A gripping yet oddly hollow report on a nightmarish day
Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark’s book about the 26/11 attack on the Taj is a thrilling, wide-canvas book. However, it falls short of the authors’ high standards, writes Dilip D’Souza.
Adrian Levy and Scott-Clark Penguin Pages: 344 Price: Rs 499
TCathy hat large public meeting at Azad Maidan soon after it was all over. I remember the feeling that was palpable, almost tangible. The crowd was roiling, throbbing, quivering with anger, roaring with every speaker’s passionately made points. And the amazing thing was that the targets of the anger were not so much the murderous maniacs who had sailed across the Arabian Sea on a boat, not even the sole survivor among them. No, the crowd was infuriated with our very Indian politicians. Their corruption, venality and indifference to justice had, in some very real way, made this horrific attack possible.
So many of us who lived through the maelstrom of the 26/11 attacks felt that whitehot anger then. Reading this book, this detailed account of the assault on the Taj hotel, is like living through it again; and yes, right down to the anger. I mean, here’s a sentence from page 207: “The hotel’s private club was the obvious choice for evacuation, especially as those stranded there were politicians and assorted tycoons with powerful voices.” And two pages later is an account of an Indian MP speaking to a TV channel: “There are more than 200 important people (here): business leaders and foreigners.” And on that same page, we hear of “a guest castigating a waiter for failing to provide the right charger for his mobile phone.” And not too much later, “a group of Europeans forced their way ahead” in one queue, and “Indian politicians (put) themselves at the front” of another queue, and an “Anti-Terrorist Squad had turned up too, but only to escort the MPs.”
I mean, here we are in a city under siege, slaughter happening all over the place; here we are in a hotel that’s turning into a bonfire — and some are marking the presence of “important people”? Their presence determines an “obvious choice for evacuation”? There are people getting annoyed over the wrong charger? Politicians and others are throwing their weight about? We heard it again and again in late 2008 and I’d love to hear it again and again today: a pox on people who believe they are “important”. On those, too, who on that say-so are willing to give them that importance. Talk about quivering with anger. Kind of describes me, reading this book.
The Siege is an unsparingly vivid, detailed and gripping account of what happened in Bombay in November 2008, specifically to and at the Taj. It has memorable characters with very human strengths and weaknesses. It has intrigue, suspense and even dashes of romance. In those respects, it’s almost like a novel, and I don’t mean that disparagingly at all. This is a wide-canvas real-life story told with passion, engagement and authenticity.
One parallel I can think of is Freedom at Midnight, that Lapierre and Collins classic. Some have criticised that book — and indeed other Lapierre/Collins efforts — for romanticising, perhaps even trivialising, history. And while I haven’t seen such criticism for The Siege yet, I can imagine it happening. Not from me, though, or at least not on that count. There’s a value to writing this history, even this wrenching history, via its everyday characters, and with an alert eye for detail. There’s a value here because I think all this brings the history home, makes it real once again. For the way it accomplishes all that, I have no complaints about The Siege. And yet it left me oddly dissatisfied, and I’ve spent weeks trying to understand and articulate why.
Consider the odd errors. Like “Jaslock Hospital, on Pedder Road in Breach Candy.” Note the wrong spelling of the name as well as the con-
The Siege is an unsparingly vivid, detailed and gripping account of what happened in Bombay in November 2008, specifically to and at the Taj. It has memorable characters with very human strengths and weaknesses. It has intrigue, suspense and even dashes of romance. . The point is simple: it is fatuous to imagine, as too many of us do, that 26/11 happened in a vacuum. That it was somehow the worst-ever terrorist attack on this city. Yet in the end, I think this book, perhaps unwittingly, only reinforces those impressions. More than that, it doesn’t dig as splendidly deep as I think the authors’ previous book,
the magnificent and profoundly disturbing The Meadow did.
fusion about locality: while they are close to each other, no Bombay resident would put Pedder Road in Breach Candy. (And the sentence where this phrase appears, on page 256, is itself oddly constructed.) Like the man in the suburbs who would likely take “an hour or more” to reach the Taj, “even with the Sea Link toll bridge”. Except that the Sea Link would only open for business seven months after the attack. Like the section titled “11 am” on Thursday, 27 November, which has this phrase: the commandos needed “thirty-six manhours to empty the Tower, which would take them to Saturday evening.” “Manhours” is meaningless here, and if the authors really meant “hours” instead, 36 of them would take them to Friday evening, not Saturday.
Am I nitpicking? Perhaps. But these are seasoned journalists who really should have got details like these right. But it’s more than nitpicking. For one thing, there’s the emphasis on the Taj itself. As undeniably dreadful as the tragedy there was, the killers slaughtered people wholesale elsewhere in the city too; in that enormous train terminus not far from the Taj, for example. Yes, I realise this book focuses on the Taj. Even so, there’s something annoying about a thread in The Siege (and elsewhere, to be fair) that equates the Taj to the city’s soul, even unconsciously. For example, page 286 tells us about the Taj Group’s December 2008 newspaper ads, that read “Welcome Home Again ... Mumbai will rediscover its nesting place.” “Home”? “Nesting place”? This, about a place that I’m guessing three-fourths of this city will never see the inside of? It’s one thing for the Taj Group itself to say this, but for journalists to mention it without question, especially while recounting this horrific carnage, is passing strange.
For another, Levy and Scott- Clark raise too few questions about some troubling facets of the attack, and in that respect mirror some of our own reluctance to ask hard questions. For example, why on earth did three senior police officers, Salaskar, Kamte and Karkare — and four other cops — drive off in one vehicle in a fraught, uncertain, violent time? Are there no police guidelines that would prevent this? Then there’s the mention of another officer who believed “there would be no inquiry (into police and administrative failures) worth its salt, when all of this was over”: perhaps a legitimate belief, but why should it be that way? And in fact this ties in with another passing mention: that the residents of the city “had lived through communal riots” and more, and thus reacted to this new crisis in unexpected ways. True, but after the last bout of “communal riots” in this city — 1000 murdered in 199293 — there was indeed an inquiry. But it’s one that has been totally ignored. Surely it’s worth exploring if there are possible links from there to subsequent horrors in the city, 26/11 included?
The point is simple: it is fatuous to imagine, as too many of us do, that 26/11 happened in a vacuum. That it was somehow the worst-ever terrorist attack on this city. Yet in the end, I think this book, perhaps unwittingly, only reinforces those impressions. More than that, it doesn’t dig as splendidly deep as I think the authors’ previous book, the magnificent and profoundly disturbing The Meadow did.
The widespread anger with our establishment after the November 2008 attack is precisely the reason many of us felt strangely hopeful then. Perhaps it would translate into some tangible and positive change. But of course, it didn’t. This book is a reminder of that anger, yes. My problem, finally, may be that it gives us just what we want to believe about that tragedy, and no more.