He lucks out on the burning hotel floor
On the night of November 26, luck and disaster courted Chennai’s chartered accountant P.B. Srinivasan alternately in Mumbai.
He still cannot figure out why he changed his mind and asked the taxi driver to take him to the Taj Hotel instead of the Wankhede Stadium, where he meant to go. A partner in a chartered accounting firm P.B. Vijayaraghavan and Co., which was an internal auditor and tax consultant for the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), Mr. Srinivasan flies to Mumbai almost every week and stays at the Taj, whenever he is not put up with his sister in Vashi.
He checked into Room 350 (third floor in the heritage wing) by about 9.45 p.m. He was watching TV when Prasanna of the IPL called him on the mobile trying to find out his whereabouts. “Prasanna told me that the Taj area had been cordoned off. He asked me to go down and check what was happening. I opened the door and found the corridor deserted,” Mr. Srinivasan recounts to The Hindu, from the safety and comfort of his T.Nagar flat here.
Then he heard what sounded like “shots, or even fireworks.” He immediately shut the door and called the hotel’s general manager on her mobile. “She spoke in hushed tones, telling me not to leave the room.” The television, meanwhile, was talking of a gang war in Leopold Café.
His friends in the IPL and the BCCI kept calling and texting him. The messages became his only source of information when the TV went off just as did the air-conditioner. “I did not want to call my family. Obviously, they did not know anything or they would have called me. I did not want to get them all worked up,” says Mr. Srinivasan. Besides, frankly, he thought it would be over soon.
That was not to be. By now, he could hear ‘gunshots, breaking glass and grenades being hurled’, though he had no idea where the action was taking place. The hotel staff called to say: “Switch off all lights, lie on the floor and do not open the door at any cost.”
In retrospect, if he got out as early as he did, unlike many others in the hotel, it was probably because he got up at periodic intervals to look out through the window of his road-facing room. “It turns out that checking the windows was a good thing. I could see the fire engines and wave for help.”
Smoke triggers panic
His luck turned again, and Mr. Srinivasan panicked for the first time when smoke started filling the room. Russel Radhakrishnan, travel assistant for the Indian cricket team, called to tell him that he could see on TV that the sixth floor of the Taj was burning. He advised him to wet towels; place them in the space between the door and the floor; use some for himself and stay away from the door. “He also asked me to read the floor plan and memorise the exit route in case I needed to flee. I was in a dilemma, I should probably escape, but what if someone was in the corridor?”
By 2.30 a.m. he grabbed his purse, and mobile phones and got a small handbag. “By then the firemen were trying to rescue people from the burning sixth floor. Someone from below was shouting, “Don’t jump! We’re coming for you!’ I decided to wait until they had finished.”
About 3.15 a.m., he switched on the lights in the room in an attempt to attract attention, on the advice of friends. The fireman saw him immediately and brought the ladder up to the third floor. He broke open the window of the next room and crossed over. “He wanted to take a few more people with us. So we went across the corridor and banged on the doors. No one opened up. So, we decided to leave — the fireman, a hotel cleaner and me — and finally got down and out.”
The first SMS he sent to his wife was at 6 a.m. Very simply it said, “Lucky escape from terrorists.”
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