An Iranian Exile in Sambhalpur

We were relaxing in the hotel after a shower, when I thought of calling up Taraz again. Small town India sleeps early, and at 11 in the night calling up somebody was a little improper. But three vodkas down, Sambhalpur’s Taraz seemed less intimidating. This time I found him, and the only question after I introduced myself was: “Where are you right now? Which hotel?”

I told him the name of the hotel, and he said he’d reach right away. Either Bombay is not the only Indian city that never sleeps, or Sambhalpur was in the midst of a bout of insomnia. And he did reach right away.

Taraz must be that token Muslim, I thought, as we lay in wait to meet the school principal who was also a journalist. Token Muslim. That is a peculiar term for Indians trying to defend their constitutional secularism against charges of anti-minoritism. It was a word that had haunted me, because I have been a regular on an Internet site, where Indians and Pakistanis call themselves South Asians and generally talk about general things.

But with Indians and Pakistanis, the zygotic twins begotten by the British in the wake of their 150 year illicit relationship with the subcontinent, there is a binary vision on every issue that pertains to their individual nationality. Every issue is always tied to the famous two nation theory that Jinnah articulated in demanding a separate state for Muslims of the sub-continent.

The cornerstone of that theory was that Hindus and Muslims were two nations, incapable of living together. Jinnah demanded Pakistan, because he feared that the Muslim minorities in India were unlikely to be equal citizens in a Hindu majority India.

Too many Pakistanis and Indians share almost a choreographed animosity. Even when they are both in the US and have no chance of returning to their native countries, they tend to hyperventilate on the respective superiority of one country over the other. Pakistanis feed their diatribes against Indians by saying India wants to dominate South Asia, that Indian secularism is a farce, and that Muslims are ill treated by the Indian government.

Indians attack pointing out how Pakistan was a failed state, has remained a fertile ground for fundamentalist Islam, has given legal cover to medieval barbarisms like honour killings and blasphemy, and treats its own minorities much worse.

When defensive Indians point out how many Muslim Presidents we have had, or how many Supreme Court Judges and Muslim ministers, some Pakistani poster will shout that those are ‘token Muslims’. Meaning just cosmetic names to establish credibility, exceptions that prove the rule rather than counter it.

That was the reason I thought Taraz might have been what would be called a token Muslim. Probably a rich landed Muslim who ran a business, and also a school. After all, in Vapi too we had this kind of people. Rich Muslim trading families, whose members were very educated and often became presidents of the Lions International, Jaycees, Giants or the Rotary International. The communal question once again intruded.

There was a ring at the door, and Taraz came in. He was short, broad without being stocky, had a broad but benign moustache , and was very fair. Our initial talk was the usual polite conversation. Was the road difficult, he asked, and himself answered that actually the roads were pretty good now. He apologised for being unavailable throughout the day, with an earnestness bordering on extreme guilt. The conversation, the first ten minutes that journalists take to measure up somebody had a single line report in my mind. And it said “Taraz is hesitant to intimacy.”

After some time he told us he was this late because he had away gone to a school called St Joseph’s School, where he was organizing a free medical camp under the aegis of the Rotary. The school had said that their regular students did not need the free medical check up so much as poor students, for whom they ran special batches. These students were from the slums and children of the very poor.

He was obviously very involved in this social service project of the Rotary Club that he headed. From his account, it was also easy to see that he took these projects very seriously. He was more comfortable, and perhaps more proud, of introducing himself as a community leader first and foremost. Though I was attentive, as was Rohan, it was not really the most interesting of topics. However it was going to be the only topic during our stay in Sambhalpur, though there were no portents of that when Taraz first broached the topic.

Taraz spoke in an accent reminiscent of somebody I knew, but could not place. He constantly softened the guttural sounds in his talk, more pronounced when he spoke Hindi. The mystery was solved in another few minutes. He was an Iranian and a Bahai. He had become a naturalized Indian, and had settled down here in the early eighties, when he came to the country as a student, and delayed his stay into employment, marriage, and eventually even setting up home.

