Intimacies Remapped

Ride Away From Gujarat is a result of my travel through a major part of India during the Gujarat riots,

it is primarily a metaphor for my journey away from the blood and gore of riots to questioning my role, and the roles of others like me, in an India seemingly fast polarising along communal lines.

Though it uses the travelogue mode as a devise, it deals more with the people rather than places, and interprets from my own understanding, the reactions, attitudes and the confusion to the question of secularism among the urban upwardly mobile. These are based on those I meet and interact with during the three weeks of motorcycling across a huge landmass of India through the shadows of the flames of Godhra, in March 2002.

The 3000-kilometer ride covered seven states of India.

It records the attitudes of the educated middle class of urban India, to questions of communal divide, the relevance of religion in today's world, as well as the effect of communal upheavals on the values and attitudes of those who experience these, especially as children.

It also maps the urban consciousness of India, educated or uneducated, craftsman and conservationist, teacher and businessman. It suggests what I believe, that the non-metro 'urban diaspora' within India may be the group where the strong communal prejudices of earlier generations may be fraying.

I have deliberately not asked in-your-face questions nor probed for precise answers as I had done through my years as a reporter, rather I have attempted to measure and formulate a perceptive understanding of individual responses in small town India, which are at the frontier modernity.

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We slipped through the crack of dawn on March 2, 2002, gliding through the familiar streets of Bombay, in the unfamiliar early morning Eastman Colour light of the posters of old Bollywood films. Rohan and I started a three week motorcycle journey without roadmaps, on our Enfield Bullet, the sturdy and sentimental favourite of the best of bikers in India.

It was a spur of the moment decision, and it was Rohan made all the heroic choices. I could not ride a motorcycle to save my life, or his, for that matter. The last time I rode a motorcycle, I cracked my lower jaw. Even today, an X-ray image of my lower jaw shows the crack distinctly.

Rohan’s second heroic decision was starting out on an outdoor biking trip without the slightest idea of where we were headed, without a roadmap, and above all with a man who was as competent to repair a motorcycle in the case of a breakdown as a carpenter would be with a spaceship.

Our original plan was to motorbike through Gujarat and Rajasthan into Ladakh, that serene landscape of thick chocolate and white cream by a wayward painter. That plan was soon scuttled, because we discovered that the road to Ladakh is traditionally closed till late April, or even early May. So a plan B was invented. We decided to move into that hilly cousin of Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh. Both entailed the same route till Delhi. We were to cut through Gujarat and Rajasthan, and into Delhi. From there, we would find the route to Simla, the capital of Himachal Pradesh.

While we knew that communal riots were erupting, and spreading in Gujarat, we did not register this serious enough to abandon plans of travel through Gujarat. We landed at Vapi, the small southern town at the edge of Gujarat’s east wing where I grew up.

At Vapi, I met up with the friends I had grown up with. Ordinary people all; school dropouts, successful businessmen, unsuccessful sportsmen, some were hesistant donners of their fathers’ legacies. They were also Keralites, Maharastrians, or people from Uttar Pradesh. My friends were all like me, at one remove from our roots. Though our parents were the pure marital double helix from one state, and often even the same caste, we were all growing up under a foreign sun that beat down on a chemically abused ground in Vapi of the eighties. Our own mothertongues, spoken only in the confines of our homes, became accumstomed to strange Gujarati gutturals and lisps.

Our parents were more attached to their respective states, and in most cases were trying to raise their children in Vapi, pretending and promoting an illusion that their tiny tenements were their private shreds of home. For the children, home was the place they went to sleep in and the world they woke up to every morning. The bastardised, multi-ethnic world that existed under a frayed blanket of Gujarati culture in a corner of the state that was closer to Maharashtra and Bombay in Geography than Gandhinagar or Saurashtra.

On the night of March 2, the fearful beginning of the gathering storm that followed Godhra was already 60 hours old. And my friends gathered in our usual way of meeting over dinner.

There was Sushil, a fair stout curly haired former footballer. He had lost his best chance at a sports career when he abandoned his post as the captain of the state junior football team out of sheer pique. The spirit of Pele revolted when he was handed three greasy puries, a jumble of boiled potatoes, and a boiled egg at the training camp in the state capital, Gandhinagar. He promptly leaped over the football field, and caught the first train to sporting oblivion, though he got down at Vapi railway station.

