The Best American Travel Writing 2011

by Sloane Crosley

  Famous

  Tom Ireland

  FROM The Missouri Review

  ON THE NIGHT of November 26, 2008, two men walked into Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai, India, and started shooting and throwing grenades into the crowds of travelers "indiscriminately," as reported in the official Indian account of the attack. In a railway station that accommodates 2 million passengers every day, a place where one can hardly stand during peak hours without being swept into a river of people, they couldn't very well have missed. In minutes the dead and dying lay throughout the concourse, their limbs splayed in grotesque postures, and blood pooled on the station's concrete floor.

  The younger of the two, twenty-one-year-old Mohammad Ajmal Amir Kasab, a native of the Punjab region of Pakistan, became famous when pictures of him taken during and after the attack circulated in the media. Sebastian D'Souza, a photographer with the Mumbai Mirror, was in the office that night when he heard gunfire from the train station and ran across the street with a camera. He ducked into a train standing at one of the platforms while the two gunmen stalked the concourse, taking turns shooting and reloading as they went.

  "They were like angels of death," said D'Souza. "When they hit someone they didn't even look back. They were so sure."

  To get a better angle, D'Souza moved across the platform into another waiting train and, trying to keep his hands from shaking, took a few frames with a telephoto lens as the two men crossed his line of vision. They probably saw him taking pictures, he said, but "didn't seem to care," or else they saw him as an opportunity to gain some cheap celebrity as young jihadists. People who never would have paid any attention to them otherwise would come to know and say their names.

  In D'Souza's photograph, Ajmal Kasab is seen in profile walking through the station, an AK-47 assault rifle held in his right hand, a duffel slung over his left shoulder—everything he needed to stay alive and keep on fighting "to the last breath," as he characterized his mission later under questioning. His commanders in Pakistan had ordered him and the other nine to kill as many people as they could before being killed themselves. Although escape routes had been entered into a GPS unit later recovered by police, escape was not an acceptable outcome according to the terms of his contract, and capture was unthinkable.

  The young man in the photograph is more attractive than he has any right to be: the boyish bangs, the proud chin, the jaunty stride, the expression intensely alert but not discernibly fearful or malicious. His evident excitement might be that of an exchange student on his own in a foreign country for the first time—in fact it was the first time he had left his native country—carrying everything he needs for a year abroad (replace the Kalashnikov with a cricket bat and you get an entirely different picture). He wears running shoes, gray cargo pants, a dark blue Versace T-shirt. There's a waterproof watch on his left wrist, and on his right wrist, the hand holding the rifle, he wears a red and yellow mauli, the yarn bracelet offered at Hindu temples in exchange for alms, meant to keep the wearer safe from harm.

  At least three other photographs of Kasab circulated in the media soon after the attacks, though none as widely as D'Souza's—two stills from closed-circuit television cameras and one of Kasab in the hospital after he was captured; he was the only one of the ten terrorists who survived battles with police and security forces. One of the television images, very unlike D'Souza's photo, is of a young man with an expression of exaggerated malice, as if meant to conform to a popular idea of how a terrorist might look in the act of killing—a comic-book villain.

  Then there was the photo taken in the hospital, in which Kasab is lying down, looking up at the camera. His face is scabby and bloated. He's too tired to summon any large emotion at this point, and his face betrays only weak contempt for the person holding the camera. It's the face of a man who knows he's going to hang.

  ***

  I didn't yet know the name Ajmal Kasab when, two nights after the massacre in the railway station, I arrived in Mumbai for a month's vacation on the west coast of India. Neither I nor my partner, Anne, had ever visited India before, and we were anxious about finding our way in an unfamiliar city, still under armed attack when we landed. Gunmen of unknown affiliation had gone on a rampage, shooting civilians in a railway station, a movie theater, a restaurant, a Jewish center, and two luxury hotels in the Mumbai tourist district, the part of town where we would be staying for a few days before taking a train from that station en route to the rest of our vacation. Before leaving home I'd seen Internet photos of Indian security forces huddled behind emergency vehicles near the Gateway of India on the Mumbai waterfront, the shattered window glass at the Leopold Café, the dead bodies in the railway station. But it would be another month, after we left India safely behind, before I saw pictures of the one surviving terrorist and learned his name.

