Sarla Parekh, who lost her son Sunil and daughter-in-law Reshma in the terror attack on the Oberoi, at a memorial service. (AFP)

The enormity — and the brutality — of the Mumbai attacks is still unfolding. Rohan Parikh, a student at INSEAD, the management school near Paris, gives a chilling account of a massacre at the Oberoi from which his father Ashwin Parikh escaped with bullet wounds. Ashwin Parikh lost his two best friends on that fateful Wednesday. As many as 38 people were killed in the Oberoi and the adjacent Trident, according to official figures.

On Wednesday night, my father and his two friends arrived at the Indian restaurant on the first floor of the Oberoi Hotel for dinner around 10pm. They had barely sat down when they heard gunshots in the lobby of the hotel. The terrorists, armed with AK-47s, grenades and plastic explosives, had entered the hotel and were executing everybody sitting in a ground floor restaurant.

The staff of the restaurant asked the guests to quickly exit through the kitchen. As they tried to rush into the kitchen, one terrorist burst into the first-floor restaurant and began to shoot anyone that remained.

At this point my father was in the kitchen and he, along with his two friends, rushed to the fire exit. They had barely descended a few steps when they were trapped from both ends by the terrorists.

The terrorists then rounded up anyone alive (about 20 people) and made them climb the service staircase to the 18th floor. On reaching the 18th floor landing, they made the people line up against a wall. One terrorist then positioned himself on the staircase going up from the landing and the other on the staircase going down.

Then they simultaneously opened fire on the people. My father was towards the centre of the line with his two friends on either side. Out of reflex, or presence of mind, he ducked as soon as the firing began.

One bullet grazed his neck and he fell to the floor as his two friends and several other bodies piled on top of him.

The terrorists then pumped another series of bullets into the heap of bodies to finish the job.

This time, a bullet hit my father in the back hip. Bent almost in double, crushed by the weight of the bodies and suffocating in the torrent of blood rushing down on him from the various bodies, my father held on for 10 minutes while the terrorists left the area.

When he finally had the courage to wiggle his arms, he found that there were four other survivors in the room. They communicated to each other by touch as they were too afraid to make a sound. My father moved just enough to allow himself room to breathe and then lay still.

The survivors passed over twelve hours lying still in the heap of bodies, too afraid to move. They constantly heard gunfire and hand grenades going off in the other parts of the hotel. They feared that any noise would bring the terrorists back.

After approximately twelve hours, the terrorists returned with a camera and flashlight and joked and laughed as they filmed what they thought was a pile of dead bodies. They then moved to the landing below where they set up explosives.

On their departure, my father decided that it was too risky to remain where they were due to the explosives. Along with the other three survivors, he climbed the rest of the stairwell, where they discovered a large HVAC plant room in which they decided to take shelter.

They passed the rest of the siege hiding in this room trying to get the attention of the outside world by waving a makeshift flag out of the window. They drank sips of dirty water from the air-conditioning unit.

Finally on Friday morning, they were spotted by a commando rescue team that was storming the building and were evacuated to safety and taken to the hospital.