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Survivors bond with hotel, fight the memories

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MUMBAI: For some, the walls may have been repainted and the upholstery changed, but the scars beneath remain open. Each time he visits the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower, Dr Prashant Mangeshikar wonders if there was a better escape route.

Mangeshikar had gone with his wife and daughter to the Taj on November 26, 2008 to attend a wedding. He ended up getting trapped in the Chambers for 12 horrifying hours.

“We were the last batch of people to be rescued from there,’’ says Mangeshikar, adding that when he first heard the firing he thought it was the sound of firecrackers bursting. Mangeshikar and his wife helped treat a wounded Taj steward with napkins to stop his blood flow. “But unfortunately, he passed away,’’ the doctor remembers.

“I’m not worried about returning to the Taj, going back there doesn’t bother me. But I still haven’t been to the Chambers, where I was stranded for more than 12 hours,’’ he says.

Like Mangeshikar, many survivors fight haunting memories of those fateful days and nights when the deafening sounds of bullets and grenades echoed all around. But, also like Mangeshikar, loyal guests of the Taj say there’s no question of staying away from the scene of the mayhem when it becomes time to show their solidarity with the hotel.

Rizwan Abdul Kader, a businessman who was stranded inside the Zodiac Grill on the night of November 26, 2008 and spent more than eight terrifying hours in the restaurant, says, “The Taj is my home. I have gone back several times after the hotel was reopened.’’ In fact. Rizwan said he also intends to go for the reopening of the Golden Dragon.

While some guests, foreign and Indian, have returned to stay in the same room in which they spent nearly 60 hours with prayers on their lips, corporates like Hindustan Unilever and Deutsche Bank have returned to host conferences at the Taj.

While Kader will probably go to the Taj to mark the first anniversary, Mangeshikar will be busy with a 20-hour surgery in Hyderabad.
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