  By the time we woke in Mumbai on the morning of November 29, all of the terrorists except Ajmal Kasab had been killed. Police were in the process of "sanitising" the Taj Mahal Palace—presumably, removing the dead from the building. A television camera had recorded the body of one terrorist being dumped from a ground-floor window at the Taj, and in the ancient tradition of desecrating the body of one's enemy, local channels showed the charred corpse falling from the window again and again.

  There wasn't much else to see on TV: the soot-stained hotel façade, where fires set by the gunmen had burned and been put out: past-tense video of commando forces known as the Black Cats roping down from a helicopter to the roof of Nariman House, the Jewish center where a Brooklyn rabbi and his wife had been tortured and executed. We went for breakfast at a dosa joint on the corner and agreed, at least for one day, to keep away from the Gateway of India and the crowds that were sure to gather at the Taj.

  After breakfast we looked quickly at a map and walked south in the direction of the Prince of Wales Museum, but it was closed because of the emergency. With no other destination in mind, we kept walking south and in fifteen minutes found ourselves staring at the damaged Taj Mahal Palace along with thousands of Indians who lined the seawall and strolled among the parked emergency vehicles.

  We were doing the one thing we had agreed not to do, but faced with the spectacle, we found it impossible not to look. Tired firefighters sat on top of their fire truck, smoking, drinking Cokes, checking out the crowds of sightseers. Black Cats in their commando getups stared sleepily at us through the steel-grill windows of buses. There was grief but also a spirit of subdued celebration among many of the onlookers: our guys had killed all but one of their guys, and he would die, too.

  One group of angry men stood out from the rest, bearing signs and flags and crying out together, presumably for vengeance. We kept well away from them and, stepping over exhausted fire hoses and tangled television cables, walked back to the hotel, stopping on the way to look at kurtas in Fabindia, a clothing store popular with tourists.

  Three policemen were camped in the corridor outside our room at the Residency Hotel the next morning when I went out to get a paper. The Residency was at the low end of hotels in the tourist district, hardly the sort of place to be targeted by terrorists. Nevertheless, we had been placed under armed protection. Squeezed together at the head of the stairwell, the three men stood up quickly and wished me good morning. For a moment I thought they were going to salute.

  We walked north that day, a route that took us past Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, and stepped inside to look at the scene of the massacre. Most people who live in Mumbai still call it VT, for Victoria Terminus, but during the 1990s, under pressure from a radical Hindu group, Shiv Sena, the station was renamed after Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, the Marathi hero who established an independent state in western India in the seventeenth century. Shivaji is famous in India for the same kind of bold guerrilla tactics that allowed the Mumbai terrorists to enter Indian territorial waters and Mumbai harbor without being apprehended. A devout Hindu (his war cry was "Hail, Lord Shiva!"), he was succeeded by Mohandas Gandhi in his advocacy
of an independent, secular Indian state in which Hindus and Muslims could live peaceably together.

  We'd first seen the station from the taxi the night we arrived in Mumbai—the monstrous Victorian Gothic stone façade, like something conceived in special effects, absurdly bathed in amber floodlight at two in the morning. Outside it was extravagant and dingy, the bas-reliefs of dignitaries and wildlife, British lion and Indian tiger, colonized with mold. Inside it was merely dingy. Even on a Sunday the place was mobbed. Railway police and a few National Security Guards were scattered near the entrances, but nobody was checking luggage. Nobody asked to see my passport.

