Living with insecurity

If you believe Saurabh Upadhyay, Mohammad Ajmal Qasab was not caught by the police. The only surviving gunman in last November's Mumbai attacks, he says, "simply gave up while running around Mumbai."

I am sitting in a taxi in Mumbai with the gangly college drop-out and gang member-turned-tourist guide as he takes me on a quick "terror tour" of the places that were attacked. Nearly 170 people were killed by gunmen at a busy railway station, two posh hotels, a Jewish centre, a hospital and a hippy eatery.

As our car trundles through the rising downtown traffic, Saurabh continues to enlighten me in breakneck guide-speak.

"The terrorists got lost. They looked at their maps. But maps don't help in this crazy city. So Qasab ran and ran and gave up to the police, exhausted."

Our taxi comes to a halt on the road where a police patrol stopped Qasab's car and dragged him out after shooting his accomplice dead. "Qasab just got fed up and gave up." What about reports that the cops got him?

"Nah, that's all wrong. You think the police can do that? They are so fat!"

A year after the audacious attacks, the dividing line between fact and fiction has blurred in Mumbai. The official narrative of that terrible night is being challenged in many ways. The only thing we are sure of is that 10 gunmen walked into a city of 19 million people and wreaked havoc for 62 hours. Also, the gunmen were indoctrinated and trained across the border, in Pakistan.

Widows of senior policemen who were killed have challenged the authorities to come clean with the facts. Why is the bulletproof jacket of my husband missing? asks the wife of an officer who was gunned down that night, raising suspicions that the force had been buying sub-standard protective gear.

Another wife has written a book saying that the police owe an explanation about why reinforcements were not sent to her husband and his colleagues during the attack on the hospital; and why they were left to die on the streets for 40 minutes after being shot by the gunmen.

A day after the attacks, I visited the Mumbai police control room tucked away in a corner of the force's handsome colonial headquarters. I sought a timeline of telephone calls made to it relating to the attacks and of the police deployments on the night of the attacks.

The timeline I got did not match a number of other timelines that the papers reported, crediting them to the Mumbai police. Control room chatter from that night point to a confused and fumbling force. Now the former police commissioner has set the cat among the pigeons after saying that some of his colleagues did slip up badly. And a perfunctory investigation of the lapses hasn't helped matters.

The tourist guide's amnesia - or ignorance? - helps in the dissemination of a parallel narrative about the attacks. As our taxi turns into a narrow lane in the backstreets of Colaba where the Jewish centre came under attack, Saurabh - "I have 16 years experience as a guide," he says - tells me cheerily that "40 to 45 terrorists" entered Mumbai that day. "Most of them escaped. The police have no idea where they went. They may be still around, plotting their next attack."

Not that Mumbai's residents have any time or inclination to ponder whether they could be attacked again. They are used to living with insecurity, says Kumar Ketkar, newspaper editor and one of the city's leading thinkers. Some of the insecurities are life-long - like affording decent housing in a city where property is sometimes costlier than Tokyo or London.

Then there is the insecurity of survival: some 4,000 people alone die every year while commuting to work on Mumbai's busy suburban networks and choked roads. On the other hand, the wheels of commerce turn fastest here and opportunities abound. Life is cheap, and time is money. So there's no time to grieve in this Maximum City, as its best chronicler Suketu Mehta called it.

"There is a feeling of uncertainty and insecurity. 26/11 has left behind an imprint of horror," says Mr Ketkar, sitting in his office in a building overlooking the sea. "But since Mumbai's people live with insecurity, they live for the day. They don't withdraw." Mr Ketkar remembers the streets of Delhi emptying out and the capital shutting down after seven in the evening during the peak of Sikh militancy in the 1980s. Nothing of that sort will ever happen in Mumbai, he assures me. "There will be no let-up in going out, having a good time."

There will also be no let-up in memorials with people holding candles and waxing eloquent on more accountability from politicians under the gaze of TV cameras. But only a fraction of them will turn out to cast their ballot on voting day. A politician will parade relatives of victims of the carnage to score brownie points. The police will crow about a $26m plan to equip the forces with modern guns and gizmos, never mind the fact that a few of their crack new commandos fainted during a mock exercise.

Like everything else, remembering the dead is good business. Some victims are cleverer than the rest - a hospital clerk who survived to tell his story after his throat was slashed by one of the attackers is charging journalists $125 for an interview. The manic media scrum helps.

Meanwhile, in the taxi on our terror whirligig, Saurabh says that life remains wretched for people like him, terror attacks or not. He sleeps on the streets near the Gateway of India because he cannot afford a home. His wife stays with an ex-gangster friend of his who has a roof over his head.

I ask him whether he believes that the city could be attacked again.

"Oh yes, it will happen again," Saurabh says dismissively. "Does anybody care?"

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