A horrible nightmare revisited Qazi Zakir Hussain during Diwali last month. Every burst of firecrackers sent the frail 24-year-old scurrying under the couch, where he would spend the rest of the night, sleepless.

“The firecrackers reminded me of that night. I still can’t stop thinking about it, it’s as if it happened yesterday,” he says.

It’s almost a year since that November 26 night when Zakir had a close shave with death when two terrorists stormed a Jewish centre in Colaba in South Mumbai and took control of it for two days.

Zakir’s employers, Rivka and Gavriel Holtzberg, who ran the Mumbai centre of the orthodox Jewish Chabad Lubavitch movement, were killed along with six visiting Jews. But their two-year-old son Moshe, his Indian nanny Sandra Samuel and Zakir managed a miraculous escape.

That night he and Sandra hid wedged behind a refrigerator for 13 hours, hearing gunshots and screams all night before fleeing with their lives.

“It was the worst night of my life,” says Zakir. He says he woke up one morning last week and checked if all doors and windows in the suburban Mumbai house where he now lives were locked. The reason: someone was bursting loud firecrackers again.

Zakir no longer works at Chabad. An argument over his salary, he says, caused him to quit. He now earns a meagre Rs 5,000 a month as a cook at a falafel chain. Back home in Assam, his mother is suffering from an ailment and needs medical attention.

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