Column

The man who answered my call appeared distracted. I breathed a sigh of relief thinking he wouldn’t want to talk. But that was not to be. He was polite yet distant. “I am still stuck at the Trident,” he said.

I will, in a week, complete three years at DNA, my first job. In these three years, one incident had a profound impact on me, as a journalist and as a human being. I got an exclusive that never was.

The day was November 26, 2008. Terrorists had taken people hostage at the Taj Mahal and Trident hotels. Alerted by relatives and shaken by the fact that I had been in the vicinity of the Taj just a few hours earlier, I went to sleep with the belief that things would be taken care of. They weren’t.

I headed to work early the next day (media, after all, thrives on such breaking news). The empty streets and empty local trains did not bode well.

Neither did that phone call. Despite the urgency of his situation, he spoke to me. Before hanging up, he had one request, “Keep me posted on what is happening outside”. He was trapped in his room, which was in darkness and his phone was the only link to the internet and his son in Kolkata.

Back at office, there was a buzz in the air: keyboards clacking, phones ringing, instructions being shouted and television channels blaring. Amidst this, my boss gave us juniors the numbers of some hostages and told us to talk to them. It was every journalist’s worst nightmare — calling up the victim of a tragic incident and asking them the dreaded “How do you feel?” But orders were orders. And a request from a hostage trapped at the Trident had to be given attention.

I kept updating him every five minutes. At times, I would receive an SMS from him about gunfire, and it would appear on TV a minute later. Things did not improve that day. The next morning I got an SMS from him saying he was still safe but he hadn’t slept or eaten.

The drama and our SMS correspondence continued that day and night, interspersed with the odd call to try and boost his spirits. The arrival of the NSG gave him a renewed confidence.
On Day 3, 11 am, I got the call that I had been waiting for. “I am saved.”

Later that day I went to meet him. He gave me a bear hug. We spoke about his ordeal and his admiration renewed faith in the security forces. He showed me the ‘souvenirs’ of his ordeal: a bottle of water and a half-eaten packet of salted peanuts. The exclusive — a first-person survivor’s account — did not materialise, and I was glad. I did not want his ordeal to be a highpoint of my career.

It’s been over two years and I regret saying that I lost contact with him. I hope, Sreejit, you are reading this and you get in touch with someone you once called your ‘guardian angel’.