As the nation prepares to mark the first anniversary of 26/11, a gripping documentary decides to tell the tale of some of its survivors. Discovery Channel will showcase Surviving Mumbai, a documentary on the brutal attacks that India’s financial capital faced last year. On November 26, at 8 pm, the channel will bring together candid, personal accounts from people who were caught in the terror attacks.
I saw a preview of the documentary. Even after it was over, I sat transfixed. The film continued to play in my head. Much like 9/11, 26/11 too is a horror that we’ll have to revisit again and again. For all those who lived to tell the tale, for those who lost their loved ones “to the power of the gun”, it will continue to be the nightmare that they relive every minute, every second.
What makes Surviving Mumbai gripping is the manner in which the survivors tell their stories. You feel like they’re your friends engaging you in a very frank chat about horrific moments when they’d lost all hope to live. You want to hug them when their voices shake as they talk about “imagining… hell”. You want to cry along when they sit on a couch, look straight into the camera and speak in a low but firm voice about “blood on the shoulders, on my shirt, dead bodies falling on my head”. You shiver when an old man, sitting in the comfort of his home, kisses his wife’s wrinkled hands and says. “To be a survivor is good, but to survive with your spouse is a miracle.”
These are real people, individuals we’ve known as part of a report, a tragedy, a quote, a picture in the newspaper, a number, as one of the many survivors. What we haven’t known, and what the Discovery Channel shows us, is how they survived, how they lived every moment while staring at death. It is also compelling that these successful people — film directors, corporate bigwigs, business heads — felt helpless and filled with fear when faced by the terrorists. Anthony Rose, an Australian film director who was dining at the Taj when the terror strike took place, says, “All my life, I’ve thought of myself as a brave, proactive person. But after that incident, I felt like I was withering… shrinking and thinking, how will I react when they come and get me?” It’s a moving sentence, one which almost jolts you — ironically — to your senses.
And while it may be morbid to have laughed at a time when a gunshot was just a split second away, another survivor remembers doing exactly that when she saw that a terrorist in her room didn’t know “how to turn on the tap”. That may be a small anecdote but it shows how minutely survivors observed and absorbed everything around them. “The dummies [terrorists] had left their backpack in the room and walked off and then asked us to open the door. We refused,” remembers one survivor who was — shocking as it may sound — sniggering at their foolishness. Another remembers “controlling my heartbeat and listening to every single sound — the footsteps of the terrorists just outside our door, the breathing sounds of those around me, the pin-drop silence after the gunshots”. One person remembers “looking at the face of a woman who continued to smile at the terrorists after receiving bullets”. It agitated the terrorist so much that he prepared “another round for her. He stared at us when we stepped forward and said our prayers in Arabic. It was a prayer for the dead.”
One of the last images is of Amit Peshave playing pool. Peshave, restaurant manager at Taj, saw one terrorist face-to-face while evacuating 200 guests, and “immediately thought when the terrorist fired at me… I had always wanted to play pool… play the guitar.”
A simple dream. And when the documentary shows Peshave living it, you can’t help but smile at how life is, also, hope.