He said he had married another Indian, who was from Guntur in Andhra Pradesh. Only when I reached his house the next day did I realize that his wife Sima was also an Iranian Bahai, and naturalized Indian, just like him. Their two children spoke Persian. Only, the children were so good at Hindi, that they teased their father when he pronounced an Oriya speciality called Khatta as Kata.

I called up Taraz the next day. He had promised to take us around Sambhalpur. He said there was some trouble where he was conducting the free medical check up camp for children. He said he’d be at the hotel a little later than the promised eight in the morning. I next called him at nine he was still busy. This time he said, there was some trouble with some Vishwa Hindu Parishad people at that school. VHP was the Hindu rightist outfit that had very definitively spread a communal poison across India under the banner of Hindu revivalism. Though there was always social division among various communities in India, it was the most pronounced among Hindus and Muslims; the standoff between the majority and the biggest minority of the country. And yet, before the late eighties when this organization started to be noticed for minor notoriety of its then nascent and sparse cadre of goons, the divisions were clearly uncomfortable and at places and at various times, painful rocks jutting from under a broader carpet of a country and people struggling to eke out a living.

I was beginning to feel a mild anxiety. In Sambhalpur, I was somehow not expecting to hear of any shenanigans of the VHP. Taraz said it was just a minor problem, and he’d sort it out before he came to the hotel. He finally landed at 11 am.

Taraz came to our hotel on his scooter. Rohan immediately wanted to find a mechanic to treat our failing steed. And if last night’s mishap on the highway was any indication, our Bullet needed urgent attention. Taraz immediately said he knew the best mechanic in town for our Bullet. We were taken to Sambhalpur’s most reputed mechanic: Shehazada. As it turned out, Shehazada’s shop was in the lane that was behind our hotel. How come all Bullet mechanics we found were Muslims?

Rohan chatted up Shehazada, an old man of sixty or more. Rohan is a very sceptical man; and because he wanted to make sure all mechanics were as good as Anna, his trusted man in Bombay, he would call up Anna on his cell phone, describe in detail all the reverberations of the bike and Anna would immediately diagnose the problem. I kept wondering how Rohan, a man unconnected to anything subtle, was such a master at measuring the reverberations of his motorcycle. Whenever I heard him describe the noises originating from the machine, the tenor of the noise, how a certain valve or nut was loose, I would marvel at the calliper like precision of his descriptions. No wonder Anna in Bombay could tell him right away what the problem was with a bike that was more than a thousand kilometres away!

I left Rohan with Shehzada, and went with Taraz to buy some stuff on a credit card, and look for an Internet café. Taraz took me through the twists and turns of Sambhalpur, gave me detailed descriptions of what the area was famous for, like the tribal handicrafts and their distinct Sambhalpuri textiles. The ride through the humid bylanes of Sambhalpur on his scooter was interrupted when he stopped to meet an old lawyer. We finally reached Tony’s textile shop, needless to say another friend of Taraz.

I got what I wanted at Tony’s textile shop. Tony was a young smartly dressed Sikh, who was talking animatedly to Taraz when I joined them at the cash counter, after my purchases. The last snatch I overheard was from Taraz.

“If I can bring you this far up, I can also bring you down,” he was telling Tony. It was obviously a boast among friends, and Tony was as amiably agreeing to it. Taraz did not seem Iranian from that moment. He was another man, just like me, my friends in Vapi, Tony next to me, could have been Rohan, Bhanu, Pankaj. Anybody.

When we returned to Shehazada’s shop, Rohan was in some whispering intimacy of two lovers of motorcycles. The old man asked him, “Who is your mechanic in Bombay?”

“Basheer,R 21; said Rohan, without batting an eyelid.

Basheer! I thought, I never heard of anybody but the very Maharshtrian Hindu Anna before. Was Rohan playing along, now that some bit of my communal riots theme was rubbing up on him?

