He saved the men who saved us

Safely ensconced in a small transparent plastic box, at Dr Keki Turel’s clinic, is a piece of twisted metal. “It’s a piece of a bullet retrieved from the brain of PV Manish, an NSG commando I operated on,” said Turel, professor and head of department of neurosurgery, Bombay Hospital.

The bullet pierced through his skull, and hit the motor area of his brain, which controls movement, said Turel. “The commando was paralysed,” said the neurosurgeon, who also operated on two other commandos.

“One of them [Amitendra Kumar Singh] lost his vision as the bullet damaged his optic nerve. The other was luckier as the bullet only grazed his skull,”  Turel said.

The commandos were strong silent handsome boys, “sleek like panthers”, said the neurosurgeon, who has operated on several victims of the Yemen war, the Iraq war, and has even had a brush with death in Srinagar, at the height of the Kashmir violence in 1989.

Bombay Hospital saw at least 70 patients the first day — most of them foreigners and upper-class Indians who had been dining at the Taj and Oberoi hotels. Their reactions were varied. One Englishman stood with open arms, pointing at the bullet wounds on both his arms. “‘They are not trained. They could not even shoot right and finish me off,” he said laughing hysterically to Turel.

Another Norwegian was shot at Leopold Cafe, the bullet pierced his hands, almost ripping off three of his fingers, and had then gone through his face, entering through the chin and exiting from the forehead. “But all he cared about was the fact that he had seen his generous Indian hostess drop dead,” he said.

There were few patients who said they forgave the terrorists, and one foreigner said he would stay back in Mumbai to share the city’s pain, said the neurosurgeon.