Sourav Mishra is a happy man, and he is eager to make others happy. Nothing in him gives away that he took a bullet in his chest at Leopold Café in Mumbai in the 2011 terrorist attacks.
Mishra, 37, was working as a correspondent for Reuters at that time, and was at Leopold to meet two French women—Kate, a filmmaker, and Clementine, a teacher—who had made a documentary on moustaches. As they were discussing the documentary over food and beer, Mishra heard an explosion and saw an old man being hit. The next moment he realised he, too, was hit on his right hand and ribs—it was a bullet. The old man was hit by a grenade. The terrorists were firing indiscriminately at the café.
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Mishra limped out of the café and fell on the road. A hawker on the Colaba causeway, Kishore Pujari, stopped a taxi and took him to St George Hospital. The hospital, too, was under attack and the doctors were reluctant to admit him because they were under the impression that it was a gang war. But as more injured people and dead bodies started arriving he was taken in.
“I was lying on the floor among the dead and the injured in a puddle of blood when a lady doctor came and examined me. Her words, ‘You will survive’, still echo in my ears. After a while I was moved to a table and they pulled out the bullet lodged between my ribs. It was a few millimetres away from my lungs,” he said.
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Mishra was shifted to another hospital when his journalist friend Firoz Jamaal visited him. He underwent surgery to remove the leftovers of the bullet which had fractured his ribs. “Later I realised that I was lucky because I was sitting next to a pole and the bullet was deflected before hitting me,’’ he said.
It changed his life for ever. “Earlier I used to run after stories and think in terms of gain and loss. But now these things have become immaterial. Now I live my day as it comes,” he said.
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He spent nine days in the intensive care unit and one and a half months in hospital. He was ashamed that he could not help the women who were with him. “I felt guilty for my cowardly act until I read Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking,” he said. Both women survived the attack.
His association with Kia Scherr, a peace entrepreneur who lost her husband and daughter in the 26/11 attacks, changed his life. She had cofounded the forum One Life Alliance to create a positive outcome from the people affected by 26/11. “Kia’s initiative helped me to recover from the trauma. We even formed a Facebook group to discuss our issues,” he said.
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Apart from books, it was the new-found hobby of painting that brought change in Mishra’s life. “It was my canvas, it was my field. I was the owner of that small canvas and I could do anything with it. The feeling gave me immense satisfaction,” he said. His work, titled Sorrow of Mumbai, is displayed at the Reuters office in Mumbai.
A few months after the attack, Mishra quit Reuters and joined Dow Jones. Now he is head of corporate communication at India Infoline, a financial services company. His dream, however, is to work among the poor villagers. “I want to adopt ten villages and make them a model of self-reliance in livelihood through a microfinance network,” he said. “Earlier, I used to do things for monetary gains. But now I work for happiness.”