  Victoria has been compared to St. Pancras Station in London, the nineteenth-century "cathedral" of railway stations, which predated it by twenty years: a European building in every respect except the ground it was built on. Its choice as one of the targets of the attacks must have been determined by more than the most practical consideration—its density of human life. A monument both to India's colonial subjugation and to its independence, Victoria celebrates the country's initiation into the echelon of progressive, industrialized nations and the birth of its middle class. By including it in the list of targets, those who planned the VT attack evidently meant to add ideological insult to physical injury.

  It wouldn't have done to stand there very long among the hurrying passengers and look up into the station's cathedral heights, as I would have liked. It would have been even less appropriate to look down and search for traces of blood on the floor, although it did occur to me to do just that.

  There was a good deal of confusion surrounding Kasab's "identity," as his captors put it, immediately after the attacks. Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani group that has been accused of planning and carrying out the operation, gave its recruits false names while they were in training and changed those names on a regular basis. The ten eventually chosen for the assault trained for months, first together, finally in pairs, but they didn't learn each other's real names until after they had boarded the boat in Karachi on their way to Mumbai to carry out their mission.

  Kasab means "butcher" in Urdu. The name of one's profession or caste is commonly used as a surname in India (Gandhi, for example, means "grocer"), and Kasab's captors may have taken his caste name for his family name. It was reported that he spoke English, then not, then that in addition to his native Punjabi he knew a few words of a Hindi dialect. In the absence of any more reliable information, his interrogators may have decided that "Butcher" was an appropriate label.

  Whatever his name, Kasab was evidently nobody, one of thousands of poorly educated, unemployed young men who are continually being recruited by militant groups like Lashkar. In the days immediately following the attacks, there was speculation that he and the others represented a new class of terrorists—young, educated, middle-class Muslims acting out of political or religious conviction, angered by the persecution of Muslim populations in India, Kashmir, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Indonesia, and elsewhere. Such speculation was based largely on how the terrorists were dressed and on statements by eyewitnesses that they seemed well-off. But Kasab's confession to Indian police indicated that his family was poor, that he had gone to a Pakistani government primary school for only four years before dropping out to find work, and that he was largely ignorant of political causes or religious beliefs. Asked to define jihad during questioning, he said, "It means killing and being killed and becoming famous."

  Kasab's native village, Faridkot, didn't have much to offer. His father sold dahi wada (fried dal paste with yogurt) from a street cart. The family often went hungry. Ajmal lived with his brother, Afzal, in Lahore and occasionally found work as a laborer. Between jobs he went home. Tired of dressing like a villager, on one such visit he argued with his father, who refused when Ajmal asked him for money to buy clothes.

  Back in Lahore, he stayed at a home for runaways until going to work for a "decorator" for 120 rupees (about $2.50) a day in the town of Jhelum, a job he hated. Later he was raised to 200 rupees, but it wasn't enough to live on, so he teamed up with an older boy, Muzaffar Khan, and started robbing houses. Hoping to make better money, the two moved to Rawalpindi, rented an apartment, and began casing the city's wealthy houses.

  In the version of his story that Kasab told police right after he was arrested, he and Khan decided that to succeed as professional thieves, they had to have guns. While searching for them in the bazaar during the festival of Bakrid (from the Urdu bakr, "goat"), the Festival of Sacrifice, they found a Lashkar-e-Taiba field office and made inquiries. Realizing that even if they managed to buy some guns, they wouldn't know how to use them, they followed directions to another Lashkar office. When the man who answered the door asked what they wanted, they said, "Jihad."

  Traditional Muslims butcher a goat during Bakrid to commemorate Ibrahim's faithful offering of Ismail, his only son, as a blood sacrifice to God and God's compassionate answer, a butchered goat in Ismail's place. At the time he signed up with Lashkar, Kasab was more interested in advancing his career as a petty thief than in sacrificing himself to a cause that he wouldn't have adopted on principle. In so doing he joined the ranks of young men worldwide who, without anything resembling a livelihood, leave their village to find work in the city. Unemployed, faced with a choice between becoming a thief or a soldier, he chose what must have seemed the easier way and joined the mercenaries. At least he had enough to eat in his new job, decent clothes to wear, the identity that goes along with having an institutional sponsor, and, best of all, the opportunity to play with guns.

