Harish Patel has seen many cadavers in his life.
Accident victims mangled by metal and tarmac. Gunshot victims surprised
by the high velocity of lead. Bodies gnawed away by disease.
Harish
has also seen at least one famous body – that of 2004 Nobel Peace Prize
Laureate, environmentalist Wangari Mathaai, which he helped cremate two
years ago this month.
But nothing prepared Harish for the sight he encountered at Westgate mall last Saturday.
Harish
had been driving to his house in Parklands when he received a call
informing him of gunshots at Westgate. He was less than a minute away so
he immediately put his car in reverse, turned around and sped to the
mall.
Harish is not an undertaker. He is a
jack-of-all-trades. By day he is an operations manager at an aviation
company in Nairobi. But his other life is much more dramatic.
A
member of Krishna Squad, a Parklands vigilante group that describes
itself as a self-help organisation, Harish can be found handing out food
donations to children in Nairobi’s slums or volunteering at the Hindu
crematorium in Kariakor.
Now he was just about to become a hero and a lifesaver.
Arriving at the mall, Harish could hear the pop! pop! pop! of small arms fire.
“This
must be a robbery,” he thought to himself as he got out of his car. His
hand went to his waist and he felt the cold steel of his Taurus 0.75mm
pistol pressed reassuringly against his skin.
Picking
an extra clip of ammo, he climbed out of the car and headed to the mall
entrance. One of the first people he saw was a dazed-looking man who
appeared to be of Somali origin.
He would later turn
out to be Abdul Haji, who had also arrived at the mall after hearing
that his elder brother was trapped inside by the gunfire.
A
woman dressed in a hijab emerged from the basement. She was carrying an
infant less than a year old against her chest, trying to keep the child
away from the gunshot wound on her shoulder.
“There
are people in there,” the woman said faintly. “These people are not
criminals. They have come to kill people, and they are here to stay.”
Leaving
behind some people to rescue the injured and recover bodies from the
basement, Harish, Abdul and a few policemen who had now joined them
headed up the ramp to the top of the mall.
The pop! pop! of gunfire was now occasionally replaced by the angry rumble of what sounded like a machine gun.
It soon became clear that this was no ordinary robbery.
As
they walked up the ramp, they could see a security guard sprawled
outside his cubicle. He had been shot in the head. Another man lay
crouched nearby, his limp fingers a permanent bookmark in the Bible he
had been reading when he was called to meet his creator.
The
rooftop was hell. Many children who had been attending a cooking
competition had been prematurely sent to heaven. A pregnant woman was
among the dead. Leaving a handful of policemen and volunteers to carry
away the injured, the dead and the dying from the rooftop, Harish and
his team re-entered the mall.
They rescued people
stranded and hiding in every nook and cranny until they got to the
ground floor where the attackers had ensconced themselves inside the
Nakumatt supermarket.
Harish could see one of the
attackers firing at them from the entrance to Nakumatt. He had a white
bandana inscribed with Arabic script. They were concentrating on this
gunman when suddenly the angry rumble of a machine gun roared inside the
mall.
The policeman next to Harish collapsed. Part of
his stomach had been blown away by high calibre bullets fired by a
gunman who had been lurking on the floor, unseen by the rescue team.
Using
covering fire, they dragged the injured policeman away. Then they
lobbed teargas at the attackers and forced them back into Nakumatt,
buying valuable time to rescue more people hiding inside shops.
But
Harish says this presented its own complications. Many of those who had
locked themselves in various shops were playing dead and they refused
to open the doors until they recognised a familiar voice, or were
threatened with abandonment.
Many were traumatised by the mayhem.
Harish
walked up to a woman, took her hand, and started guiding her to safety.
After a few steps, she suddenly turned to him and whacked him across
the face.
“What are you doing in my house?” she asked,
and refused to move an inch until four soldiers held her and forcibly
dragged her to safety. The moment she got outside of the mall, she
turned to the soldiers and asked: “Where is my car?”
Another
elderly white woman had been shopping in Nakumatt. As people used the
tear-gas enforced lull of the retreating gunmen to flee, she emerged
holding two plastic bags full of groceries. She walked calmly and
majestically towards the exit, as if oblivious to the crowds, the noise
and the danger.
When a couple of soldiers tried to
relieve her of the groceries, she would have none of it. “I do not have
any food in my house,” she said, before handing one of the bags to a
soldier, who she mistook for a supermarket assistant, and ordered him to
carry it to her car.
By the end of the day, Harish and
the ad-hoc group of rescuers had saved perhaps hundreds of lives. They
had arrived at the scene before the specialist security units and had
bravely battled the gunmen and bought time for people to be saved.
More
than 60 people were killed and hundreds injured in the attack, for
which the Somali militant group al-Shabaab has claimed responsibility.
By 6 pm on September 21, the Kenyan specialist forces had taken over
the operation, but Harish would stay on until 3.30 am when he finally
went home to reassure his panicked family. After a shower, a cup of tea,
and a change of clothes, he returned to the mall and stayed with the
forces until Monday morning.
Harish, the 43-year-old
father of twin 15-year-old daughters and a 10-year-old son, says he had
acted out of humanitarian considerations.
“This is my
country. These are my people,” he told the Sunday Nation. “At that point
it did not matter whether they were Asian, Africans, white or Kenyan;
you are in our country, and we have to look after you.”
Harish
says he is not a hero and does not expect any medal or reward for his
action. But he evoked the history of his adopted country – born in
India, he came to Kenya when he was 3 – to explain his courage and that
of his colleagues.
“There were heroes who fought for this country at Independence,” he said. “This was our moment to fight back.”
These
men realised, soon after entering the mall that their pistols and a
lone AK-47 rifle were no match for the sophisticated weapons and
grenades the attackers were using.
But they still walked into the line of fire and put their bodies on the line to save as many people as they could.
“Our mission was to get them or die trying. We were ready to die,”
Harish said. “We weren’t trying to be heroes; we were only trying to
save lives. I feel proud that I saved lives.”
The injured policeman is expected to make full recovery. The other members of Harish’s team are back at their regular jobs.
but a friendship between the men was forged that Saturday afternoon in Westgate, during their baptism of gunfire.
Unlike
Abdul who has been weeping in his sleep since the attack, Harish has
struggled to sleep, catching a few hours of dreamless sleep here and
there.
“I have seen many bodies and I have done many cremations,” Harish said. “But this was a shock and a disaster.”
He plans to take some days off work and find a quiet place to seek closure and inner peace.
Families
of those killed in Westgate will be trying to find their own closure
and inner peace over the coming months. For the survivors, many only got
out alive because of the courage and bravery of this gang of men armed
with a few light arms and one bulletproof vest.
Among
Harish’s many pieces of jewellery (bling-bling) is a ring with the head
of a lion roaring. It will always be a reminder of the lion-hearted
foray into Westgate and the lives that were saved and touched.
