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A chance encounter outside Nariman House

They emerged onto the pavement and into the sunlight: the woman, dishevelled and barefoot, rushed across the road clutching a little blond child who was crying.

She was quickly surrounded by policemen who were trying to herd them immediately into an ambulance. Everyone was shouting and giving contradictory directions.

I beckoned to her, and perhaps because I was the only woman she could see she came up to me. She was torn between telling me something and pacifying the child, who was now screaming uncontrollably because he was surrounded by strange faces and shouting men. She was breathless as she said: “His parents are both unconscious and there is one other person who is very badly injured. Get help to them, please.”

I asked her who she was and she said she looked after the child. I asked her how she got out. Her face and eyes reflected the exhaustion of a sleepless night and 12 hours of fear. The child was grimy and dishevelled too.

She said she had seen men with guns enter the house the previous night. She managed to evade being seen and locked herself in a room. In the morning she heard the baby cry and opened the door warily and saw him sitting on the floor.

The gunmen were not in sight, and she picked him up and ran out.

I asked her if the parents were Israeli Jews, and she confirmed it. I asked her if there were others there and she said there were people living in the house. But she did not know if they were there when the gunmen entered. I asked her how many gunmen there were. “One… two” – she was not sure.

It was a surreal feeling. Here I was at 10.30 a.m. standing on the corner of 4th Pasta Lane and Shahid Bhagat Singh Road listening to squawking parakeets and chirruping squirrels that ran along the branches of a spreading rain tree: sounds that I would have gladly immersed myself in at any other time except this.

The street at this time should have been filled with the sounds of traffic, shouts of haathgaadiwallas and the rest of the general din that envelops a Mumbai street by this time. But today there was no traffic.

The main Shahid Bhagat Singh road was cordoned off at both ends and behind the cordon swarmed fellow- journalists. Policemen in bullet-proof vests and riot helmets carrying SLRs and AK-47s stood around. Men from the Shiv Sena shakha walked about officiously, intent on showing that this was their area, and police or no police they would move as they pleased. But even they refrained from going into the Nariman House lane. At the mouth of the lane were positioned National Security Guard commandos, their black uniforms, compact helmets and deadly looking weapons all completely at odds in the bright sunshine of this Thursday morning.

Sitting on a sack filled with crushed sugarcane stalks that were beginning to attract flies, I suddenly noticed a subdued flurry of activity across the road. It may seem contradictory to say this but subdued flurry is what describes the movement I saw. The body language of the NSG commando and the woman with them was that of heightened tension – they wanted to rush but had to be stealthy. It was extraordinary and I was struck by it.

She would have spoken more but a policeman came and in a well-meaning manner extended his hand to guide her to the waiting ambulance. She turned on him, shrieking, “Don’t touch me. Just don’t touch me.” The child who had calmed down a bit started wailing again and she seemed to think it better to get into the ambulance.

It was a brief encounter. Sandra Samuel’s story seems to have varied a bit since then, but nevertheless the meeting was a haunting one. When she said that the child’s parents were unconscious and she had confirmed that they were Israeli Jews I had a feeling that they would not survive. I also had the distinct feeling that she had seen or heard some abuse.

It was a sad but inexorable logic that made me think this. I imagined the triumph of single-minded young Islamic terrorists successfully carrying through their mission of entering and holding captive deeply religious, conservative Israeli Jews – a tragic end seemed predetermined at that moment.

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