Film is an invisible image that either manifests out of frame, or right on the cut.

– Alexander Kluge

Morning papers: It happened, inevitably, every morning, through most of May 2002 in India. The steady ghastliness of what the papers would bring into our lives, in that early hour when we are still trying to wake up properly. For those of us who would be going out to work later, this is perhaps the quietest hour – often dream-haunted and rather private, the phone still switched off. Yet, it is also when most of us read the papers, or watch a bit of television. This is, therefore, a time for words and pictures as well, culled, almost passively, in a state of mind and body that is very much like reverie, and to remain with us, in some form or the other, through the rest of the day. Photographs, events, reports, comments, analyses.

This is the space in which Gujarat was happening for many of us in Calcutta. And our experience of this every-day theatre was often deeply divided. There was, on the one hand, the sense of a distance – the removes of Godhra, Naroda Patia, Ahmedabad, Vadodara. The remoteness not only of talukas, villages, slums, walled cities and relief camps, but also of an order of fear, zeal, bodily harm and brutality which most of us who were born well after Partition have hardly ever witnessed directly. On the other hand, some of the most persuasive images and accounts of these events came into our lives – particularly our life of feelings and imagination – in this hour of solitary reading. More than any other time, this is when the seeds of the day’s ferment were planted in the core of our consciousness. Yet, this is also a time of slowness and passivity, and of trying to overcome both; a time for dawdling in the margins of the day, before we open the door and walk out into the world.

This dichotomy – remoteness and immediacy, normalcy and aberration – in our experience of Gujarat brought with it the sense of a surreal marginality to events which we nevertheless felt were changing the human coordinates of our daily lives. It drove a wedge, for instance, between consciousness and agency, between what we read, watched, believed in, thought or felt, and what we got up and did in our normal lives. This led to larger questions. How do things happen to us? How do we experience things which are happening to other people? Are things happening to other people also happening to us? How far away does something have to happen so as not to have happened to us?

 

For most of us, then, the events in Gujarat took place in the spaces of reading and viewing. The violence reached us as pictures and stories, having its most immediate impact on what we believed and imagined. It was therefore a bizarrely appropriate juxtaposition when the front page of The Telegraph on 8 May 2002, brought together what appeared to be two very different sets of stories and pictures. The top story, ‘Dark-age death by fire and stones’, spoke of stabbed and charred bodies in Gujarat, while the anchor informed us that Cervantes’s Don Quixote had been voted the best work of fiction by the world’s leading contemporary writers.

Above a little picture of Quixote on his horse was one of K.P.S. Gill, then security adviser to the state of Gujarat, shaking hands with L.K. Advani, then home minister, in New Delhi. Gill, presumably having just put his request to Advani for forces from the Centre and Punjab, is staring abstractedly into middle distance. And Advani has an incredibly brazen grin on his face. This grin seems to be reducing Gill’s apprehensions to an exuberantly public joke, while reassuring him that everything was going to be alright.

Why was it so strange to look at this picture while reading, in the anchor, about what people love reading – about Cervantes, Proust, Homer and Shakespeare? Everything that this picture and the accompanying report exuded seemed to be utterly at odds with what we like to think the classics stand for, the civilized worlds they conjure up, their enduring humanity. Yet again there was that wedge – between the civilized and the barbaric, between readers and killers. Even as this page yoked these worlds together, it seemed – and still seems – unforgivably tenuous and effete to think of Gujarat and the classics in the same breath.

Yet, at the centre of much of this violence in India was an epic poem. Was this not an attempt, however wrong-headed, to situate the matter of a poem in the actual world, to prove its enduring relevance to human experience? And is this not how we often define a classic? Among the best works of fiction voted, in the same survey, by a hundred noted writers from all over the world are the Ramayan and the Mahabharat, together with the Iliad and the Odyssey. A curious detail in my own encounter with the Greek epics around the same time suddenly made it seem less tenuous to talk about the classics and Gujarat as part of the same continuum of experience.