Sushil was an obsessive football freak. Ask him something as arcane as the average number of goals scored in the 1954 World Cup in the middle of a night’s sleep, and I bet he’ll surprise you with 5.6. He was a Maratha, a Hindu from Ratnagiri, the coastal town of Maharashtra. Though his father, when their family was in Bombay’s Dadar Parel belt, was a supporter of the Shiv Sena in the early seventies, he was himself indifferent to politics and even religion. His God was the chequered football.

Then there was Suresh. A fifth standard dropout. He was the best brain in this town. He oversaw a small business empire with a double-digit crore turnover in transport, paper- scrap, money- lending, and real estate. All this for a friend who helped him during his rather wayward teens, when on my advice he had left home forever. Now he was a respected and feared guest in his family.

Feared, because he is one of Vapi’s tough men. Slips easily into fights and mediation roles. His mother was a Telugu speaking Christian from Andhra Pradesh. His father was a Malayalee dock worker in Mumbai, before he moved to Vapi and became a rich contractor, riding the construction boom in South Gujarat when Vapi was a furiously growing to be Asia’s largest small scale industrial estate in the late seventies and the eighties.

Suresh’s mother had died early, and he was brought up as a Keralite Hindu after his father remarried a Malayalee. His sporadic schooling also had one brief stint at a convent school. He wore a cross for a brief while, and had a picture of his mother he never knew among his most guarded possessions. Despite his cross religious blood, he had grown to be more or less against Muslims. Besides, he had high decibel opinions. Though he talked little, when he did, it was with a rapier wit.

Also Atul, alias Jefrey. A twelfth standard dropout. Atul was a romantic gambler at jobs. The best thing is, he never got or lost jobs that ever earned him more or less than the last one; he was right at the bottom of the skilled labour wages.

Atul, a tall strong man, had a dimunitive Hindu wife. His mother too was Hindu. She had married his Anglo-Indian Roman Catholic father at sixteen. He was born when his mother was 16 plus the nine months, give or take a few months.

Though Atul was a Roman Catholic, he was a hiccuppy goer to churches. Every time he went, he gave up going. He had little knowledge, opinion or need for either.

Then, there was Darshan. A young cynic. He hated the family profoundly. Not his, or anybody’s family. He hated the institution of the family. He was currently employed in Muscat, assisting a relative in his hardware shop selling building materials. Darshan was a very meek boy. He grew up to be one of the most pungent talkers on general ills of the family system.

Though Darshan was an expert at computers, he moved to Muscat because he was being paid very little in Vapi. He saves his salary, and hopes to return with enough money to set himself up in some business.

He was of Gujarati Vaishnav parents. They would faint at the mention of meat, fair or fowl, he eats anything that is available. He had no alliances, and nobody and nothing was above his cartoonist’s scalpel. Though he was raised on Saatvic Vaishnavism, he fed his diatribes on all religions.

For him religion was a more extended, more rotten form of the claustrophobic families that corroded individual freedom, enterprise, and eventually, human will.

Shakir. From Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh. That is, his father was. His father raised him exactly as he had been raised in Azamgarh. The only difference is that Shakir went to an English medium school. That too only because there was no other school in sight, the option being a Gujarati medium school.

As a junior of mine in school, I had lured Shakir to participate in sports. One day he won the trophy in the 200 metres dash. He reached home, and ran smack into a very angry father. The Silver Cup that had him beaming till he reached home was snatched from him, and dashed against a wall, and broken. His father had no patience for his tale of sporting conquest, he had more important failings. His father had asked him to take the wheat to the flour mill, and he had chosen to win a 200 metres sprint race instead. Shakir was Muslim, a Sunni. And yet a closet liberal who flaunted his closet.

Then there was Zakir. Giant Zakir. Gentle. Absolutely and resolutely faithful. Charmingly witty. Game to listen to all criticism, opinions, and business options. But, insists he should and had, lost a lot of money only on the stock market. Rich by inheritance, brilliant at studies, but he did not allow his propensity for education interfere with the inheritance of his small town rich destiny. He too was a Sunni Muslim, like Shakir, and had his roots in Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh. He was a strict follower of all tenets, and often the sympathetic but unforgiving custodian of Shakir’s vices. Though Zakir had a critical mind, he was a clear-headed protector of the chosen prejudices.

