“He appeared in front of us. My concentration was more on the gun, the weapon that he was carrying than on him, himself,” he said of the gunman, whom he described as “a fairly young man of south Asian appearance.”
“And he was wearing a smile on his face as he started to spray the bullets,” he said.
For hundreds of others inside the hotels, however, the ordeal was just beginning.
Varagona, 45, a meditation teacher, says on her Web site she had taken the name Rudrani Devi, Sanskrit for “one who takes the pain away from others,” in 2002. She was having dinner with friends in the Oberoi’s plush restaurant when the gunshots rang out.
Survivors said the gunmen checked passports and looked for Americans and Britons, but Varagona said they just sprayed the room and didn’t seem to care who they killed.
“They might have been targeting Westerners, but they still shot the wait staff,” she said. “They were of Indian, Asian descent.
There wasn’t a foreigner among them.”
Varagona said the gunmen kept firing, and bodies fell to the floor, at least a dozen.
“There were bodies everywhere. I felt like I was in a movie,” Varagona said.
She dragged herself past the bodies and into the restaurant kitchen, where employees were huddled for safety. They picked her up, she said, and carried her out.
“If it wasn’t for the wait staff, I wouldn’t have made it out,” she said.
Among those killed was a friend on the meditation retreat who had been dining at Varagona’s table, Alan Scherr, 58, of Faber, Virginia, of the Synchronicity Foundation. Also slain was his 13-year-old daughter, Naomi.
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