 

The ‘grim struggle’ between the Greeks and the Trojans is going on in book XI of the Iliad. The Greek Menelaus, ‘of the loud war cry’, has captured the Trojan Adrestus alive, and is wondering whether to kill him or to go for the ransom Adrestus is promising him. But he is scolded by his brother, Agamemnon, ‘My dear Menelaus, why are you so chary of taking men’s lives?… We are not going to leave a single one of them alive, down to the babies in their mother’s wombs – not even they must live. The whole people must be wiped out of existence, and none be left to think of them and shed a tear.’ ‘The justice of this,’ the bard continues, ‘made Menelaus change his mind.’ So Adrestus is killed. Nestor then calls out to the Greeks, ‘Friends, Danaans, fellow soldiers; no looting now! No lingering behind to get back to the ships with the biggest share! Let us kill men. Afterwards, at your leisure, you can strip the corpses on the field.’ This, Homer adds, ‘put new heart and daring into every man.’

 

The infectious gleefulness of the Greeks on a murderous romp is now familiar to any reader of the many reports on the Gujarat genocide. But the detail about the babies in the womb immediately arrests attention. The most compelling image to have come out of the accounts of arson, looting, rape and massacre is that of Kausar Bano’s unborn child. ‘They cut open her belly, took out her foetus with a sword and threw it into a blazing fire. Then they burnt her as well,’ her sister-in-law, Saira Banu of Naroda Patia, tells a fact-finding mission in a relief camp. This episode had, by then, acquired a horrific life of its own, the way stories often do – both in Gujarat among the brutalized women in the relief camps, and in the minds of those trying to imagine the atrocities from a distance.

Syeda Hameed’s scrupulously documented report on minority women in Gujarat put this account in a box, entitled ‘a meta-narrative of bestiality’. Her panel recognized the importance of this event, but set it apart from the other testimonies – not simply because of its extreme nature, but because of the peculiar status it had acquired through incessant telling and retelling. ‘Sometimes the details would vary – the foetus was dashed to the ground, the foetus was slaughtered with a sword, the foetus was swung on the point of the sword and then thrown into a fire. Each teller of the story owned it. It was as if it was their own story.’

 

Here the activity of recording facts, of marshalling documentary evidence, comes up against a terrible, dark ambivalence which arises inevitably in the wake of a trauma of such an extreme and collective dimension. ‘It was as if it was their own story.’ Vicarious trauma, or the act of imaginative identification with actual experience in extremis – as the testimonies, dreams and fantasies of Holocaust victims have repeatedly shown – is disconcertingly akin to the process of fabrication, of making stories, by which compelling images could turn into myths. This is the inevitable fallout of such an event, a form of psychological damage which is just as ‘real’ a fact or event as the other experiences and their afterlife documented in these reports, even if the language of empirical evidence seems at a loss with what to do with it.

Hameed’s team had seen photographic evidence of ‘burnt bodies of a mother and a foetus lying on the mother’s belly, as if torn from the uterus and left on the gash.’ (That ‘as if’ again, testimony to how Gujarat compels the imagination.) But the body could not be identified as Kausar Bano’s. Shabnam Hashmi also reported being shown photographs of seven such unidentified bodies.

Hameed’s panel felt that this did not matter: ‘In all instances where extreme violence is experienced collectively, meta-narratives are constructed. Each victim is part of the narrative; their experience subsumed by the collective experience. Kausar is that collective experience.’ And this is why we must learn to distinguish between such psychic consequences of trauma and deliberate propagandist fabrication. It is an immensely difficult and risky distinction, but it has to be made in all its complexity in order to grasp what was happening in Gujarat. And ‘grasp’ in more senses than one: not only to understand the nature of these events, but also to not let them slip out of the realm of what could be proved and recorded, the realm of what did actually happen.