When I asked Rohan next, he told me he did indeed have a mechanic called Basheer in Bombay. That was his mechanic. He had a Bullet, a 500 cc bike he had bought and remodelled closer to his teenage heart’s desire. Somehow, I did not ask him why he did not say Anna, who was the mechanic who looked after the bike we were travelling on. Our bike actually belonged to Rohan’s uncle, and Anna was its only mechanic. Plus, everywhere else I had only heard of Anna. It was Anna that he had called up to attend to any problems with the bike so far.

In Rohan’s immediate and appropriate answer to Shehazada, I recognised artifice. Not the seasoned, schooled artifice of the politically correct. It was more his take on what had happened earlier in Vapi. When, in panick, I had moved in to stop him from blabbering before Shambu assuming he was a Hindu. I did not doubt Rohan’s sensitivity, even then, but in a Guajarat where Muslims were being targeted by Hindu mobs, Shambu was most likely to read what would assuage his prejudices. He was unlikely to have seen Rohan’s blabbering with the innocence that he would have on another more regular day.

Taraz left us at the hotel. He asked us to rest for a while, since we were already into the noon, and went away promising to return in an hour. He said he would take us around Sambhalpur. By two in the afternoon, Taraz was back, this time in his car, and he drove us to the Hirakud dam, the world’s largest earthen dam. And then to Usha Koti, the forest range. We drove through the area of the forest range where it was allowed to take the vehicle. The jungles excited Rohan. He insisted he wanted to come back, and maybe stay in the forest at one of the forest outposts.

These outposts were watchtowers next to water bodies bathed in halogen light so that wild life enthusiasts could spot their prized wild pets from the towers, and also film them in the powerful light. The Halogen lights were turned on during the night. Apparently, most animals seem to have the journalistic habit of reaching their watering holes only at night and if you wanted to see them you had to be in the watchtower at night.

When he told our host about his wish to come and stay the night at one of the forest watchtowers, Taraz immediately took over as an elder citizen of Sambhalpur. He arranged with a young boy who was attached to the forest department to accompany us, and then on his advice went to meet the senior Forest Range Officer. There we met the Indian Bureaucrat who, after hours of prolonged irrelevances, sold us the idea of the forest visit being great even if we saw no animals. Then promptly informed us that there were no jeeps available, and the motorbike was not allowed. We settled for the old way of paying the boy, and asking him to guide us to any watchtower, and fixed a rendezvous at 11:30 pm; of course this was accomplished away from the bureacrat’s presence.

When we reached the hotel, Taraz threw us with an unexpected invitation. He insisted we should check out of the hotel, and move to his place. A little non-plussed, and unprepared for such sudden friendship from a man who did not seem to speak a lot, our resistance must have seemed more artificial than sincere. He literally bulldozed us into packing up and practically kidnapped us to his house for dinner.

His rotund daughter seven year old Mona, his thin and sharp six year old son Sina were there to welcome us. They lived on the first floor of a moderately sized building. The rooms downstairs, I was told, was where they ran the school. Taraz’s wife Sima, had prepared Persian specialities. After a formal dinner, a few photographs, Rohan and I decided to set off for the forest. As we were leaving, Sima stopped us and said she wanted us to join their family in a small prayer. She got out two small prayer books, we all sat around the small centre table in their house, and she read out a prayer in Persian. She then asked Mona to say it in Hindi. Then, it was Sina’s turn, this time in English. After the prayers, we set off.

The moment we were out, Rohan became almost sentimental.

“That was the most beautiful thing I have ever witnessed. They were praying for our safe return from our destination.”

The forest rendezvous was a mild disaster. We reached precisely two hours late. Everybody was asleep at the rest house. After our repeated honking and some very desperate rattling on the iron gate, the boy we had met in the afternoon came out, groggy eyed.

He said it was not possible to go into the forest. He flatly refused, plain as that. Err what about our deal in the afternoon, I said weakly, for the fear of upsetting him beyond redemption.

