Receiver: Oh! That is good news! It is the icing on the cake.

Caller: Find those 3-4 persons and then get whatever you want from India.

Receiver: Pray that we find them.

The second time around, it was more than just an indication. In fact, supporters of the Chabad-Lubavitch sect in the US, whose Chabad House (Nariman House) had been attacked and seized by two Lashkar gunmen, even initiated a process of getting in touch with the attackers who were holed inside the five-storey building in Colaba.

Calls were made to the terrorists and an attempt was on to rope in a Mumbai Police official to pursue talks with them. But in the absence of a clear strategy to engage them and half-hearted measures to string up the technology needed to make a conference call, the attempt fell through.

Here is what happened on the morning of November 27, about 12 hours after Babar Imran and Nasir had raided the nondescript building in a Colaba lane. Rabbi Levi Shemtov, a Chabad emissary in Washington, called the mobile phone of Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, who ran Nariman House, but ended up getting someone who spoke in a language he did not understand. It was one of the terrorists speaking in Urdu.

Chabad-Lubavitch followers in Washington and New York searched for a Urdu-Hindi speaker they could depend upon and found P V Viswanath, who taught at Pace University in New York, and was willing to act as the interpreter between Shemtov and the terrorists in Nariman House.

... contd.