Trapped in their hotel room in Mumbai, India, a Henrico County couple listened to automatic rifle fire and exploding grenades while they drained their sparse supply of food, mostly nuts and orange juice, over the course of 44 hours.

Back home Sunday, McKinney "Mac" Taylor and his wife, Jan, talked of a wondrous tour cut short by killings and gunshots, one of which crashed through the door of their fourth-floor room at the Taj Mahal Hotel.

"They called it 'A Portrait of India,' " Mac Taylor said of the countrywide, travel agency-planned trip that ended with a siege by terrorists on Mumbai's best-known luxury hotel. "The portrait was something like out of a [Steven] Spielberg movie."

Smoke from the burning hotel filled their nostrils, and calls to the American consulate's office produced little more than a warning to lock their door and stay quiet.

Half a world away, the couple's five children and 20 grandchildren watched television footage of mass destruction as terrorists felled scores of victims, many of them Americans, and at least two of them Virginians from Nelson County who were making a pilgrimage to India.

"The only thing we let the people back home know was that as far as we knew, everything was all right," said Jan Taylor, who celebrated her 76th birthday on the trip. Her husband turned 80.

Safe last night, too, was 23-year-old Tyler Hogg, who wondered if she would regain the trust that took her to Mumbai.

Hogg, a St. Catherine's School and University of Virginia graduate, had been in Mumbai since July, setting out on a teaching mission in a distant land she had never visited before. She is specializing in elementary education at the American School of Bombay, an hour's drive from the targeted areas downtown. The school still carries Mumbai's former name.

Hogg was at the Mumbai airport on her way to Shanghai when the shooting started, and she learned by e-mail that the parents of three students she knew had died.

"It was a terrible thing to learn, being away from the school community," she said. And rather than return to India from Shanghai, she chose to fly back to Richmond.

"It is definitely a time to be with my family, to sort things out," she said.

The attacks have done uncertain harm to Hogg's sense of freedom, independence and safety in a land that she had grown to love for its vibrancy, openness and vastly different culture. She has been writing about her experiences on her blog, www.classesandcurry.blogspot.com.

"I don't know if I can feel safe there again like before," she said. "I know I'm staying home until Christmas."

The Taylors learned that an Australian businessman who was part of their group died, and they are mourning for his wife, who remains hospitalized in shock.

Mac Taylor said he was frightened but had no choice but to endure. "I filled the bathtub with water, something you learn in Boy Scouts," he said simply. His fears that the water would be turned off proved accurate.

During the attack's first night, a commando doing room checks was spooked by Taylor's slamming the door to his room. Taylor had seen the armed man coming down the hall.

The noise was enough to prompt the gunman to send a slug through the Taylors' door. It left a neat hole in the Privacy Please sign hanging on the doorknob and embedded itself in a bureau drawer.

Taylor, a retired structural professional engineer and Georgia Tech graduate, kept the copper-tipped 9 mm slug for a souvenir.

"Something to show the grandchildren, I guess," he said.

Tougher to take was the exit from the hotel, a perilous journey overseen by commandos who covered the Taylors' exit with gunfire while carrying the couple's luggage.

"We passed three of the dead terrorists on the way down the steps," Taylor said. "And we learned later there were still men on the loose in the hotel when we got out."

He knew he was back home when a son greeted him with news of who won the University of Georgia-Georgia Tech football game Saturday.

"First time we beat them in years," Taylor said.

He had passed the time in the room reading commentator Bill O'Reilly's new book, "A Bold, Fresh Piece of Humanity," while Jan read the Bible.

"Twenty-third Psalm," she said.