These constituted the motley bunch, all in their late- twenties- or early-thirties worthies, who make up my group of friends from Vapi. They had missed being recruited into the violence of political activism because they were in a small town so far from the epicentre of power. After their fiery youth was wasted away, however, there were things happening that revealed incomprehensible, and at times uncomfortable, alliances that forged in their minds. The winds were sown with polarities, though they grew outside the inviolable rubric of ideology that consumed so many others in other parts of the country.

That night we had a guest. My riding partner the 26-year-old, supremely instinctive, unabashedly brash, street fighter-cum-play-safe would-be-father, Rohan. Rohan in many ways was a vertical invader to our large table of old friends. We had a shared childhood.

Rohan was Hindu by religion, cosmopolitan by neighbourhood, but home was a chawl in Worli in Central Bombay. It was there that he grew up among his cousins and relatives. All Shiv Sainiks by faith and pledge. All street fighters.

This was the star cast that slowly but surely glowed with the latent heat of a debate strangled by the awkward hospitality towards Rohan. My Vapi friends were all used to uninhibited talk. On all issues. Rohan was a newcomer and his presence cramped their style.

Suresh was at the wheel while we were driving to the restaurant outside Vapi, in Daman. Daman served liquor, because it is a different state, and does not observe prohibition as Gujarat does. The car slid smoothly through the sparsely peopled roads of Vapi and inside the car, talk screeched to the communal riots in Gujarat. It was still early days in hell though, and nobody had any idea of how big, and monstrous it would get.

Three days ago, February 27, that a mob in Godhra torched an entire compartment of a train carrying Vishwa Hindu Parishad activists, the Hindu militant outfit which is trying to graft upon India a “new purer” version of the constantly frayed and mutated religion. The fallout of that horrific incident was that an entire state erupted into a revenge- killing spree that would shame India, and severely damage the country’s new found pace of economic development, and the nascent credibility of its democracy, and the institutions it fostered. But in the car, we were still only privy to the gathering momentum of the feared Hindu backlash, because the train was torched by a mob of Muslims.

I started the conversation. “Shakir. Where is he?”

“Bastard. Didn’t come. I called four times. Said his father did not want him to leave home in the night,” rasped Suresh. His casual hurt still carried the rawness of his disappointment. But that was what set off the talk about the Hindu-Muslim riots that had begun to erupt across the state, but still a few red kilometres from Vapi. The last place reported to have had incidents was Surat, more than 150 kilometres from Vapi.
“Why are you cursing?” I asked, as if it was not too easy to understand the reason why Shakir could not join us.

Suresh went silent. He was my closest friend. The closest in Vapi after Shakir.

Only a week back he had come home to meet me in Bombay, with Shakir. The reason: Shakir was upset with his parents for mistreating his wife. She is from a humble village in Azamgarh, and whom none of us has seen. She refused to meet his friends, and he remained the butt of jokes from all his friends for this.

Shakir had told me separately, that she was too shy to meet male friends of her husband. And when he had tried to persuade her to meet his best friends, she had blankly said she did not want to. And Shakir did not want to force his wife to meet his friends. But, Shakir said, they did not understand. So he told them, she does not want to relinquish her purdah. And, does not want to see men.

“So I get teased. She doesn’t even wear purdah,” he had said.

But ever since Shakir’s younger brother Aamir married a rich man’s daughter, some symptoms of the nouveau riche had entered their home, where his authoritarian father had forcibly prevented fifty years of Indian Independence and its tryst with modernity from ever venturing in.

That was what had brought Suresh and Shakir to my flat in Bombay.
Shakir felt aggrieved that his wife had done all the work, before Aamir brought his bride home. Suddenly, his father who had stubbornly resisted hiring a domestic servant till then hired one almost overnight. Shakir felt that his wife and he were sidelined; he felt humiliated and was intense enough to think of leaving home. He shared his domestic trouble with Suresh. Suresh told him to not be hasty, and stick at home. It would pass, he had told him.

But, when over the week Shakir’s insistence grew, Suresh realized the issue might get out of hand. Knowing that Shakir would listen to me more gravely than him, he promptly dumped him into the train to Bombay. They came over. We spent a day chatting over beer, Shakir refused to touch the topic, and all was fine. Having rediscovered the magic of our childhood friendship, and having touched the explosive intimacy of those days in hours, Shakir forgot to talk about the issue he had come for. Suresh did not broach it. He had warned me not to either.

