‘We could hear desperate shouts, bachao, bachao’

At 10.10 pm, senior correspondent Prashant Rangnekar and I heard a long rat-tat-tat outside — it could have been dismissed as a long firecracker, but this is The Express Towers, located in the heart of the financial capital’s business district, Nariman Point.

Wondering what sort of wedding party would burst firecrackers outside here, I walked towards the window from where I could see The Hilton, right opposite.

Prashant came with the next inputs: people running helter skelter outside, the taxi-drivers waiting for their regular long-distance drops had fled, there was firing inside The Hilton. “Some fled without their taxis,” he said of the city’s most dependable cabbies.

With dozens of others still in the building, many management professionals and bankers working late, security guards, journalists, labourers on the night-shift, I walked down the stairs. There was chaos outside the plush hotel, groups of people huddled around on the pavement opposite, our security guards trying to seal the building entrance, followed by the wail of police vans and ambulances.

“Soon after I saw one body being taken out in a car. Three more bodies were then taken away in a police van,” Prashant reported. We saw frightened hotel staffers crying as they described the scene inside to lathi-wielding policemen — among the dead were the security staffers of the hotel.

The street was almost deserted for the next few minutes. But even as Prashant walked on the pavement trying to find eye-witnesses, anybody who could make sense of what television had already put out as a gang war, the Goenka Marg filled with onlookers once again. While policemen and guards tried to warn people off, I climbed three floors to the Express lawn, a vantage point to see what was happening at The Hilton.

Glass windows in the upper floors of the Trident were being shattered. “Bachao Bachao,” we could hear desperate shouts, nearly 400 metres away.

That’s when the calls of other attacks — at VT, at Cama Hospital, at Metro cinema junction, began to come in. Even as phones were ringing off the hook as informants, well-wishers, parents, friends, readers called in, colleagues warned us off the lawn.

As I turned, an explosion rocked the building, followed minutes later by another. We could see smoke going up in the distance, hear more panicked wails. More firemen were running in, an ambulance was backing up to the farther gate, more sirens as, finally, the last few onlookers moved out of the way.

It was quiet for a few minutes. Till news from other parts of the city began to come in.