“No, No. It is not possible to go into the forest”

“I know it is difficult. But we had arranged for this. We are willing to pay your charges.”

“No No. It is not possible to go into he forest”

“Arrey baba, we will pay you yaar. Double. Promise. Please. Look at all the cameras I have lugged this far.” Rohan joined the entreaties.

“No No. It is not possible to go into the forest.”

“Can we pee on your feet?” I asked him in my mind.

“No No. It is not possible to go into the forest.” He even pre-empted my mental question with the same certainty.

We were about sixty kilometers out of Sambhalpur on a very lonely highway, in the middle of a very thick forest. In fact the forest looked more dense and menacing in the night. Only occasionally a truck cut through the highway splitting the eerie blackness with blinding flashes of their headlights.

“Well then, we stay here for the night,”I told him, half expecting him to say “No No. It is not possible to go into the forest.” His answer to my assertion was not much different either. He said that we could not stay in the resthouse either. By this time I realized there was little that the boy could do to help or hinder us. I told him, if he did not open up the resthouse rooms, we would sleep on the verandah. He could go and do what he pleased. I told Rohan to pull in the bike. In another seven minutes Rohan was snoring on the mosquito beehive that was the verandah, I was awake, marvelling at his ability, while a flabbergasted boy trotted off with his torch to find some senior official. We never saw him return, and early morning we headed back for Taraz’s home.

There we found Taraz in worried consultation with Dr Sinha, a prominent local doctor of Sambhalpur who was part of the free medical camp for the poor organised by the Rotary Club. He was also a member of the club. The VHP issue had taken a more serious turn, filling Sister Miriam Morris, the Christian nun who headed St Joseph, with panic.

What had happened was really macabre. One of the children attending the medical camp was given a tonic, which was past its expiry date. The VHP landed up at the school saying this was a case of medical negligence against poor students. And then, in a transparent political ploy, they presented the school’s principal with outdated medicines that had not been supplied at the camp. They had just picked up such outdated stock from some medical store, and landed up outside the school. When the town’s eminent doctors who volunteered for the camp expressly said that those bottles were not the ones given out at the camp, the VHP leader of the mob, started fumbling. By the next day, the town’s eminence grises, who were all with the Rotary Club, got together, and started to form a bulwark against the VHP leader, who was a local lawyer.

But by the second day the issue was not so much expired tonics but how the poor section of the school’s students were targeted in the medical camp for palming off expired and potentially lethal medicines. By the third day, the morning I met Dr Sinha at Taraz’s house after our misadventure at the Usha Koti forest, the whole episode had leapfrogged through all the gaping holes of warped logic to a charge against Sistser Morris, the principal of St Joseph’s Convent, for targeting poor people, offering them expired medicines as incentive, and converting them into Christianity.

From the talk between the doctor and Taraz what I could gather was that a mob had surrounded Sister Morris in her principal’s office. They were making statements about forced conversions, and threatening action, legal and extra legal. The small but potentially true case of medical negligence had sister Morris panicking. She did not know what to do, she did not know how much to be consoled by the Rotarians. Her eyes wide in panic was seen as the natural reaction of a woman under stress by Taraz, by Dr Sinha, by other Rotarians who were there to support and be with her, said Taraz.

I imagined that those eyes were wide also because before them she was probably seeing the leaping flames of a jeep set on fire in the night with two young sons and their father, Australian missionary John Staines. She must have felt the screams from the jeep, and a mob around with burning torches. That too had been in Orissa. And incidentally, that final orgy of inhuman vengeance was also started by a man who had originally campaigned against the slaughter of cows; a pet campaign of the VHP. I did not mention my imaginative interpretation of Sister Morris’ panic. They had enough trouble on their hands without my imagination.

We left Taraz and Dr Sinha to their own able intellects to tackle the VHP issue. When it was time for us to leave, I asked Taraz why he used his initials and not his surname. It was just a lazy question really.

But the answer was exciting. “Actually my name is Muhatelebi, but people started calling me matlabi, meaning selfish. So I only use my initials.”

