The people of a city turned into a war zone took the first steps yesterday to commemorate the atrocity they had suffered. Outside Mumbai’s Oberoi hotel, hundreds came to light candles to remember the dead, and to help deal with the trauma the city suffered.
”I came just for [offering] condolence,” said Juthika Mehta.
They arrived in groups of two or 20, Hindus and Muslims, with the Oberoi’s elegant facade pockmarked by blown- out windows as a backdrop to their vigil.
Barely a kilometre away, the Leopold café, which was sprayed with gunfire by the terrorists, reopened briefly on Sunday for a few minutes, with cheers greeting its owners serving beer.
”I want them [the attackers] to feel we have won, they have lost,” its manager, Farzad Jehani, said of the symbolic opening. ”We’re back in action.”
Police later ordered the café closed again, saying it was still a crime scene that was being investigated.
After leaving the café last Wednesday night the terrorists turned right into Nowroji Ferdonji Street and headed to the Taj Mahal Hotel. Down this small street on Sunday flowers hung on a wall in memory of a pharmacist they killed, Subhash Waghela, as he closed his shop.
All over the city there were similar reminders of what had happened.
A kilometre away, Vijay Mehta was attempting to get his life back to something like normal. He jointly runs a book store at Chhatrapati Shivaji terminus, the train station where the terrorists went on a killing spree.
Mehta was shot at by the terrorists and Sunday was his first day back at work.
A bullet hole was still visible in the glass at the front of his bookstall. There was another in a granite column in front of it, and three more just to its left.
From a shelf he pulled down four damaged Mills and Boon books. They were hit by a bullet, and one was left shredded. ”I am scared now coming to work,” he said. His brother, Vijay, who also tends the bookstall, said the station was half as full as usual: ”Everybody is frightened, nobody is coming out, even the roads are empty.”
Based on his experience of the 1993 riots that scarred Mumbai, he expected it to take weeks before things returned to normal: ”It will take 15 to 20 days at least. In 1993 it took time; for one, one-and-a-half months, we suffered.”
Mumbai is capital to India’s film industry, which serves up doses of fantasy to soothe the harshness of daily life faced by most people.
But residents are not yet ready for escapism. At the Regal cinema, close to the Taj Mahal Hotel, where the siege ended on Saturday, audiences for the Sunday matinee were a fraction of what they were a week ago. The films on offer were the usual fare — Dostanna, in which two Bollywood stars engage in a gay kiss, and a movie called Sorry Bhai (brother), in which a man runs off with his brother’s wife-to-be.
The cinema’s manager, Constancio Barbose, said: ”There’s no business, it’s very slow. We had 150 people at 4pm, the theatre has 1 166 seats.”
The cinema had been closed since the attacks, but reopened for the first day on Sunday, like many businesses in the Colaba area of Mumbai which bore the brunt of the attacks.
At the closest Indian restaurant to the Taj Hotel, the Alibaba Clay Oven, only two tables were taken at lunch time. ”People are shocked, they don’t feel safe going outside,” said Arunjit Singh. ”When I get on the train I fear something might happen.”
Down Apollo Bunder, which leads to the Taj, hundreds of locals and a smattering of tourists came to see the fire-blackened hotel. Some had come to protest against India’s entire political class. At a barrier, placards were waved reading: ”We hate your politics”, and ”We must rebuild what has been destroyed. Taj, Oberoi, people’s faith in government.”
Mehak Mandhrani, mother of two boys aged 10 and 14, said she was now terrified when her sons went outside. ”We don’t want this to become part of our daily lives. We need the government to give us security.”
One week ago, the area outside the Taj Hotel had looked like a scene from a fairytale; it was bathed in golden light, and silver, horse-drawn carriages were parked outside for tourists to take, or for those attending weddings at the hotel.
On Sunday, for the first time since the attacks, the carriages started to reappear. Some child beggars made an appearance, a sign they expected Western tourists to come back to the streets.
And in the morning, after days of people in southern Mumbai waking to the sounds of gunfire and explosions, as battles raged at the Oberoi, Taj and Nariman House, the sounds of a band heading a wedding procession hung over the air near the Jewish centre taken over by terrorists, as some felt able to celebrate a day they would remember for the rest of their lives. – guardian.co.uk