Fifteen Years Later, Mumbai is thriving, and despite me having two cancelled trips back in 2022 and 2023, I will make all effort to go back to the beautifully weird city of the bay.
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I am Indian. If I have to self-identify, I do as that. Over the years, I've grown proud to be Indian. Actually, I was always proud, but I'm now more proud to be 100% Indian. When I was really young, and we were regaled in history class stories of Ellis Island and my classmates ancestors coming across, scores of the 'poor, huddled masses', etc., I desperately wanted to have another flag in my family tree aside from India's. I can twist and contort my personal history to include the Portuguese flag, the peoples that colonized the ancestral part of India I am from (Goa), converting many of my ancestors, changing our names to Portuguese names (Pinto and Menezes in my case - the name of the ex-Portuguese National Team goalkeeper and ex-Brazil National Team head coach). Let's be honest, very likely the Portuguese had their way with some and there is a non-zero chance I have some Portuguese blood in me.
I am a Mumbaikar. I am from Mumbai. My roots are from Mumbai. My grandmother's apartment still exists in Mumbai, and that is where my connection to this story lies. That was a long intro, but it means something to be a Mumbaikar, especially in 2018, ten years after our city was rocked. More than a Mumbaikar, I am a person connected with Colaba, the old home of all things Mumbai, a district that is still a bit lost in the times, the colonial home of Mumbai's beauty, but now surpassed as industry expanded their horizons. Of course, Colaba is still important to Mumbai writ large, and was the location of the attacks that rocked the city in November, 2008. The assailants, Pakistani loyalists somewhat led by a US-born terrorist, focused on Colaba, on my home, with excruciating impact.
From my grandparent's flat, the one my Dad and his brothers and sisters grew up in, where my Aunt and cousin still live, you can see the Taj hotel rising above across the street and couple gullies (alleys, in US parlance). Their apartment building is across the street, literally, from the Leopold Cafe. These landmarks meant little to me pre-2008. But after the terrorists started their attack at the Leopold cafe, exiting and running towards the Taj to hold that majestic hotel hostage, it meant a lot more. I was not in Mumbai that night. My cousin and Aunt were, and they heard the gunshots. I distinctly remember us (my family and my uncle's in Boston) calling my aunt who lived in Colaba that evening, not fully realizing the seriousness and criticality of it all.
In the gulley that connects Leopold Cafe and the Taj Hotel is a tailor - Waghela Tailors. A man who I assume is Mr. Waghela, was killed in the attack. He was in process of closing up his shop, rapidly turning the crank that would gate up his store, when a shot randomly fired off of an assault rifle by a terrorist hit him. He was my dad's tailor.
His son runs the store now, still remember who Vera Menezes's kids are, and by extension, to some degree who I am. Furthering my connections to the attack, my Uncle got married at the Taj Hotel in 1981. There are multiple pharmacies there, all of whom know my family, having set up shop in Colaba, off the causeway, since 1960-something. They all experienced loss. They all heard the gunshots.
I live close to New York. I went to the World Trade Center about a week before teh attack. I loved that building. Still, I am so much more closely connected, at a personal level, to the Mumbai attack than 9/11. In a weird way, the connection to the Mumbai attack grew over time, as I learned just how close my family lived, just how personal the ties were.
When the attack happened in November, 2008, I hadn't been to Mumbai for five years, and hadn't visited our apartment in the Esperanca building in seven years. My grandmother died in 2002. I last visited in 2001, obviously too young to understand the legacy of Colaba, the Taj Hotel, and Leopold Cafe. Honestly, in 2001, no one really knew about Leopold Cafe.
I visited Mumbai next in 2011, a one day trip on a layover from Bangalore back to the US. I visited in earnest in 2011 summer, spending six weeks in Mumbai, all the while looking forlornly out my apartment window at the Taj, rising as a pillar above the cloudy monsoon-laden skies. I went to the Taj for the first time (that I can remember) during that trip. And went to Leopold countless times, with the bullet-shattered windows still left unfixed, a testament and monument to the horror that was November 28th, 2008.
