Hope hides scars at Nariman House

Workers go about their job furiously on the ground floor of Nariman House. They are refurbishing brick-by-brick the five-storey building which only a year ago was witness to one of the most brutal terror attacks in the country, trying to restore it to a semblance of its pre-26/11 look.
Within weeks of the attack people had wondered if Nariman house would survive the 45-hour battering it had taken.Hundreds of bullets riddled its walls and grenade blasts had left it shaky. But a structural audit said that far from needing to be pulled down, it would stand tall for another 80 to 100 years.
Defying the horror that visited it, the building is also getting a shiney new coat of paint in time for the visit of Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, who will join thousands of people from all walks of life on November 26, paying his respects at a candlelight vigil to be held at the site.
Just outside the building life goes on as usual in the busy lanes of Colaba Causeway.
Every evening youngsters from nearby houses assemble at the Mirasaheb Dargawala Vyayamshala-a gym right below Nariman House. They pump iron and look at their toned muscles in the mirrors.
"Terror has come and gone but life does not stop, said Sudhakar Naik (43), who works at a private firm in Fort and walks every day to his office through the lane in which Nariman House stands.
Less than a month after the attack, a new Rabbi, Dov Goldberg, was at Nariman House to continue with the work that Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, had been doing.
One perceptible change in the surroundings is the throng of curious tourists seen now. "A number of people who stay at Taj Hotel visit this site and even have guides with them," said Ravi, a 17-year-old boy.
Many foreign tourists are surprised by the normal pace at which life goes on in the surroundings. "If there was such a site in any other country it would have been turned into a shrine. A memorial would have come up. But here, it happens to be just another lane in the market," said Collin Harwood, a tourist from Canada.
But the scars are not gone. Family members of
Salim and Mehjabeen Hararwala, an old couple who were gunned down in nearby Fareedun Court building, express their lingering anguish and do not want to talk of the day when the killings took place.
Moreover, though it had the smallest death toll of the four places that were attacked in Mumbai, the ferocity of the gunbattle that took place, the shooting of the pregnant Rivka and the cold manner in which the two gunmen were instructed by their Pakistani handlers to murder their hostages still sends a chill down the spine.
In the moments before she was killed 50-year-old Norma Rabinovich was made to speak on the phone to the gunmen's bosses. She kept insisting that she wanted to "say something from her heart," but could never complete her sentence. She was waiting to fly to Israel on December 1 for her son's 18th birthday. But in the end an Israeli Air Force plane took her body back home on the same day.
Little wonder then, that no matter how normal things look on the outside, a terse message written by the locals on a bullet-marked wall opposite the Nariman House still reads, `26/11: We will never forget.'