The world-renowned Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, India, was hit in a wave of coordinated terror attacks orchestrated by a previously-unknown Islamic militant group.

The Taj Mahal Hotel is the jewel of South Bombay. 

In the late 19th century, famed Bombay Parsi businessman Jamsetji Tata set out to create one of the world's finest hotels because he was a victim of racism. 

The idea came after he wasn't allowed into the Apollo Hotel in Bombay to meet with European investors. Tata, one of the world's greatest industrialists, couldn't enter the place because he wasn't white. 

In those days of the British Raj, you had to be British to enter the finest hotels. 

So Tata decided to build an even greater hotel, which would be open to Indians. He didn't live to see its grand opening in 1904. 
Situated a stone's throw from the Gateway of India, the hotel has since hosted Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Sophia Lauren, John & Yoko, Prince Charles, and scores of other celebrated guests. 

On my four trips to Mumbai, I've spent an inordinate amount of time and money in the Taj's outstanding Nalanda bookstore. I've eaten several meals in the Shamiana coffee shop, which has some of the nicest old waiters you'll ever meet. 

Up in the second-floor Sea Lounge, you can see Marwari and Gujurati couples meet for the first time as part of the elaborate ritual of creating arranged marriages. 

Behind the front desk is a brilliant M.F. Hussain painting, likely worth more than $10 million. 

For wealthy guests, there's the Golden Dragon Chinese restaurant, a Louis Vuitton store, Ravissant, and much more. This is the type of place where there are attendants in the washroom who will turn on the faucet for you before you wash your hands. 

The hotel is still controlled by the Tata Group, which is headed by the relatively modest Ratan Tata. The Tata family has distinguished itself with its philanthropic endeavours, and I've never heard a negative word about the Tatas from any of the staff.
 
The hotel is not only a source of pride for Mumbai residents, it's a source of pride for the entire country. And that's precisely why it was targeted by terrorists, likely obsessed over India's continued control over Kashmir. 

Today, I'm left thinking about those pleasant old men who work at Shamiana and the erudite staff in Nalanda, where I've bought so many memorable books. I hope to see them on my next trip to Mumbai. 

These terrorists aren't going to keep me away from visiting the Taj in the future. 
                                                                                                                                                                              Top

--x--

MUMBAI, India -- As I watched the Taj Mahal hotel breathe fire, I remembered my grandfather, Burjor. For more than 30 years, he was the florist at the hotel, ordering roses flown in daily from New Delhi. 

Like the Taj, his black Fiat, a broken dinosaur of a car, was a landmark in itself. Filled to the brim with cane baskets for his flower shop, and home to several brown cockroaches, he parked it in the same spot every day -- right in front of the hotel's main entrance.

I essentially grew up in the hotel. And I would have been there on Wednesday night, browsing in its bookshop, and at the Leopold Cafe nearby, if it were not for the last-minute distraction of a soccer match in my neighborhood.

My family lives about 4 miles from the Taj, in a Parsi colony called Rustom Baug. The colony was developed exclusively for members of the Zoroastrian religion -- the same religion that J.N. Tata, the man who built the Taj, belonged to. 

It is one of the quietest and most picturesque locations in Mumbai. It can feel like it's a world away from the city. Except when it's not, like when the attacks started. 

The morning after the siege began, I read the following story in one of the papers: Moments before the terrorists opened fire in the main lobby of the Taj, a 10-year-old boy had entered the hotel to use the washroom. When he heard the shooting, he stood paralyzed in the center of the lobby until a man whisked him away and they hid in Nalanda, the bookshop in the Taj. They switched off the lights and sat in the darkness for nearly three hours. 

There was a time, not so very long ago, when I could have been that boy. Nalanda is my favorite bookshop in Mumbai. My grandfather took me there every Sunday when I was a boy. While he cajoled me into buying books on science -- though he was a florist, nuclear physics was his passion, and he was also fluent in Japanese -- I sheepishly picked up copies of the Tintin and Asterix series as well as Amar Chitra Katha comics, full of fables and magnificent illustrations of demons and celestial beings from Indian mythology. 

Thankfully, the boy's story, like the Amar Chitra Katha comics, had a fairy-tale ending. He was eventually reunited with his parents. 

On Saturday, when the siege ended, I stepped outside our gates and took a taxi to the Taj. The driver let me off nearby at the Regal Cinema and I walked toward the Leopold Cafe. The smell of disinfectant was overpowering. The cafe was closed, but through the shutters I noticed that two ceiling fans were on. There was a flier on the outside wall with "Good News" written on it, an advertisement for plumbing and carpentry.

The makeshift stores selling old gramophones were empty. A store called R. Dadavji's Ladies and Gents Under Garments was open. Florists also were open because a tragedy like this always means business. But everything else was closed.

I came in view of the entrance to the Taj, and the spot where my grandfather's black Fiat was always parked. There was a police barricade flanked by fire engines. The hotel's windows had been smashed, like teeth that had suddenly gone missing. Above, crows circled. 

I thought of all the weekends when I would come to the Taj bookstore with my grandfather. I thought of how for so many years he bejeweled the hotel's rooms with flowers. Today, I thought, his store would be closed. The last thing he would have wanted would be to use his flowers to decorate the dead.

(Anosh Irani is the author, most recently, of "The Song of Kahunsha.")
                                                                                                                                                                           Top

--x--

Details about the Mumbai outrage are still unfolding. But we do know that at least 30 men armed with AK47s and grenades held India's premier city hostage, targeting both Indians and foreigners, particularly Americans and the British. When facts are uncertain, theories become ascendant. Since at least some of the terrorists entered the city by sea - in a trawler registered in Vietnam - it is possible that this operation was propelled from Karachi in Pakistan through the Lashkar e Tauba, a terrorist organisation sustained by hatred towards secular India and funded by shadowy Pakistani agencies and street support. At the moment of writing, one terrorist has been caught alive and interrogation will, hopefully, reveal details we can trust.

The drama of events, however, could make us miss a significant element of the story. This operation must have taken months of planning: weapons were deployed, a small army was mobilised, targets studied, routes finalised, transport organised, weak points identified; a multiple plan of attack involving hundreds at the very least was put in motion, and the massive infrastructure of government discovered nothing. The chief of the Anti Terrorist Squad, Hemant Karkare (who lost his life in the battles that raged through the night) recieved a death threat from the nearby city of Pune and his own unit did not bother since it was busy playing games on behalf of its political masters. Terrorists may have a religion but death has none. In the first list of dead issued by the JJ Hospital, the name next to Karkare was that of Mastan Qureshi. There were six Hindus, four Muslims and two foreigners, presumably Christians, on that list.

Complacence and politics gave the terrorists more protection than silence or camoflauge could.
This represents a collapse of governance; these are the wages of the sins of administrative incompetence and political malfeasance.

India is a tough nation. No one should have illusions about that. It has fought off Muslim terrorists in Kashmir, Sikh terrorists in Punjab, Christian terrorists in Nagaland, and Hindu terrorists in Assam and across the country (there is a Maoist insurrection in a broad swathe of states in the centre of India). India has learnt that you cannot blame the whole community for the sins of a few. But under ineffectual governance, particularly in the last three years, a tough country is in danger of degenerating into a soft state.

Instead of being the international leader in the worldwide war against terrorism, India is sinking into the despair of a continual victim.

--x--