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Qazi Zakir Hussain

Mumbai, India - 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 night —November 26 — when Zakir, or “Jackie”, had a close shave with death when two AK 47-wielding terrorists stormed a nondescript Jewish centre in a narrow alley in Colaba in South Mumbai and took control of it for two days.

Cook-cum-handyman Jackie’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 Jackie managed a miraculous escape.

The youth from Assam has apparently not been able to leave behind the trauma of that night, when he and Sandra hid wedged behind a refrigerator in a storeroom for 13 hours, hearing gunshots and screams all night before fleeing with their lives.

“It was the worst night of my life,” says Jackie, as his employers and their guests fondly called him. Jackie says he woke up one morning last week, at 3.30 am, 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.

“There was a friend in the house. I just threw him out and locked the doors. I didn’t realise who it was. He abused me a lot the next day, asking what was wrong with me.” The trauma has not just been psychological. While Sandra moved to Israel with Moshe to care for the orphan who now lives with his grandparents, life got tough for Jackie.

He says an argument over his salary caused him to quit the service of the recently-relocated Chabad Centre and he now earns a meagre Rs 5,000 a month as a cook at a falafel chain. With no home, he stays with Sandra’s son in a distant suburb. Back home in Assam, his mother is suffering from a heart problem and needs medical attention.

But he says he is more hurt by aspersions cast by a few Jews in the city that Jackie, a Muslim, may have unwittingly shared information about the Holtzbergs and Nariman House with those who are believed to have surveyed Mumbai for targets before the attacks.

“It’s all a lie. Nothing like that ever happened. If I was a suspect, why would the Israelis have employed me? I left the job on my own for a better salary,” he says bitterly.

Jackie, who had been working with the Holtzbergs since 2006, had learnt to cook kosher meals and had developed a deep bond with the couple and Moshe. In fact, pictures of Jackie carrying and consoling a wailing Moshe at a memorial service for his parents at a Mumbai synagogue became one of the many enduring tragic images of the carnage.

Before 26/11, Jackie and Sandra were planning a party for Moshe’s birthday. “But memsaab was against a party, she said we would just have a sit-down dinner. But Sandra and I were planning for a Monday party,” he says.

Jackie still talks to Moshe, when Sandra calls “every week”. “How can he forget me? We have spent so much time together,” he says. He says employers like saab and madam are difficult to find nowadays. “They never treated me like a servant, unlike Indian employers. They always gave me the same food that was cooked for everyone. I was made to sit with them for dinner and during all other functions,” he says.

In his wallet is a small photograph of Rabbi Holtzberg. When it slips from his hand, he’s quick to pick it up and kiss it. “There was no person alive like my saab,” he says, wistfully.

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