I can't stress enough that my family's home is right across the street from Leopold Cafe, a good five minute walk to the Taj. 10 years later everyone in Mumbai has commendably moved on. Waghela is run by his son. The Taj has laxed its security - so much so it allowed me and my cousin to enter at 2am after a temporary blackout cut power in our flat in 2013. Leopold is as popular as ever, now with a whole host of white people, transient tourists as patrons.
In the ten years since the attack, I have visited our apartment six different times, each time marvelling how close we were to the action. My cousin, as horrifying as it sounds, had a birds-eye view to my country's 9/11. If we picked the perfect moment, we could have seen the terrorists leave the Leopold Cafe post-attack and run through the gulley back to the Taj, all from our perch on the 3rd floor of Esperanca building. In a way, I'm, happy I was 8.000 miles away on 11/28/2008, but also wish I could have been there, to have a first-hand view of how evil people can be. But then also have a reference point to remember again how well man moves on. Never in defiance, but in memoriam.
There is a reason the attackers picked so many landmarks in Colaba. It was the heart off the Colonial era Mumbai. When I tell fellow Indian acquaintances that my family lives there, I often get met with a stare and awe. I am not close enough to India to verify how rare or special this is. What I see in Colaba is its age. There is a great amount of history and import to be sure, but when my cousin and I want to go out, we go to Lower Parel or Bandra, or areas that have left their colonial roots well behind.
But Colaba is that center. Be it the western tourists that walk its causeway, fighting past hawkering stall owners looking for a fix. Be it the landmarks that were so present long before my consciousness. Be it the new places that have sprung up post attack - like Stock Bar or Colaba Social. Be it the long remembered Sports Bar XS, which was my cousin and my haunt du jour in 2011 summer.
I've lived too close to many terrorist attacks. Obviously, 9/11is the most present. Change a few variables, and I could have lost my Dad (he didn't go to the ;Windows of the World' breakfast that day, on the 110th floor of the 2nd building) and Uncle (who normally took the Boston-to-Los Angeles flight that was hijacked). Someone in my neighborhood lost their dad. Todd Beamer, one of the people who led the mutiny on Flight 93, went to my family church. I still remember when a guidance counselor entered our class room and called out a student, a friend, who's dad worked in the building, luckily on the third floor.
A bit more opaquely, I went to Istanbul Airport two weeks before it was attacked by terrorist bombs. I was in Dallas a week before a shooter opened fire during a rally. I've had my close cases. That all said, apart from the highest interpretation of 9/11, nothing comes close to the Mumbai Attack.
I didn't know it at the time, but over the years, I've grown to appreciate both the intimacy the attack could have had to me, and how well us fellow Mumbaikars have turned the blind eye and just moved on. There is tragedy and bloodshed all over those gulleys, but Mumbai moved on. Each night I spend in the Esperanca building, I look out of our window to a Taj Hotel Tower that was once on fire with hostages inside, look across the street to Leopold Cafe, which still wears its scars, and think of what could have been. But also what has become., a city that moved on, shoved the desolation in the face of the assailants, moved on with pride, whether it being Waghela's son, or Bademiya expanding, or Leopold Cafe squeezing every ounce of notoriety for being location zero.
I am a Mumbaikar. In that sense I move on as we all do. The only time I've been to the Taj hotel was post-attack, same with Leopold, where today I go and order my Kingfisher without even glancing upwards at the window with bullet-holes still in it. I've taken a train from CST (aka VT) station). I've walked the causeway, walked the gulley. I've changed to an OCI resident visa status to allow me to go back and forth to India - something not allowed with a generic visa after a US-born person went back-and-forth from Pakistan to Mumbai to aid in the planning. I am a Mumbaikar who now understands the stakes, who understands that I could have heard the gunshots. It was thanksgiving weekend in the US, and I am thankful for getting to live through what happened next.