“If he chooses to, let him,” he had told me when Shakir was out of earshot.

That was how we had grown up. More or less tadpoles at the bottom of the economic barrel, and yet within reach of an English medium education because of the small town economy. There was a group of numerically small elite that needed, and therefore, promoted an English school in Vapi. But to populate that school, it had to be made easily accessible to a majority of the townspeople. So the sons and daughters of the head honchos of various industries and factories in Vapi had for classmates the progeny of their drivers, security men and even their domestic help.

The unavoidable intimacy of the small town almost wiped out the inequities of society for all those of us who were students at Gnyan Dham High School, then the only English medium school in town. Now the town has several, a mad melee seeking the highest amount as donation for admission of children, a euphemism for illegal one time fee. While that is the fallout of the privatisation of education, it also set up a high entry barrier to the poor.

Shakir, Suresh, and me, we were each other’s chosen friends. Not class mates. Our fraternity had more to do with being of the same sensibility in a poor neighbourhood. Our years together held us in a sort of secret bond of silence when we became adults. It was almost as if we could instinctively read intangible symptoms of stress, discomfort, anxiety in each other.

We grew up in a mixed neighbourhood of chemical plant workers, auto rickshaw drivers, vegetable sellers, lame carpenters, and epileptic cinema-ticket-black-marketers. As this lot grew together, the biggest tide and ebb remained the beginning and end of playtime for the children. They burst into freedom when they finally shot out of their tenements into the sun of the playground, and sulked, sometimes bawled, beaten and dragged back into the house by one of the angry parents. We always wondered if our neighbourhood wasn’t the biggest conglomeration of angry parents anywhere in the world.

We little realized that the ebb and tide of children’s wails in our neighbourhood was our tryst with their life and their almost impossible dreams for us. In this elaborately quotidian collage of situations among us, religion flared up occasionally, but always in festivity. On Eid, our neighbours gave us special mithai. Chachi, the wife of the man whose husband sold cigarettes and beedis, would give us the sweets made on Eid.

They would avoid the meats, imagining that we, Hindus, might not like it, or worse, be offended by it. That was in childhood.

Since Shakir and Suresh did not live in my building, we rarely exchanged festival food during our childhood days. But, as we grew, by the time we broke into teen age we had become visitors to each others’ houses. Then, of course, we got everything. Meat. Sweets. Sometimes, we even got to taste what the other’s mother was cooking before the household itself got to eat it.

Shakir and Suresh returned that night from my house in Bombay, after a good day. The problem sorted itself out. Shakir made peace with the situation. Moving out from his father’s house was never again mentioned, Suresh told me.

It was this intimacy that had upset Suresh that night with Shakir‘s keeping away. My reaching Vapi was an occasion for a meeting of all our friends and Suresh, Shakir and I were more closely knit outside of school.

“So, have there been any incidents here in Vapi?” I enquired.

“Nahi re. Not here. Nothing will happen here.” When Suresh said that, he
was being an authoritative spokesperson for the town, as someone who had some amount of control there too. And also on the way the town reacted, or so he thought, and several others agreed.

“It will not happen here,” piped Atul. He was talking out of the sheer piety of the somnolent citizen. His memory of recent history stretched only from his school days to today. That was the kind of piety that a majority of Bombayites had had, till December 6, 1992 happened. Now, nobody ever says it. Not in Bombay.

I lapsed into silence. After a moment Suresh spoke.

“This will never stop. If it is still here all these years after partition, it is not going to stop. Ever.”

Suresh was measuring up to me. He, and also my other friends in Vapi shared one opinion of me, in various degrees. They considered me a part of an intellectual elite of the society; the politically correct lot; the kind that preached idealism and spouted unreal nonsense about social situations in the country. I had earned such an impression entirely because at 18 I left our shared world to strike out alone in Bombay. Many followed after that. But I was the only publicly visible their-town-boy in the media.

They had read my name in national newspapers, on television. They knew that I spouted an English they were proud of. While that created a degree of awe about me in others, Suresh and Shakir, especially, loved to pull my leg as one of the nation’s “foolish” press wallahs who sought unreal, rather surreal things like “communal harmony,” and “honour” in cricket matches. Suresh was addressing that particular alter ego of me that they had created and shared and did not bother to review, with any opinion or reservation I might have had.

