The Battle of Nariman House

Throughout the siege, crowds grew around Nariman House, jostling for a glimpse. Every hour or so the police would clear the street, and people would fill back into the spaces along the alleys, lanes, rooftops and roads. Less than a mile away, smoke steadily rose from the Taj—now easily Mumbai's most famous hotel. Locals who would normally be out fishing in the Arabian Sea are busy guiding police, soldiers and commandos through the labyrinthine alleyways.

Suddenly a grenade came rolling out of Nariman House and exploded, sending everyone diving for cover.

As Thursday afternoon dragged on, curious neighbors started to pop their heads out of windows. Journalists who had been up all night closed their eyes briefly. At 4pm, 30 more commandos joined police officers in the street. The commandos on the roof conferred. Journalists, thinking a raid was imminent, jostled for the space. Nothing happened.

A helicopter flew by and everyone looked up. It made another low, slow pass; this time nobody looked. Cats danced along the tiled roofs, aloof and uninterested in the surrounding drama.

Occasionally the commandos on the rooftop took a break for chai. They refused to give their names, but cited their involvement in a famous mosque siege in the state of Gujarat as a kind of identification. The 10-by 20-foot rooftop can be unbearably claustrophobic. It was now starting to get very crowded. Three men in olive uniforms brought up a floodlight against the encroaching darkness, which added a surreal, Bollywood quality to the standoff. A gaggle of local strongmen, their white shirts draped over large paunches, closed in tight to photograph the commandos with expensive camera phones.

As a gorgeous sunset gave sway to the incandescent glow of the streetlights, four men from the army set up a night vision device the size of a small telescope. I asked the mustachioed commando what he wanted to do. "Shoot" he said. "Shoot and finish." The siege, however, lasted all night.

Friday couldn't have been more different from Thursday. Just after sunrise, a helicopter deposited 20 commandos onto the roof of Nariman House. People sensed an end was near. But how near? And what of the hostages? With the police not giving out information rumors ran wild.

After hours of quiet, the afternoon stillness was punctured by the sound of an exploding grenade, followed by a volley of small arms fire aimed through the fourth-floor window, some rounds hitting the walls and window sills. Smoke, or tear gas, wafted from the side windows.