Sixty hours of terror: The attack on Mumbai

Jason Motlagh, Special to the Pulitzer Center
Virginia Quarterly Review

Over the past two years the Pulitzer Center has supported Jason Motlagh's reporting from south Asia, working in collaboration with print and broadcast outlets to produce extraordinary projects on India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan. Over the next four days, in an exclusive online report for Virginia Quarterly Review, Jason recounts in searing, unforgettable detail, in words and photographs, the terrorist attacks a year ago this week on the heart of Mumbai. We are honored to share this work with the readers of Untold Stories.

SIXTY HOURS OF TERROR, PART 1

The platform at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus.

I. TEN GUNMEN, TEN MINUTES

November 26, 2008. 9:40 P.M. Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus.

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) hummed with the foot traffic of late commuters. Under hulking steel rafters, held over from the British colonial era, the PA announcer issued final calls for departing suburban trains as they lurched away one after the next, packed with passengers. Long-distance travelers, mostly the poor North Indian migrants who flock to the city by the tens of thousands, took up benches and spots on the concrete floor, resting on sheets of newsprint with their piles of luggage.

Fongen Fernandes, the spry fifty-three-year-old manager of the upper level of the Re-Fresh snack bar with its tall glass panels overlooking the platforms, was talking to a graphic designer. Fernandes stood admiring the designer's digital handiwork on a laptop open at a table in the far corner of the restaurant, when he felt sand-like debris sprinkle the top of his head. "What's this?" he said to himself. He wiped his smooth pate a couple times and continued talking, unaware that below two young men had emerged from a bathroom abutting Platform 13 and begun spraying the crowd with gunfire, unaware that a high-velocity bullet shot from less than thirty yards away had missed him by inches and lodged in the wall over his shoulder. He bid the designer farewell and was halfway down the stairs when another series of rounds cracked against the wall and showered sparks into the air. A grenade exploded on the platform.

For more of Jason Motlagh's work, see his article in Virginia Quarterly Review.

For related reporting, see Simon Marks' "India's Global Ambitions," a series of reports for The NewsHour.