On 26 November 2008, my city of birth, my Mumbai -- trusting little insomniac that she is -- watched disbelievingly as 10 lethally-armed terrorists, young, smiling and high on speed, targeted key sites on its southern side: the CST railway station, from where millions commute daily, in large dusty trains that snake their way across the city, the country; the Hotel Taj Mahal, heritage home to the wealthy, the gentile, the dressy, the showy, the well-read, the well-heeled, the old who must be seen as apostles of good taste, and the young who, well, simply must be seen -- The Taj, where marriages are plotted as feverishly as mergers, where flavours settle fluently on tastebuds, where architects and aesthetes celebrate the ambience of another day, a nother age; without doubt, the grand old dowager of monuments;

Leopold Cafe, Mumbai's own nook of bohemia, agog with tourists, music, chatter, beer, the romance of marble top tables and cursive black chairs and foreigners in light summer clothes and waiters swivelling in between, tiptoeing to their orders as nimbly as to the tunes of the jukebox; Hotel Trident, the end-of-the-road glitter in the Queen's Necklace, where the city sparkles before an endless ocean, where lovers turn their backs to the city and gaze wistfully at the horizon, where vendors stroll purposefully, their wares in hand, hope and expectation alight in their eyes, and where people of all communities, all ages, shed their frustrations: job cares, family cares, money cares: who cares as long as they have a seafront to wash them away?

Here they stole in. Here they attacked. How do you think we felt? We, the ones who belong to this city as much as it belongs to us.

They came in from the choppy seas
Accompanied by a traitor wind
Dark-eyed monsters with a collective spine
Abject orphans of a mastermind