As we headed out of Sambhalpur, Rohan once again mentioned how he would never forget the Taraz’s prayer for us. When we first met Taraz’s family and introduced ourselves to Sima, she burst out that Rohan was a Persian name. Throughout my brief interaction with the family I noticed a self contained pride in their Persian ancestry, never fierce, never glowering, but supremely self assured. They had maintained in their rented house a displaced people’s legacy, with no hope of a return to their native Iran.

But, what was more unsettling in its sheer transparency was how they all kept meaning India when they said our country. This intrigued me, because their parents, both Taraz and Sima’s, were still in Iran. The old parents made occasional trips to India, and the family met in Bombay first where they would go and receive them, and stayed with them in their Sambhalpur house for some time. These meetings too were petering out, since age was catching up with their parents.

“Don’t you want to go to Iran, see and meet the friends you grew up with?” I asked Taraz.

“I want to go. But I do not know when I will get a chance. They think of me as a traitor. I did not join the compulsory army training. And now I am an Indian citizen. But you know Bahaullah says that we must always respect and be loyal to the soil that feeds us. This is the soil that feeds me, and my family. I belong here.”

My first tryst with Bahaism happened in my callow youth, when ignorance reigned supreme, but little knowledge wore a fiercely gleaming crown. I had met an old couple who told me about Bahaullah, the founder of the faith. It sounded ridiculous to me when the couple, trying to educate me on the religion, told me that their religion recognized Krishna from the Hindu pantheon, Jesus from Chrisitanity, the Prophet of Islam, and the Buddha, and came up with an amalgam of all the good that these religious figures put forth as their truth to their followers.

This was the bedrock of their faith; the best of all other bests; almost an anthology of the best religious messages from established world religions.

My mind was benumbed then that a 19th century mystic should pass off for religion a neat job of accumulating, chopping, and then rearranging known sources of wisdom. Had Osho Rajneesh also not done that? There was excitement in the new perspective, but that was essentially an intellectual high. And then, Rajneesh only spawned a cult of the well heeled who got their intellectual high.

Much like, though to some lesser extent, what Tibetan Buddhism is today for Steven Segal and Richard Gere. Or Hinduism, and later Budhism, was for the beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Later, I recognized the Ismaili sect of Muslims as another of those who formed a club of people wanting greater freedoms than were offered by their current religion, and which the newer version did, allowing them to live in real time.

My perspective on religion till then was conditioned by the widely known universal truth that religion is always a precious heirloom from the past. A people beget it and carry it with their civilization through a constancy of adherence to the canons, rituals, myths, legends, moralities of one such religion. Through this all, the real test is whether there are people living by the tenets of their religion. A significant and distinct number was a must. And above all else, they should not exclude anybody on the grounds of disparity of intelligence, deformity, wealth, or nationality.

It had never occurred to me that a religion could be born today too.

I have realized now that the Ismailis and the Bahais are followers of the world’s most modern religions. Modern not only in being the newest on the bloc, but also in terms of temperament and sensibility. In the meaning that one generally associates with the term when used in fields such as architecture, literature or art. And some extremely conservative, naïve, devout, and boring people follow these religions and get the same peace or sustenance as do some very intellectual people, just as in any other established religion of the world.

Religion cannot effect its revolutions like art that attacks the establishment in full fury with an anti-establishment movement. It cannot be like politics either, because there cannot be an overhauling of popular thinking to a more dominant ideology since religions operate outside geography. Besides, religion purports to offer no roadmap for progress of human lives, it only invests in the progress of the human soul.

Nor can a rebellious lifestyle such as espoused by the sixties’ flower children movement, which rode a predominant social impulse of the youth to infuse a temporary convulsion of the collective human conscience.

Of all human enterprises, religion, the longest running idea whose time never runs out, is the most phlegmatic. Its changes, revolutions and arrivals of new players are marked by carving out from the old a significantly large chunk over historical time. In that sense Bahaiism and the Aga Khan’s Ismaili order both expressly forbid supremacy of one region or nation over the other. That equitableness is a very modern idea introduced into religion. The Bahai’s as well as the Ismailies can be and remain only Bahais and Ismailies in every country. By faith they are to serve their current geographical nations.

