THE SIEGE. 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel. By Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy. Illustrated. 318 pages. Penguin Books. $28. Ensconced in Luxury, as Terror Pays a Visit: Dwight Garner, On the evening of Nov. 26, 2008, as heavily armed Pakistani terrorists raced to infiltrate the five-star Taj Mahal Palace Hotel and other tourist sites in Mumbai in a spectacular coordinated attack, the hotel’s executive chef, Hemant Oberoi, feared he was falling behind. Taj was filled, as usual, with the wealthy and renowned. But there was also a wedding that night, three banquets to attend to, and a birthday party. What’s more, the country’s most imperious food critic, Sabina Sehgal Saikia, formerly of The Times of India, was staying on the sixth floor. Ms. Saikia rumbled unhappily. “After three days of eating and drinking,” Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy write in “The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel,” “her body had revolted, and when her butler had come over to help, she had vomited on his shoe.” The chef and the critic — one will die, the other will become a hero — are among the dozens of individuals whose stories the authors track in “The Siege,” a propulsive and exceedingly well-reported book that offers an intense ticktock account, the fullest we have had, of the attack on the Taj, in which 33 people were killed, scores were injured, and the hotel set ablaze. Throughout Mumbai, more than 160 people were to die in the two-day assault, and more than 300 were injured. Ms. Scott-Clark and Mr. Levy, both British, are foreign correspondents who worked for many years for The Times of London and The Guardian, frequently as a team. Their previous books include “The Meadow: Kashmir 1995 — Where the Terror Began” (2012). They are not the most gifted writers you will ever come across. I spent the first 50 pages of “The Siege” tallying clichés, dangling modifiers and awkward phrases. These very quickly stopped — or stopped mattering, I’m not sure which. The story they present steamrolls finicky objections. It’s a tragedy and a thriller with concussive human and political resonance. I read it in what felt like three blinks. Very poor young men carried out these attacks, spurred to jihad by members of the Pakistani-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba. “These were landlocked boys,” the authors write, “from impoverished rural communities, who knew only about chickens and goats.” In death, they were promised eternal glory: “Your faces will glow like the moon. Your bodies will emanate scent, and you will go to paradise.” Once on the ground in Mumbai (they arrived by trawler, having killed its crew), the young men’s actions were puppeteered from a control room back in Pakistan. Their handlers had cellphones, computers, television monitors and detailed maps. Ms. Scott-Clark and Mr. Levy are delicately attuned to how technology and terror mingled during this horror show. Google Earth and a Garmin GPS were used to plan the strikes on Mumbai. Inside the Taj, the frightened guests called, texted and tweeted throughout the attack, often providing their assailants with deadly real-time information. In one remarkable scene, a hostage is taken, and the attackers report his name back to their controllers, who Google him and do an image search. Here is the author’s account of the conversation that transpired: “ ‘O.K., listen, is he wearing glasses?’ He was. ‘He is balding at the front?’ Umer shouted at Ram: ‘Hold your head straight.’ Umer replied: ‘Yes, yes, he is bald. He’s got a face like a dog.’ Qahafa had found Ram’s online résumé. A top-class hostage. He was pleased.” You await the next wave of terrorists, who will come wearing Google glass. This story of the taking of the Taj hotel, based on hundreds of interviews, spreads out. The historic hotel, which opened in 1903, was filled with 600 guests and 1,600 employees, and we meet several dozen of them. Among the central characters: the hotel’s general manager, whose wife and sons are trapped in an upstairs room; a footloose young Western couple; an Indian police officer; and an American double agent who helped plan the attacks. As the terrorists run freely though the hotel, we witness what the authors describe as “a spinning zoetrope of dreadful scenes.” These include many point-blank murders, and guests leaping to their deaths from windows to escape fire. A question that lingers over this attack, and over this book, is why it took so long for the authorities to respond to the events at the hotel and elsewhere. Some police officers simply ran away. Dithering and political infighting led to obscene and baffling delays. For the first 28 hours of the siege, the Taj gunmen were almost completely unhindered. It took 58 hours to kill them. Only four gunmen were in the hotel. Only 10 terrorists took part in the attacks. “The sobering reality was that one man less than a cricket team,” the authors write, “had got an entire nation on the run.” The atrocities in “The Siege” will stick with you. But so will many smaller moments. Some are class details. One of the young assailants, the authors note, “came from the brick kilns of a village so impoverished it had only a number, 511.” They are struck dumb by the opulence they encounter inside the hotel. When one of them is captured alive, a cop thinks to himself: “He really was the most ordinary-looking mass murderer Maria had ever seen. Sallow and greasy, he reminded the cop of the kid manning the deep-fat fryer at the sweet seller’s in Zaveri Bazaar.” The heroism displayed by many, especially by members of the hotel’s staff, sticks with you as well. One chef was saved by the pair of chopsticks he kept in his chest pocket. “A bullet heading for his heart had glanced off them. On his chest was a tender, fist-shaped bruise.” The observation that hangs over this book, though it does not appear in it, is one made by one of the attack’s ringleaders back in Pakistan. By telephone he told two of the young terrorists, who were killing people in a Jewish center, to speak a warning: “This is just a trailer. The real film is yet to come.”
Posted on: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 03:04:21 +0000
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