The massacre of unborn children in the Iliad, and the repeated citings of the same act in the Gujarat testimonies seem to point to a shared, and perhaps timeless, realm of human potential and possibilities from which springs a vast range of words, images, dreams, fantasies, stories, myths and – on a par with these – acts, what human beings actually do to one another. The classics have never hesitated to represent and reflect on the entire spectrum of human cruelty, most often with the utmost amorality and robustness. We like to think of the classics as transcendent. Perhaps it would be better to think of them as the toughest, sometimes the grimmest, survivors. They endure precisely because they can confront and accommodate everything, every use and abuse, every act of reading.

Epic poems – like death-camps, war-zones and pogroms – are sites of absolute licence, where entire communities of men and of gods could play out without restraint, individually and collectively, the most barbaric desires, the deepest hatreds and equally, often indistinguishably, the most cherished ideals of heroism and nobility. This is why Homer and the home minister could sometimes end up in the same early-morning muddle.

 

Nude woman among the spinning vanes: Vadodara made me feel tranquil the moment I landed there in May 2007. The little airport had a distinctive, Islamic-looking terminal building with white domes. Outside, the streets lay stark and clean in the afternoon sun. There were giant neem trees on both sides, in whose trembling shade cows ruminated timelessly. The first thing I noticed were the many women, young and not-so-young, single and in pairs, riding their two-wheelers in white, elbow-high gloves. The writing everywhere – signboards, notices, nameplates – was in Gujarati. The autos, I discovered, all ran on CNG and strictly to the meter.

 

The sense of orderliness and safety disconcerted me. This was my first trip to Gujarat. Over the previous five years, the names of its districts and cities, together with their housing societies, bazaars and bakeries, had become points in a very different kind of mental map. They stood for organized menace rather than safety. I had reached on May 15. Not even a week had passed since Chandra Mohan’s arrest on the premises of the fine arts faculty of Vadodara’s M.S. University. This MA finalist – a carpenter’s son from Andhra Pradesh – had put the other carpenter’s son naked on the Cross, and placed a commode in front of him. He had also put up huge and startling representations of a few Hindu gods. This wasn’t a public exhibition, but his finals display, to be judged by examiners.

On May 9, Neeraj Jain, a local BJP man, stormed into the faculty with his men and some reporters from the vernacular press, abused everybody at the display (which he deemed obscene and ‘anti-Gujarat’), roughed up Chandra Mohan, and then got the police to arrest him. All this, without once informing the university authorities. The offending artefacts were taken down and sealed by the police, but the vice-chancellor refused to lodge an FIR against Jain. A couple of days later, with Chandra Mohan still in jail, the students put up, in the arts-faculty porch, a comprehensive exhibition from their departmental archives on the erotic traditions – particularly the use of nudity – in Indian as well as western religious and secular art. They wanted to make the point that the taboos broken by Chandra Mohan were by no means artistic or even religious ones, in any ‘traditional Indian’ sense.

The deputy registrar and the pro-VC ordered the exhibition to be closed down, again on grounds of obscenity. When the fine arts acting dean, faculty member and art historian, Shivaji Panikkar, refused to do so, he was suspended and the Regional Documentation Centre sealed. This was all aggressively overseen by the BJP and VHP men, and the local Gujarati papers were on their side.

 

When I arrived, the protests in support of the artist and his teacher had spread all over the country and, through the internet, to many other parts of the world. But in Vadodara, I quickly began to sense a strange, deathly hush. Chandra Mohan had been released on bail, although no FIR had yet been filed by the university. An inquiry committee had been formed that included nobody from the fine arts faculty or community. Both Panikkar and Chandra Mohan had gone underground, fearing for their lives. Some of their friends were talking to me from undisclosed locations. The vacations had begun, and students had started going home, many of them uncertain about what would become of their final evaluations, some of them lingering out of a bewildered sense of solidarity.