“Nobody in the world likes Muslims. That is because they believe everything is written in one book. The Koran was written so long ago. Life has changed so much. Bahaullah said we must be loyal to the land we live in.” Taraz said things as he saw them. He was untouched by political correctness. He seemed to have seamlessly become part of Sambhalpur’s elite. And yet, I wondered, if ever there were to be a communal riot in Sambhalpur, he might be one of the most visible “other.” That he was not Muslim would be too much of a subtlety for a mob of Hindu arsonists. His name would be enough. And its Persian roots would suggest Muslimhood rather than anything else. In fact, Taraz had told me that he is often explaining Bahaiism, and that he is not a Muslim, to many who confuse him to be a Muslim.

The riots in Bombay razed so many Irani restaurants, a distinct legacy of an old Bombay, with their dark brown cane chairs and glasstop tables with chequered tablecloths. Many oldtimers in Bombay still remember long literary soiries and political debates over Irani tea in those restaurants through the seventies and eighties too. Most of these got their name because that style of restaurant was started by old Iranian settlers. Many of them were even run by Parsi families, while several were sold out to Muslim families who were in the restaurant business. And yet, with almost uncanny precision Iranies run by Muslim families alone were targeted by rioters in 1992-93.

So in many ways, mobs do have sharp brains. They are masterminded whenever riots happen and spread widely. An occasional eruption can be termed a collective emotional outburst, but riots like the one in Gujarat were tactical and strategic operations.

But Taraz’s was a very delicate position. I did not think his Bahaism would be a strong enough fig leaf to protect him from Hindu rioters were a riot to happen in Sambhalpur. And his alliances with the secular, educated elite, and his leadership role in furthering a progressive worldview would expose him to the orthodoxy of enemies like the VHP. His religious identity that was so amorphous, would make him an easy and soft target.

Just as Irani restaurants owned by Muslims were targeted in the Bombay riots, often because of personal vendetta of Hindu business rivals, Taraz would be the first enemy among the Hindu secular bulwark of Sambhalpur. Others would have their Hinduism to save them, but Taraz?

He even echoed the stereotyping that the majority does of the minority. Without fear or favour, just as many do in casual conversations inside their homes. I did not think it was any kind of defensiveness, or even an easy allegiance with the majority Hindus that made him mouth such opinions. But were his cozy world to be put to a Molotov, would he still retain the faith? I dropped the scary thought like a heavy, unlucky coin on the tar melting in glazed patches on the road as we raced towards Cuttak. As I imagined the ridges of the thought coin I dropped cutting into the melting tar, I refused to engage the speculation any further. I knew I did it out of fear. A fear that pursuing such a thought would leave me with a very paranoid conclusion.

My first experience as a reporter was the riots in Bombay that erupted on the night of December 6, 1992. I was then a reporter with a small city tabloid called The Daily, For a morninger that sold 35,000 copies at its peak, it was a feisty paper forever in need of good senior journalists and concurrently always bogged by an embarrassing riches of rookies. When I was a reporter there, middle level in the hierarchy of reporters, but with only three years in the profession, The Daily’s senior reporting staff of two decided the riots was an opportune moment to strike work and railroad its then editor. That left us with only our chief reporter, and four or five young reporters running the paper, other than the production and sub-editing staff.

The non-cooperation of the senior reporters soon brought the desired result, the editor was sacked. Unfortunately, that made a curmudgeon of a man whose entire earlier career in the media had been as a circulation manager, the de facto editor in chief. And it was his bright idea that all the riots stories should be bundled together into one single lead story; and for the tabloid size paper that meant a day’s entire coverage was to be recorded in The Daily as a 600-word story.

