Former Boston couple stayed safe by staying put in apartment

As smoke billowed up toward their Mumbai apartment, the loudest of the gunshots and grenade explosions nearby could be felt as well as heard.

Flocks of birds would scatter outside the windows, then the blasts would reverberate moments later on the delayed live broadcast on their television, said Paresh and Nirva Patel, a former Boston couple who now live in the heart of India's commercial center, among the main sites struck by terrorists.

The pair waited out the three-day siege from the relative security of their modern apartment building, where the lobby served as a staging area for freed hostages and evacuees from the luxury hotels nearby. They monitored the news on TV and on the Internet, out the window, and in conversations with the numbed travelers in the lobby.

"We just saw a body being thrown out the window," said Nirva Patel, a 30-year-old lawyer from Ashland, in a phone interview while the siege was coming to a close yesterday morning in Mumbai. "The entire Taj hotel is in smoke. They say there's a foul smell emanating from the Taj. . . . We're too afraid to open up our doors and windows."

Amid fear and uncertainty, the Patels spoke with those who had witnessed mass carnage and narrowly escaped death, and they dispensed cellphone chargers to help the displaced in the lobby stay connected with family and friends, in a surreal scene.

"It was almost like being in an airport, where the flight gets delayed and there's all these people milling around and they don't really [know] what to do, walking around looking disheveled and frazzled," said Paresh Patel, a 37-year-old Lexington native, in an interview late last night from Mumbai (midday yesterday in Boston) after authorities had announced the end of the siege.

As the violence subsided, the Patels, who moved to Mumbai two years ago, described the moment - and ensuing mix of emotions and reactions - that in some ways echoed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in the United States.

Even as politicians and officials talked about cracking down on terrorists and bolstering public safety, local residents wondered if action would follow rhetoric, Paresh Patel said. And while many natives are already exhibiting what Paresh called their characteristic spirit and resilience, some residents fled immediately. Two couples from the Patels' building, which is popular with expatriates, hastily packed and dashed for the airport, returning to England and the United States, respectively, they said.

But for now, the Patels said, they were trying mostly to calm their shaken dog and shelter their infant daughter, assure family and friends half a world away that they were safe, and prepare to resume their lives in a scarred city.

"Our entire lifestyle will have to change now because there's nowhere that's safe," said Nirva, as the couple's 7-month-old daughter, Bela, cried in the background.

The Patels regularly dine in the restaurants at the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower hotel, two blocks from their apartment, and at the adjacent Oberoi and Trident hotels, four blocks in the other direction. Paresh knows two people who escaped from Oberoi's Kandahar and Tiffin restaurants, where dozens were killed. And Nirva ate lunch Wednesday at Trident's Frangipani a few hours before the siege began. She might have returned to the hotel that night if not for lack of a baby sitter.

Among the people they spoke with in their lobby was a man who hid behind a Taj bookstore counter and watched as another traveler was shot outside a locked store in the hotel's shopping corridor. The Patels met an Australian woman who escaped gunfire on two floors, hid in silence in a darkened hotel room for 15 or more hours, fainted as police led her to safety, and regained consciousness in time to pull her pant legs up as she forged through body parts and blood while exiting the Taj lobby.

Paresh Patel, who graduated from Boston College and Harvard Business School and started a hedge fund that invests in Indian companies, moved to Mumbai with his wife, who had worked as a lawyer in Boston, a few months after the coordinated, rush-hour train bombings of 2006.

At the time, resilient "Mumbaikers" quickly resumed everyday life. But in hindsight, officials did not seem to back their rhetoric with enough action to prevent or minimize future attacks, he said. "Maybe it's not time to start criticizing people," he said, adding that the police, paramilitary forces, and soldiers who ended the standoff were heroes.

As they huddled in their building and tried to calm their tiny dog, Garcon, who shook with each of the dozens of blasts, Nirva Patel said she had her family's safety to be thankful for on Thanksgiving Day.

"I'm grateful. I'm really grateful," Patel, a graduate of Boston University and New England School of Law, said with a heavy sigh. "We could have been there."