s no time left to argue about whether Bombay is any worse than anywhere else. These modern times, death is everywhere to be had and if we escape its scope, like i did, the conceited being that i am, it could just as well have gone the other way.

I recall recently being on an NDTV show featuring the honourable home minster P Chidambram. When given the chance to ask the minister a question, I summarised the abominations of the past year – the denial of incompetency by the police, the Pradhan committee report, the fact that Hafiz Saeed was alive and well and that Kasab was more secure than me and far from being handed due justice. The man looked at me unblinking. I felt no empathy in his response. I knew what was coming. He asked me how i would have brought Hafiz Saeed to justice. I saw through his ploy to dodge the question. Perhaps out of misplaced deference or just helplessness, I didn’t opt for hostility. Instead I responded stutteringly, naively. Like an ignorant fool. Much to his satisfaction. I feel nothing but pity for him. The question will come back to him at a press conference when the next, inevitable attack occurs. What will he answer then? Will he throw the floor open for suggestions about how to nab Saeed because the home and external affairs ministry is out of options?  Like the writers who penned the closing words of the movie Seven,
“Someone once said, The world is a beautiful place.
It’s worth fighting for……
I agree with the second part.”

This is the complete story of what exactly happened on 26 November 2008 when a bunch of terrorists attacked Mumbai. Commissioned by Channel 4, UK, award-winning filmmaker Dan Reed gets access to some highly classified never-seen-or-heard-before material. Terror in Mumbai tells the story of what happened when 10 Muslim gunmen held one of the world’s busiest cities hostage; killing and wounding hundreds of people while holding India’s crack security forces a More..t bay. MOB held Dan Reed hostage who revealed how he managed to make a definitive documentary about a tragic event that was made a complete mess by over-zealous Indian media and a clueless establishment.  Read the transcript and be part of the big discussion hosted by CMYK bookstore in Delhi on 25 November 2009 (details below).

MOB: How did you bag this assignment to do a documentary on 26/11? Were you a frequent traveller to Mumbai? When you came to India after the attacks to document them, did you see any change in people’s psyche?

MOB: Where were you during the attacks and how closely were you following it? Were you following the Indian media reports? What did you make of it?

MOB: When you first landed here, did you have any leads to follow?

MOB:While documenting, were there any ethical questions that bothered you? Was censorship something you were concerned about? That’s something that bothers every Indian.

MOB: What were some of the greatest hurdles you faced during making the documentary?

DAN: Where do I start? The traffic, mainly! Working till 2am, then being woken up by the street bustle outside my hotel at 5am. There was this one particular squawky koel bird in the huge dusty tree just outside my window who would launch into a tirade every morning at dawn: ”Wake up! wake up!” he whooped. “You’re not getting anywhere! You’re screwed, dude! Haha! Haha!”

MOB: You managed access to some highly classified data that no one in India had access to. How come no Indian media got their hands on it?

DAN: Over the years I have found that being an outsider confers a strange advantage when approaching a seemingly impenetrable story. The first documentary I directed, in 1992, was about a notorious criminal gang in a South African township. I was a young white boy nosing around alone in an area where white people literally never set foot without the backing of a small army of policemen. Eventually, through steps and intermediaries, I found the bad guys, explained myself to them and soon got to know them very well, becoming a sort of persona grata amongst them. I spent a year filming everything they did – arms deals, drug deals, paying off policemen and prison officers, kangaroo courts and hostage-taking, the shocking, stark reality of their lives as outlaws. No one in South Africa had ever got this kind of access for a camera crew. The key was just persistence, an open mind, making friends with the right people, and above all believing (cheesy though it sounds) that you can do it – because as we all know if you believe it strongly enough, others will too. I certainly don’t think the Indian media was incompetent, but very, very few journalists I met had the rigorous high standards, the passion and the persistence necessary to do first-class work. I believe this situation has arisen because many newspapers and TV stations in India simply do not prioritise factual reporting and rigorous research. “Why let the truth get in the way of a good story?” is an attitude by no means confined to the Indian media, but it is certainly prevalent there. The majority of the 26/11 stories I checked out in the Indian press contained major inaccuracies or errors. But then there were a few journalists whose work was nothing short of brilliant and who helped me a great deal. Hussain Zaidi, the brilliant and fearless Asian Age bureau chief in Mumbai (and author of the outstanding Black Friday book), became a close associate of mine on this project and his shrewd assistance, inside knowledge and encouragement were vital to its success.

MOB: Documentaries are almost extinct in India with no dedicated channels or screenings available to the general public. How do people like you get around that?

DAN: The extinction of documentary is also well advanced in the UK, there’s simply no money around to finance the kind of high-risk, long-term projects that produce the best documentaries. Without HBO’s financial backing, we would never have been able to stay in India for as long as we needed, or achieve what we did. And even with their backing, it was a close call. It takes years, perhaps a decade, to develop the skill-base and the audience for documentaries – but the ability of a documentary maker to stay with a story for months rather than hours (as is the case all too often with news) is the key to a functioning democratic media. Without documentary, everything is news – and news just can’t provide the background and the context, or throw enough resources at a story to illuminate its hidden depths. I think my film is proof of that. Sadly, it looks as though TiMu (as we call it for short) will never be broadcast in India, because none of the channels are able to fork out the $50,000 or so to clear the embedded material and cover the routine errors-and-omissions insurance. All very dull, but a sad fact nonetheless, and the sales company is unable simply to subsidise  such a major shortfall. Actually I’m hoping one of your wealthier readers will come up with the money and get “Terror in Mumbai” onto an Indian network and release it on DVD. It’s really tragic that it can’t be shown in the country where it was made and where so many people want to see it.
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MOB: You’ve also made a movie called Straightheads starring Gillian Anderson who plays a revenge seeking rape victim. What was that like?

DAN: Gillian was a total pro, as you might expect from someone who’d put in gruelling 6-day weeks on X-Files for nearly a decade. She’s also an intense, complex and fascinating woman, whose personality was strangely suited to the part I had written for her. The result is one of Gillian’s best performances of all time, maybe even the very best. Straightheads was my first piece of drama and there were many things I could have done better. I was somewhat overwhelmed, both as writer and director, by the sheer number and weight of producers, executive producers, script doctors and seemingly endless notes and re-drafts of the script, diluting its substance further and further. Inch by inch I Iost creative control of the project and Straightheads turned into something rather different than what I had envisaged when I wrote it – less complex, less lyrical, and as a consequence of that the extreme violence seems starker, less motivated. But Gillian and I have stayed good friends, and sooner or later we’ll make another movie together. Maybe in India! I’d love to come back and direct one in Mumbai.

This documentary is not hosted on MOB servers and is merely a link to another site. MOB is not liable for any copyright/broadcast rights infringement.