  For six and a half months he was sent to one camp after another and put through a series of courses, first in physical exercise and weaponry—AK-47, SKS, Uzi, pistol, revolver, hand grenades, rocket launchers, mortars, bombs—later in swimming, marine navigation, the rudiments of urban warfare, and the workings of Indian security forces. Kasab did well and earned the approval of his handlers, who noted that he was a good shot. He and Ismail Khan were eventually assigned to the "VTS team"—Victoria Terminus station—and isolated from the other four teams in the final weeks of training.

  They studied a map of Mumbai on Google Earth, learned how to get from Azad Maidan on the city waterfront to Victoria Terminus, and watched a video of commuters during rush hour at the station, morning and night, when the number of people in the station would be highest. After killing as many as possible, they were supposed to kidnap some others, take them to the roof of a nearby building, contact the local media by cell phone, and make demands in exchange for their release.

  A little more than halfway through this period of training, Kasab was permitted to visit his parents for a month in Faridkot before the final and most intense stage of preparation for the attack on Mumbai—the first and only time he went home after the falling-out with his father. He still had no idea what he was being trained for, exactly, and even if he had been inclined to betray Lashkar, he probably couldn't have told his family where and when the attack was going to take place. They must have been curious to know what he'd been doing, why he seemed so fit and well fed, who his friends were, where he'd come by the new shoes he was wearing. One can only guess the extent to which he was able to confide in them before leaving home for good.

  The official Indian dossier on the attacks is a brief constabulary account of the terrorists' journey from Pakistan by sea; their hijacking of an Indian fishing vessel; the murder of its crew and, later, after he had piloted them to their destination, its captain; their landing in an inflatable dinghy; and the various assignments undertaken by the five pairs of terrorists. Appended to the dossier is a list of foreigners killed in the attacks (the names of Indian citizens who died are not given) and a list of supplies the terrorists left behind on the hijacked boat, with photographs, presented as evidence that the men were in fact Pakistani nationals: "Made in Pakistan milk powder packets (Nestlé)...Shaving cream—Touchme, Made in Pakistan ... Pakistan made pickle." Nothing about the pickle conclusively identified it as Pak
istani, but the weight of the other evidence was strongly against it.

  Ajmal Kasab and Ismail Khan took a taxi from the waterfront to Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. The dossier briefly tells how, when "challenged" by police in the station during their shooting spree, the two retreated to the vicinity of Cama Hospital, planning to gather hostages and herd them into some sort of stronghold. At this point their plan jumped the tracks. Confronted by police near the hospital, they shot and killed three officers, took their car, and drove toward the waterfront. There they hijacked another car and drove west along Marine Drive until they were stopped at a police barricade near Chowpatti Beach.

  According to some accounts, Kasab sustained a minor wound during the showdown on Marine Drive, in which Tukaram Ombale, a junior police officer armed only with a lathi (metal-tipped cane), managed to grab Kasab's weapon long enough for others to subdue him. Ombale died later of bullet wounds. Civilian onlookers beat Kasab unconscious before he was taken to a hospital where, exhausted and dehydrated, he asked for a saline injection—possibly a first-aid technique he'd learned during his training.

  At first he told his captors that he didn't want to die. Then he begged them to kill him, if not for his own sake—to escape the ordeals of imprisonment, trial, and execution that certainly awaited him—then for the sake of his family in Pakistan. His actions would not go down well with Lashkar-e-Taiba. Besides his failure to carry out his orders and die fighting, he gave detailed information, including names, to Indian authorities, and at one point, demonstrating how unmotivated he was by anything like conscientious belief, he offered to do for India what he'd done for Lashkar. What the photographer D'Souza had observed in the train station the night of the attack—that the two killers seemed "so sure" of themselves—had disguised Kasab's fundamental neediness, ignorance, confusion, and fear.