The chief reporter chose me as the executioner of the worst editorial decision in the midst of the metropolis’s biggest and bloodiest communal carnage. That was the time when for nearly an entire month, especially during the second and bloodier phase of the riots journalists called “the Hindu backlash,” I was the man chosen to funnel the entire trauma of a city into a pout pourri of figures, locations, and deadpan quotes to fit our 600-word limit. The gross injustice done to The Daily’s superlative coverage, and the insane insensitivity of converting bodies and screams into an exercise of numbers and clichés, remains with me till date.

I avoided reading newspapers throughout the trip. It was a kind of shutting off from newspapers. A kind of fatigue had set in after 12 years as a reporter, and that fatigue tended to leave me with a very odd kind of binary vision. If I read about the carnage I would either get into a shell, preoccupied and gloomy. Or, the more embarassingly, I would get sentimental about the brutalities in Gujarat that would be splashed across in a gleaming array of clichés. Even the despicable gore of communal riots rarely brought out the real nausea of carnage. I myself had found that a reporter can be absolutely out of depth when writing about things that scar him, and the journalistic necessity to be stoic in the presence of the worst, eventually hardens around him like a carapace of cliché that he never escapes.


I knew Gujarat was boiling over. Muslims were being butchered. And yet, I did not want to read newspapers. I did not seek newspapers. I knew that were I to get gloomy, I would not be a good partner to Rohan, who often needed a boost of light conversation. He might offer a deferential silence for sometime before saying, “Hell, drop it. Stop thinking about it. Let’s stop and smoke here.”

And yet, it was impossible to blackout news. Despite my decision to avoid the media, it was easier on days when we were on the road, and booked overnight into highway hotels. They rarely served newspapers, and the television was Rohan’s right.

It was seven days since we had set out, and the brutalities in Gujarat had been escalating. In the first three days after Godhra, 400 Muslims were butchered, 179 of them in Ahmedabad alone. The ratio of Muslim versus Hindu deaths in police firing was a numbing 6:1, 42 Muslims and seven Hindus. And this was what had already happened by the time we left Vapi.

A glimpse of the television in a highway Dhaba, talks at restaurant tables, occasional headlines in newspapers, all stabbed into my consciousness with the reality of Gujarat. Though I did not read the papers through the journey, there were instances when I did. And the reports of atrocities in Gujarat seemed to have an impact. It did depress me. But somehow, what I carried in the mind was the irony of that overplayed “feel good” story of a lawyer who saved 25 Muslim families at a risk to his own. Or that serenely anachronistic village “hardly eight kilometers” from Ahmedabad where communal harmony reigned in the face of repeated threats to overrun the minority by outsiders.

In all these, all I could visualize was the news editor looking for that elusive “human interest” story to be splashed as the bottom-spread of the front page. The top would be full of the ruling party’s stand, the opposition’s stand, when the prime minister and the home minister did not say anything. The Hitavada at Taraz’s house was prime example.

The forced optimism of these columns was dictated by a foreign sensibility that the Indian mainstream media has rehearsed and perfected with much better results than the Indian parliamentarian has done with democracy. The impotence of this self-conscious rosiness to reach and keep the faith in those affected seems not to have hit anybody too hard.

The papers and local cable television networks do a much more immediate and true job. They reflect and report to their constituency, thus Urdu papers continued to scream and spin out Hindu atrocities in Bombay’s Muslim heartland, tinged with a jehadic hue towards revenge. The Shiv Sena’s mouthpiece did a similar spin on Muslim atrocities on the central and Hindu neighbourhoods of Parel and Dadar. The Gujarati papers and cable television networks continued to tell stories of Muslim atrocities, sedition would be a very mild word for this clear peddling of communal hatred.

To beat it all, the kind of Hindu extremism that swamped Gujarat, a result of committed and grassroots level campaigning, was what emboldened the VHP to publicly state that their future plan of action was “to replicate the Gujarat model.” As though Gujarat was their laboratory where they first perfected the art of cloning the Hindu superman, which they would replicate throughout the country to build their Hindu nation.