Journalist Rommel Rodrigues recreates a compelling account of 26/11 accused Ajmal Kasab, tracing the terror trail from a village in Pakistan to the rooms of Lashkar-e-Taiba. In a chat with Mid Day,u00a0 the writer tells us how he joined the pieces

Rommel Rodrigues' account of the violent life of Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab in Kasab: The Face of 26/11, has the potential to fly off bookshelves. And, perhaps create a stir on the other side of the border too. After all, the subject of his book is the man who captured the collective imagination of the subcontinent; the lone survivor among the 10 terrorists who brought the nation to a standstill with their assault on Mumbai's iconic landmarks and its people, for nearly 60 hours.


Illustration/ Jishu

Rommel's gripping
narrative follows Kasab's beginnings in a dusty village in Pakistan to his eventual capture in Mumbai.
We speak to Rodrigues, a journalist with the New Indian Express, on his latest book. How much of a challenge was it to document the life of an individual who remains the centre of an unending debate for two years? How different is your chronicle?

It wasn't difficult. My starting point was the confession videos of Kasab's questioning (at Nair Hospital, where heu00a0 was taken after being caught on November 26, 2008), which soon appeared on several video-sharing websites.

I began my career as a journalist in 1993, around the time the serial blasts occurred in Mumbai. Covering them left a lasting impression on me.

The brazenness of the 26/11 attacks was the kind one watches in Hollywood films. It intrigued me to no end. We all had a general idea about these terrorists, their motive and so on, yet we weren't aware of the goings-on on the other side of the divide.

I wanted to live their lives -- it was going to be a tedious process. My research took me through thousands of newspapers from Pakistan and across the globe. Though the book was based on secondhand information, every fact has been validated by my sources and experts. The back and forth took time.

What immediate roadblocks did you face at the onset? At any point, did you feel as if your research had hit a dead end?
Two months after the attacks, in January 2009, I began my research. What repeatedly confused me was the amount of information floating around, which was a departure from the factual details that I needed for my research.

I had to sift through heaps of it to reach the truth, and steer clear of the numerous hypotheses. I went back to the drawing board and omitted information on over half a dozen occasions. I started the book at Chapter 1 and continued writing it as fiction. The names, places and people from Pakistan are factually correct as I validated each fact. After reading this account objectively, it's up to the reader to decide.