Free The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel by Adrian Levy Page B

afraid,’ he said. ‘I’ll be murdered like Daniel Pearl.’ Headley laughed. ‘No one will touch you if I’m around. You should change your names.’ He looked at Bhatt and said: ‘Maybe you should become Mohammed Atta!’ Everyone knew the 9/11 conspirator. ‘There’s safety in the blindingly obvious,’ Headley told them, laughing in their faces.
    When he was not with Warek or Bhatt, Headley often visited the Taj alone. In his mind it was already emerging as the number one target. Drinking with a well-connected local businessman, Sunil Patel, he got himself invited to a Bollywood party in the Crystal Room and bought a Mont Blanc pen from the hotel shop. He browsed in Nalanda’s. He loved the Taj and its lifestyle, and observed it minutely. On at least two occasions, he joined the Friday Tour, a paid walk-and-talk tour popular with tourists, which he also filmed, recording on one of those videos the hotel layout and its history. He read up on its founder, Jamsetji Tata, whose family, originally priests from Gujarat, had emigrated to the city, sending their boy to London in 1858 on a voyage of discovery.
    Everything was research material. Headley taped the guide explaining how the scion of the Tata dynasty had returned from Europe with a plan to open cotton mills, building an industrial empire based on personal loyalty. Jamsetji Tata also purchased a rectangular block of reclaimed land overlooking the harbour at Apollo Bunder, envisaging a hotel that merged Mughal, Rajput and Oriental aesthetics backed up by Colonial standards.
    In a hotel pamphlet, Headley underlined passages about the Taj’s design, how the industrialist Tata had hired a dynamic Indo-European team led by the great Victorian master builder of Bombay, Frederick Stevens, who had constructed the Royal Alfred Sailors’ Home (later the state police headquarters), as well as Victoria Terminus (later renamed Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus) and Churchgate station.
    The pamphlet described how Stevens had created a U-shapedstructure out of hard-wearing grey basalt, turning in from the harbour, with spacious galleries running the length of the building, along each wing and from the second floor up to the roof: a great net to catch the evening breezes. Headley walked with the group down these galleries, videoing all the way, sketching the route afterwards, as visitors were told how Stevens had planned to lace these galleries together with Gujarati trellises and balustrades interpreted in an Edwardian style.
    As Headley fathomed the complex layout, drawing detailed sketches of wherever he had walked, he also learned about the hotel’s history of innovation. He highlighted passages in guidebooks that explained how the positioning of the hotel back-to-front also enabled the greatest number of guests to have a sea view. Like Victoria Terminus, the Taj had cupolas on each corner and a grand central dome covering a cantilevered central staircase. The cellars contained a refrigeration plant, the ground and first floors would be shops and restaurants, while the bedrooms would be on the second to fifth floors, with a roof garden crowning the building. When Stevens died suddenly in 1900, his successor, William Chambers, added a Florentine Renaissance theme. Jamsetji splashed out 26 million rupees – the equivalent of £200m today – for thirty private apartments and 350 double and single rooms with electric lights, fans, bells and clocks, along with four mechanical passenger lifts imported from Germany. The hotel had its own power plant, a chemist’s shop and a Turkish bath. Adding to the city-state atmosphere, a post office was opened. Upping the technological ante, the residents were cooled by a carbon dioxide-powered refrigeration system that also provided ice for Bombay’s first licensed bar. With an English manager and a French head chef, the Taj was half finished in 1902 when Jamsetji embarked on a grand tour of Europe and the US, sending back Belgian crystal