It was the saddest and strangest way to rediscover Bombay after an absence of more than a decade. I walked through streets that felt familiar but were so silent and so empty of human presence that they looked like a film set. Even the homeless had vanished. It was less than 24 hours since the terrorists first struck, and the surreal emptiness of Colaba was just the first manifestation of a world turned upside down. A world in which the most comfortable, most orderly, safest and most luxurious destinations of Bombay had been desecrated.

During those three strange days, as I travelled from my hotel room and the TV news to the siege sites at the Taj, Oberoi and Nariman House, I witnessed many things.
One was the courage and common sense of the ordinary people in the Colaba market neighbourhood. In this relatively impoverished area the inhabitants seemed remarkably unfazed by the invasion of their little village first by the terrorists and then by the security forces and media.
When I was leaning out too far through a window frame of an apartment opposite Nariman House, during one of the intermittent bursts of fighting between the NSG and the terrorists inside, a teenage boy pulled me back to safety. This boy seemed to have a better understanding of bullets and how far they can travel than many of the journalists in the press pack at the Taj. It was not surprising that two of them were hit by shrapnel. In the UK or US the press would have been kept back hundreds of yards from a siege scene, partly for their safety, partly to keep them out of the hair of the security forces.

I was struck too by the intensity of the fear inspired by the attacks, especially the further I went from the actual attack sites. Friends up in Breach Candy or Bandra who had been trapped in front of their televisions for whole days on end were literally shaking with terror, though they were in fact far from immediate danger. I suspected that this was only partly because these were all people from the five-star going classes, most of whom knew at least someone caught in the hotel attacks. Mostly it was because all of us in the city, native or foreign, had become addicts of the relentlessly melodramatic TV news coverage (thanks to massive repeated doses) and the TV coverage somehow amplified the horror of what had happened.
People in central Mumbai would ask me how I could poss–ibly return to the Colaba area, as if to return to my hotel a mile from the Taj was somehow to risk death. But then in Delhi people had asked me how I could possibly go to Bombay. And throughout my time in the city, I was getting texts from the UK from people insisting even more irrationally that I should leave India. It was as if the terrorists’ message – Be Afraid – increased in power the further it travelled through the ether.

It couldn’t have helped that the 24-hour English news channels pumped out so much contradictory information and rumour disguised as fact, much of it coming from competing security force briefings and leaks. One minute the Taj was cleared and being ‘sanitised’, the next there were still five terrorists alive in there and firing at the security forces. First there were said to be 26 terrorists (where on earth did that number come from?) then 10, then 15, then at the end, 10 again (though this number seemed suspiciously convenient once the police had nine bodies and a prisoner).
Of course, back on 9/11 when I had been in New York, there had been plenty of rumours too. But that crisis had only lasted for a day, and by 9/12 we knew for sure that there were not 10 hijacked planes.

At the same time I was alarmed to see the lackadaisical efforts at security in the area around the Taj during the siege: it would have been so easy for terrorists to slip out from a rear entrance or join one of the groups of escaping hostages. I was also bemused that no one in Bombay seemed surprised that all but one of the policemen in VT (CST) fled from the two terrorists without firing a shot.
Amidst the stress and drama I was surprised to discover that the compulsive renaming of the city’s streets and buildings by the politicians continues to be ignored or resisted by most Mumbaikars – most people still call the station ‘VT’ and everyone still calls that stunning stretch of road ‘Marine Drive’. I wondered if this wasn’t another demonstration of Bombay’s indomitable spirit: Mumbaikars don’t defer to politicians they despise. Similarly, they are not going to let terrorists cow them or change their way of life in the long term.
As the crisis finally drew to a close, after three traumatic days, it felt reassuringly as if the city was impatient to get back to business, as if things would get back to normal for most people with much less fuss than was made in New York or London, after the huge terrorist attacks there. There was mourning to do, and apportioning of blame. But as the roads jammed with traffic again, the pulse of the city felt strong and fast.

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