Yet, this sense of an eerie lull gave way to quite another sense of anxious, energetic and concerted activity as I began to piece together the human networks that constitute this remarkably cosmopolitan ‘small town’. All the senior, local artists I talked to – most of them M.S. University alumni and not Gujarati – told me that they hadn’t been able to work at all over the past week. What they were feeling was an incapacitating mix of outrage, sadness and fear. Everybody was constantly and feverishly in touch with everybody else; every little development was instantly being circulated. Those who were close to Panikkar and Chandra Mohan had reached that stage of hectic exhaustion in which the normal rhythms of everyday life were suspended and it was impossible to talk about anything else. Strategies were being continually thought up and coordinated – for keeping the pressure up on the university authorities (now unabashedly partisan in refusing to protect their own students and faculty), for dealing with the press, the UGC, the state and central ministries. All this activity, I realized, had nothing, and everything, to do with art.

 

On my first evening, the young student I was talking to suddenly thought of taking me to see the artist, K.G. Subramanyan. She suggested this with an easy impulsiveness that is possible only in university towns like Vadodara and Santiniketan, where artists, teachers and students form close relationships that ignore institutional hierarchies. This student – who, like many others I spoke to, did not wish to be named – explained to me how the authorities and even students from the other faculties see such informal interactions as part of the dubiously unconventional ways of the ‘arts people’.

While walking with her towards Subramanyan’s house, a gentle breeze easing out the day’s heat, it struck me just how much my perception of the city was formed by the paintings of its other great artist, Bhupen Khakhar, who died in 2003. Bhupen’s art, together with his stories and plays in Gujarati, had unfailingly captured the sly eroticism of a middle class town, its rooted householders sitting in their boxes of light with caressing eyes, performing strange, mundane rituals. But now, walking through the real Vadodara, I dimly began to sense the connections between the mystical kindliness of Bhupen’s vision and that other map of Gujarat, sinister and menacing, that had begun to form in our minds after 2002. What, I wondered, would Neeraj Jain, or indeed this entire tranquil neighbourhood, make of the two visibly aroused, elderly men in Bhupen’s Jajati, whose embrace clears out a vast, luminous and open space in the very heart of the city?

Subramanyan also talked to me about the difficult balance between openness and protection that must be constantly thought through and adjusted when something as idiosyncratic as art is brought within the institutional structures of a university. Art education has to allow for not only creative and intellectual freedom, but also for unpredictable forms of dissent in the young people who come to it from a variety of backgrounds. In the fine arts, the teachers are, most often, artists as well, making their relationship with the institutional necessarily problematic. Hence, ‘protection’ has to be understood and implemented in diverse and complex ways, and senior administrators – VCs, pro-VCs, deans, registrars – must be intellectually and humanistically up to such a challenge. Students and teachers will thus have to be protected from sensitivities and sensibilities within a space in which the mature as well as the immature can feel both secure and inspired.

 

Open communication and collaboration across disciplines, especially between the arts and the sciences, and among students, faculty and administrators, remained important ways of preventing the isolation of the arts. Yet, a certain amount of what Subramanyan called ‘privacy’ should also be ensured for them within the confines of the university, in the same way that new scientific research is often protected from untimely public disclosure. That too is an important aspect of the protective role of the university – a role that must be ever on guard against becoming a form of controlling paternalism, which again would be inimical to the special nature of the creative and critical arts.

 

But it was only after I actually went to the fine arts faculty the next day that I realized why Subramanyan had steered our talk away from fuming against the Hindu Right to a more nuanced understanding of institutional ‘protection’, its necessity and its pitfalls, in the context of art. Abha Sheth, PhD scholar and lecturer, pillioned me into the faculty on her scooter, past the armed guards, and parked close to a sign which said, ‘Public Exhibitions and Displays not Allowed: By Order’.

Yet, in spite of these disagreeable presences, the place instantly made me feel what I always feel when I enter the Kala Bhavan courtyard in Santiniketan. It’s a sense that this space is beautiful and alive, neither a classroom nor an art gallery, but more like a cross between open-air theatre and fairground. The halls and the courtyard, with its tree-shaded pool and its greens gone quite wild, are strewn with all kinds of artwork, the walls, floors and surfaces randomly, eccentrically, yet lovingly decorated. Everywhere there were students dismantling their work for the annual display.

