MUMBAI, India — About two dozen Americans, their cameras filled with photos of Hindu temples and Buddhist caves, were eating dinner in the posh lobby cafe of the Oberoi hotel when a young gunman raised an assault rifle and opened fire.
It was just after 9:30 p.m. Wednesday, the start of a terrifying siege that would last about three days.
“We all dived under the table,” said Linda Ragsdale, a children’s book illustrator from Nashville who was visiting India with a Virginia-based meditation group. “I tried to lay my head down and pretend I was dead.”
Bullets whizzed overhead. The sound of grenades reverberated off the marble floors. Ragsdale pulled a young girl under the table. But it quickly became apparent that the girl, Naomi Scherr, a spunky 13-year-old with red hair, had been hit. Her body was pale and limp.
“I was taking in the enormity of the moment, thinking that this energetic child who I had been playing with in the pool the night before — and had made a pact to do somersaults with — was dead, shot.”
At the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel nearby, Sarita Hegde Roy, an Indian public relations director, was meeting with a group of European businesspeople to promote tourism. Through the glass doors of the Sea Lounge cafe, where she was holding the meeting, she spotted three young men with guns walk into the hotel’s lobby. Then she heard gunfire. “Lock the door! Switch off the lights! Lay down flat!” shouted a hotel worker. More than three dozen guests hit the floor.
A few minutes later, the gunmen started shooting at the Sea Lounge’s doors. Glass shards showered the room, Roy said. She noticed her foot was covered in blood.
As quickly as the gunmen came, they vanished into the upper floors of the hotel.
“Laying on our stomachs, we started getting text messages on our cellphones from senior hotel managers warning us to stay down or that gunmen were on the fifth floor,” Roy said.
After midnight, a portion of the ceiling caved in. Apparently, a pipe had burst. Cold water and ceiling debris poured over many of the prostrated guests, who were too terrified to move. Some held hands.
They lay there for five hours, some of them soaking wet. By 3 a.m., the blasts became louder and more frequent.
As dawn broke, hotel workers guided Roy and the others out of the cafe to a second-floor window, where fire crews had a ladder waiting for them. Once outside in the morning air, Roy said, she looked around and saw parts of the hotel in flames.
“There were snipers all over this hotel that I have loved since my childhood,” she said.
