Everyone in the city's bon ton was called or texted or emailed from BlackBerries, by friends and relatives dining or drinking at the hotels that night. Many of the trapped diners knew what was happening by accessing the internet. (It may well have been the case that the terrorists too kept abreast of developments outside by checking the Web.) The Times of India food critic, Sabina Saikia, sent text messages to her husband in Delhi from her hiding-place under the bed in a suite on the top floor of the Taj. Her final message read: "They are in my bathroom."

Martin has a colleague who was in the Taj but escaped in the early hours of Thursday morning. He says the commandos weren't searching the rooms in any systematic way. When they escorted him and ten others out to a bus, it was parked in plain view of the hotel windows. As they reached it, the terrorists opened fire, killing at least one fellow-guest.

No one is surprised by this. Another guest has heard from a friend who was dining at the Taj but also got out in the morning how "the troopers didn't know their way round the hotel". "Look," said another guest, a tall, slim woman married to a foreigner, "most of them have probably never been in a five-star hotel before. Of course they didn't understand." One of the commandos confirms on TV that the terrorists knew the hotel extremely well while he and his colleagues lacked maps or plans of the building.

Everyone is furious with the BJP's Narendra Modi, who came to town today. Modi is a controversial figure, who gets "Z-category protection": wherever he goes, he is accompanied by a huge police presence plus bodyguard of NSG commandos. Nor does anyone have any faith in the Chief Minister, whose house can be seen from our hostess's balcony. "When we had the floods in 2003 that killed 800 people, he tried to blame it on plastic bags."