For a while, because of what installation art looks like nowadays, I couldn’t make out whether they were putting together their works or taking them apart. And as I walked about, my initial feelings of lightness and freedom changed into a peculiar, haunting dismay as three things struck me about the students working away intently all around me: how terribly young they all were, how hard they worked and how passionately, and how fragile their artworks were physically. How important and difficult, yet also how exhilarating, it must be, I thought, to create and sustain a space for them where they might learn, and live out, the perpetual interplay of freedom and discipline that constitutes original creativity of any worth, where they might begin to experience the errors, risks and rigours of their art, as well as its especial rewards, without feeling constrained or afraid.

 

Out in the courtyard, one student had covered the entire ground beside the pool with delicate yellow and white wind-vanes made of paper and sticks. They were all spinning madly in the breeze, looking like a field of crazy flowers. On the other side of this bank of wind-vanes, was a lone sculpture placed in the shade of a huge, old tree. It was a seated female nude realistically done, looking oddly forlorn amidst this wonderfully pointless activity. And when I think of what is at stake when the ‘autonomy’ of such spaces is so violently compromised, the image of that naked woman amidst those vanes spinning in the hot wind of summer comes back to me.

In March 2004, only a couple of years after the Gujarat genocide, the faculty of fine arts had organized an UGC national seminar, which was called ‘The Issues of Activism: The Artist and the Historian’. The brochure for this event puts together a mosaic of quotations and images about the myriad ways in which the practice of art might be radicalized. Going through this document in the light of what is happening now, I find myself pondering, with a particular sense of irony, the excerpt from Rustom Bharucha’s Cultural Activism: Axioms in Search of Innovation (directly below which is reproduced Bhupen Khakhar’s marvellous painting of a bespectacled Indian pundit in drag, titled Sakhibhav): ‘Indian activists are too straight. Often, they are also self-righteous, politically correct, lacking in imagination and humour. They don’t risk the creation of new modes of cultural activism. But it is time to think about new strategies to get messages across… It is time to develop a lightness of being.’

 

The garbage people: There are two words that come up frequently if you talk at any length to the survivors of the 2002 genocide in Gujarat – tufaan or a storm, and mazaak or a joke. The first is a memory-word. It provides an image, or story, for the immediate purpose of remembering and talking about a series of events that both compels and eludes the grasp of words. The second is a colder, grimmer word. It stands for the dawning of a post facto sense of things – the five-year-long unfolding of a design, more persistent and rooted than just a storm that comes from somewhere else, devastates, and then runs itself out.

‘Un logo ne mazaak kee Musalmano ke saath,’ Mukhtar Muhammad told me with a bright-eyed grin that seemed to relish, for a moment, the devilishness of this mazaak. It was June 2007, and we were eating brain curry and chapatis for lunch, while his two little sons played Tiny Toon with the sound politely turned off. This was in Mukhtar’s sparsely-furnished, month-old house in the more middle-class part of Juhapura, one of Ahmedabad’s less noticeably backward, though quite as segregated, Muslim neighbourhoods. After the 2002 riots, Mukhtar moved to Ahmedabad, from the small town of Kaalol in the Panchmahal district, where he was a successful hardware manufacturer. During, and for months after, the violence, he ran a relief camp in his area where he got the government to provide rations, from March to May 2002. He had also arranged for free medical treatment for the 3,500 people who took refuge in his camp with help from his friend, a local Hindu doctor, whose courage, in the face of threats from other Hindus, did not last very long.

 

After the doctor backed out and the state government abruptly stopped rations, Mukhtar ran the camp on his own resources until December 2002. Then, as things started ‘coming back to normal’, he found himself getting increasingly involved in the legal work of claiming compensation and rehabilitation support for those Muslims – mostly poor, illiterate rural folk – who were left homeless, bereft, and severely injured or traumatized by the carnage. And it was only when he started figuring out the diabolically complicated bureaucracy and loopholes of the entire compensation and rehabilitation process, and those entitled to Rs 50,000 for loss of property were being sent away with cheques for Rs 300, that the nature and scale of the joke being played on the survivors began to dawn on him.

