For Sarita Khilnani, it's the little things -- like the ring of her doorbell Wednesday night -- that suddenly fill her with fear and remind her of the 42 hours she spent locked in her room at Mumbai's Taj hotel.
Exactly one week earlier, terrorists had blasted their way into the hotel. When the doorbell rang at Room 363 that day, it was by a heavy hand, and followed by furious knocking.
It was 1 a.m. Friday, and Sarita, 32, and her mother, Mira, 62, stood at the door, their hands clasped. They dared not approach the peephole.
"Who is it?" they asked timidly, her mother speaking Hindi. But the voices had moved away and the two were left in silence.
Hours later, mother and daughter emerged from their room and entered the hallway. Room after room had its door broken in. Shards of glass littered the floor, and luggage was strewn about.
Today, Sarita Khilnani and her mother struggle to understand why the five rooms next to theirs were violently emptied, but theirs went untouched.
They are among a handful of Southern Californians who returned from Mumbai this week still shaken by an almost surreal reprieve.
"Why did I get saved?" Khilnani pondered this week, back home in Mission Viejo and trying to sort out her emotions. "Guilty isn't the right word, but it's so unfair that we made it out, pretty unscathed, and other poor people, they lost their lives."
It was supposed to be a happy return to her mother's hometown, a final mother-daughter vacation before Khilnani's wedding. But now part of her wedding outfit and the many items bought for the Indian marriage ceremony remain in her luggage in Mumbai. She wouldn't mind if the items are never returned. "It's just stuff," she said.
"We feel really, really, really lucky, we don't understand how we got out, it's just a series of so many coincidences," Khilnani said. "I can't believe we're still here. While we were in the room, I was thinking, sometimes we make really big deals about stupid [stuff]. This puts everything in perspective."
Khilnani has eaten little since her return -- "I haven't had much of an appetite" -- and her eyes droop with fatigue as she talks about normalcy and coming back home.
On Thursday, Khilnani visited her mother, who has not been able to sleep since the attacks and suffers from a cough exacerbated by the smoke she inhaled in the hotel fires.