Mukhtar’s relative affluence, good sense and robustness helped him negotiate with the separatist kattarwadis in his own community who did not want the displaced to return to their own homes. He and his wife, Anisa, then started getting serious threat calls, and that is when he decided to move to Ahmedabad, from where he continues his work with the survivors, with some valued training and support from an NGO called Centre for Social Justice. Yet, he cannily resisted the label of ‘community leader’ and eluded most Islamist stereotypes, keeping a mischievously-smiling, unillusioned distance from fundamentalists, politicians and celebrity social activists alike.

With his sons and daughter in a mixed-community, English-medium school, his spacious, new house, and his relocated business evidently looking up, Mukhtar, together with Anisa, was a survivor whose painstakingly reconstituted world could not have provided a greater contrast to what I had seen of human survival the day before, in the rapidly industrializing wildernesses outside Ahmedabad’s city-limits. It was Jumma-baar that day, and around mid-day, Khairunnesa and Usha, two social workers from a local NGO, took me with them to visit the Bombay Hotel area miles outside the city. There was a cluster of colonies there, where ‘riot victims’, as they are now collectively referred to, have been ‘resettled’ after they found it impossible to return to their original homes – because these homes did not exist any more and they got no help from the state to rebuild them, or because they were still too afraid to return and live among their Hindu neighbours.

 

As we approached Bombay Hotel, first the stench hit us – of rotting waste and burning plastic. And then we saw the huge mountain-range of garbage, silhouetted, all the refuse of the city dumped high, with wisps of smoke rising from here and there. And nestling in the foothills, surrounded by sulphurous pools and swamps, were the little colonies of single-storied, flat-roofed pukka houses. The first one we went to – far off the highway, connected to it by a winding, bumpy, kutcha lane – was called Citizen Nagar. The jokes were at their blackest here, I realized. Another colony, a little way away, was called Ekta Nagar.

Citizen Nagar, built by the Islamic Relief Society and the Kerala State Muslim League Relief Committee on land privately acquired, housed about 400 people in 60-odd families. They had been displaced from such places as Naroda Patia and Gulberg Society, which had seen some of the worst massacres in 2002. Nothing I had read of the various reports and newspaper articles about these colonies had prepared me for the bleak-ness and degradation I saw here. There was no drinking water, no sewerage, no health centre, no school within miles, no street lighting. Every facility, from electricity to water, had to be paid for. Because of the vast dumping ground nearby, the ground water, accessed by bore wells, was dangerously polluted. So was the air, by fumes from the burning garbage that wafted in continually.

 

When it rained, the whole place got flooded by water mixed with chemical waste from the neighbouring factories. Most people suffered from skin and gastric diseases, and some children from a peculiar type of crippling, polio-like illness. Because the hospitals were so far away, women in labour delivered or died on their way to them. After dark, the whole area was unlit and unsafe. Children had to walk miles to go to school, and attendance levels were abysmal.

These were people who have not only experienced extreme brutality and loss, but had also lost all their official papers: ration cards, birth certificates, BPL cards. Many of them had been given voter ID cards, but their ration cards had been reissued with their BPL status changed to APL. This was only one of the many sleights of hand denuding them of their most basic human entitlements from the state. The men found it impossible to find jobs, and when they did, were paid a pittance.

Many of these men had been unable to save their wives, sisters, daughters, and mothers from being raped, tortured or killed or, in many cases, all three. The mix of trauma, outrage, fear and a sense of profound ineffectuality and emasculation, made worse by the lack of employment, bred a feeling of irredeemable victimhood – easily handed down to the children or taken out on the women – that hung like a miasma over the place. The men looked hopeless and passive, lying around in the afternoon heat on khatias with blank eyes. The women, in contrast, seemed bustling with energy, articulate and better organized together. They recounted their experiences vividly and were very clear about what was happening, or not happening, to them. Yet, after a while, one began to sense a different kind of incapacitation in them too, born out of persistent fear and a long history of disempowerment, which made them unwilling, for instance, to go out and look for work outside the home.

 

This sense of victimhood and the scramble for getting most out of a system determined to make nothing easy resulted in another peculiar phenomenon: the battle for evidence. It is fought against an inhuman machinery that was geared to strategic denial and forgetting. Apart from personal papers and testimonies, photographs were crucial here. Every survivor carried around a personal portfolio of photographs – of damaged property, dead family members and, most unforgettably, of terrible physical wounds. These last were often well-lit studio photographs with fancy backdrops. We were made to sit and look closely at these photographs and listen to the accompanying tales.

Most of the time, several individuals were doing this together with a bizarre combination of desperate urgency and profound mistrust. Even as they trusted us with their stories and images, with half a mind they wondered if we had come to conduct another survey of the sort that was done before the tufaan, when innocuous-looking surveyors came to their homes to see where and how they lived. Every survivor told us, over and over again, of the signs of systematic planning, with constant help from the police, in the months before the violence erupted.

From siesta-time at Citizen Nagar to the late-evening azaan at Naroda Patia, we saw about ten of the 69 colonies that existed all over Gujarat at that time. Citizen Nagar was more or less representative of them all. A 2007 survey showed 4,473 internally displaced families – 23,081 men, women and children – living in them. None of the land they were built on had been provided by the government, and most of the inhabitants did not have proper ownership papers. The state government denied that these people existed at all, and claimed that they had chosen to remain in the colonies because it happened to be a better option for them economically.

Mukhtar believed that victim-hood, together with the rehm-o-karam mentality that came with it, had spread like a disease among them, exploited, in different ways, by the state and by organizations that believed building mosques in these colonies was more important than building schools or health centres. ‘So why shouldn’t 2002 happen again?’ he asked.

 

What is history? (Remembering 30 September 2010, when the Allahabad High Court’s pronounced its verdict on the Ayodhya dispute.)

It was almost four o’clock in the afternoon. My friend and I were sitting in a Barista at Connaught Place and discussing what dissent looks like in Delhi. I had just been to a dharna on Jantar Mantar Road, organized by the Anti Commonwealth Games Front, and couldn’t help feeling a bit sad about how trivial such a demonstration could be made to look by Delhi’s decked-up hugeness. The protests were reduced to a comical roadside spectacle that busy city-dwellers ignored and tourists and day-labourers taking a break stopped to gape at without understanding what it was all about. My friend, in his early twenties, studies anthropology in a Delhi college. He comes from a small town in Uttar Pradesh, and has a keen outsider’s eye on everything happening around him in the city. We were talking about dissenting wardrobes, for two academic-looking women had just walked in wearing Anokhi kurtas and carrying printed-jute conference folders. At the dharna too there were interesting Fabindia versus Anokhi nuances.

 

We both knew that we were trying not to talk about what we were waiting for. The police were everywhere, but it had been like this for days because of the Games. The streets looked deserted, like siesta-time in a Mediterranean city. A tiny feeling of sickness stirred from time to time in our tummies, but we quickly drowned it in cappuccino. Then the phone calls started. First, the somewhat bemused relays from friends in Calcutta. Then, the gradual waking up to the meaning and tone of the verdict. My friend went out to take a call from his brother in their hometown, which was on high alert with all shops and offices shut. He had told me how his family were more or less Hindu Right, though curious about his life and politics in Delhi. He came back white-faced after the call, angry but not sure whether to be angry. We got up, paid the bill and decided to take a scooter to the Jama Masjid. On our way out, we saw the two Anokhi-clad women closely reading an Urdu pamphlet together. Why did we notice that?

The first few scooters refused to go to Old Delhi, then one agreed. We noticed the driver was Muslim, and we noticed that we noticed. We sped through nearly empty streets, saw shops pulling down their shutters. Perfectly ordinary scenes, like people gathered together and talking into their phones, suddenly began to look meaningful. As we got off near the front gate of the masjid, we saw a large crowd gathered there, as if waiting for some sort of announcement. Lots of police, but everyone very quiet. As we approached the crowd, I felt, for the first time in a public place, something that I must not hesitate to call fear. And I instantly felt guilty for feeling this fear. (I was studying abroad in December ’92, and Gujarat happened far away from Calcutta.) I found myself checking the name of the policeman closest to me: Something Yadav. Again, I noticed that I noticed. For a moment, we wondered whether we could go into the mosque, and then asked ourselves why we thought we might be barred entry? It was all in the mind. Or was it?

 

We went through the bag check and up the steps. At the gate to the courtyard, where you must take your shoes off, the man checking for cameras fished out my phone, pointed out that it had a camera and asked for Rs 200. I refused. He consulted his companion, looked into my eyes for a second and let me go. Again, a twinge of fear followed by guilt.

But, as we stepped into the courtyard and our feet took in the late-afternoon warmth of the stone, everything changed. The sense of peace, of timelessness, of the architecture opening up yet gathering people into itself, of a place more protecting than protected, took over instantly. A couple of years ago, I had spent a number of days at the G.B. Pant Hospital nearby with my mother, then gravely ill, and every evening I would walk to the masjid through the bustle of the market, have a plate of shahi tukra outside Karim’s and sit in the courtyard and let its peacefulness comfort me and make me feel lighter.

This afternoon, too, we stood in the shade on one side, looking out across the surrounding rooftops. The light was failing, but in one clearing, the boys were still playing cricket. The rooks and kites circled above them, and there is always something ominous about large, dark birds slowly circling the skies. On one side of the courtyard, there was a square marked off with a yellow line, covered with bird-grain and droppings, on which hundreds of pigeons gathered, pecked, hobbled about and crooned, to fly off in great, mindless gusts of panic, and gather again just as inexplicably. A man came from time to time to scatter more grain from a plastic bag as if it were his life’s vocation. The rhythm of the pigeons gathering and scattering was hypnotic. As we watched, our conversation petered out and the dusk thickened. Men in white were assembling inside the main hall for prayer, the lamps glimmered brighter, and the women flocking outside in black seemed to gather the afternoon’s last bits of light into their burqas.

 

Then, all of a sudden, as if from one of the minarets I had once climbed to the top of, emanated, into the expanse of the evening, a sombre, amplified voice that we soon realized was not the azaan. It was a call to the people who had gathered at the gate and inside – a call of the last solemnity – to react to the verdict with dignity and restraint, to not give in to disappointment or a sense of injustice and not be roused to untoward passions. Within the cadences of an almost ritual Urdu that I understood only in parts, I caught the words ‘high court’, ‘supreme court’ and ‘appeal’. They sounded strangely incongruous, even absurd, as they floated out into the evening on the wings of an indescribable melancholy, which was somehow more song, to my ears, than words.

 

We were both glad not to be alone during those moments, for we prevented each other from indulging in the vanity of believing that we had just lived through history. Everything seemed to come together too dramatically in deluding us into that feeling. Suddenly, pointing to something behind a pillar near us, my friend whispered, Look! It was a large black cat tensely crouching in the shadows. I followed its gaze and found it fixed on a lone pigeon pecking away inside the yellow line, left behind by its flock and blissfully unaware of being looked at so intently. A mad man kept shuffling up and down between the cat and the pigeon, calling out, ‘Farooq Begum! Ey Farooq Begum!’ But animal and bird were unmoved. Then, with a sure and deadly swiftness, before our reflexes could work, the cat shot across the square and leapt on the bird. There was a brief, horrible struggle, and even in the failing light we could make out the jaws tightening around the neck. Then it shot back into the shadows and disappeared behind a pile of rubble with the bird in its mouth.

And the very next moment, as the cat melted into the darkness, the muezzin’s call broke out above us, with a supreme sense of timing that makes my hair stand on end as I try now to write it all down. As the azaan’s sadness waxed and waned in the skies above Dilli, something else – something unspeakable but too non-human to be called cruel – was going on, we knew, behind that heap of rubble in the peaceful old courtyard.