“What about the current riots. Will these killings stop? How long do you think it will take?” I ask.

“Why? Why do you want it to end? It’s the first time the Gujarati bhai has reacted. Let them do something. At least, this time they have felt something,” said Suresh.

Gujaratis have had a reputation for being a soft people. They are known to be India’s best entrepreneurial community. They are known as a sweet talking race. They are also known as a very flexible, very progressive people. Aggression is not associated with Gujaratis, especially physical.
Suresh, as a foreigner in Vapi used this stereotype of Gujaratis to tease his Gujarati friends. However, the phenomenal enterprise of the Gujarati community was beyond debate. The flip side of this individual enterprise and its concomitant rat race was the total neglect of anything that was for the common good of the state as a whole.

In the beginning the state embraced everything new. Gujarat opened its doors to industry much before any other. Today it is a raped state, with the chemical industry, which flourished on excise evasion and tax holidays, having polluted, with extremely harmful chemicals, most of the water resources of this prosperous state.

India’s most industrialized and progressive state, once in a while popped up its internal contradictions like suppurations of a ghastly tribal epidemic, suppressed beyond its deadline.

Like the plague that hit Surat, India’s biggest diamond trade centre. It only underlined the state’s paradox that it made great individual entrepreneurs but messed up the state as a whole. That the most modern state in India should have been visited by an ancient pestilence almost forgotten by the rest of the world would have been a deliciously diabolic scenario for a Hollywood scriptwriter, had it not been so rudely pre-empted by reality.

If that was not enough, when the state slipped into the hands of the Hindu nationalist party the BJP, a tenth standard dropout from Vapi who was related to the powers that be, had a mind boggling offer. He was asked to choose between the chairmanship of either the Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation or the Gujarat State Electricity Board! Even corruption in Gujarat is run on a rich vein of enterprise.

“It has been three days now, of the Hindus killing Muslims allegedly as a reaction to the Godhra train burning incident,” I said.

“That’s okay. When the mians react, they’ll even the score in two days,” Suresh said. Mian was the local dialect for anybody from the Muslim community.

We were settled at the seaside restaurant, out in the open. And Rohan had been quiet for too long. He was still getting to know the company, and waiting to make a mark. And the opportunity came head on.

“Will Bombay be affected?” asked Darshan. “I have a bloody flight to catch.”

“Arrey, sab taiyyari ho gayli hai!” piped Rohan, with his Bombay Hindi. Everything has been readied.

“Matlab?” asked Darshan. Most of my friends considered Rohan a child, which he was in some ways. His directness and a propensity for rhetoric only cemented their opinion.

“My uncle told me everything is ready. The swords and choppers are all ready throughout the chawl. They are just waiting for Saheb’s orders,” said Rohan.

Saheb is the Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray, as he is fondly called by his party functionaries and the cadre. Thackeray has often said that were anything to happen to him, he would set Bombay on fire. This is how fire was set.

Rohan waited for the gasp. Sushil, a Maharashtrian who was in Bombay with his parents for part of his childhood, smirked at Rohan’s dramatic narration. Darshan raised his eyebrows as if he was silently laughing at the comic aspect of a tragedy everybody was crying about. Both Sushil and Darshan had been in Bombay for their college degrees, and had spent three years in college hostels in the metropolis.

Atul looked wide-eyed. But he knew the truth in that statement. He had, in his intermittent visits to Bombay’s northern suburb of Bhandup, seen how the chawl residents operate. How they are allied to politicians and criminals. He had been part of their steaming, incestuous alliances and this gave him his idea of politics being dirty.

Suresh kept quiet. He had been there, seen it. He had, not many years back, started a branch of the Shiv Sena in Vapi. A couple of years later he was also part of the gang that tore it down. The earlier act was the direct fallout of his then mentor, a small time thug. The later, a manifestation of frustration at the claims of those who came to run it, long after he had stopped being part of it. Violence was very much part of his personality.

Through it all, one person was not there. Shakir. Would the tone and tenor of this discussion have changed were he there? I think not.
But as I knew and understood Shakir, he would have come. He must have stayed indoors merely to avoid an argument with his father. Am I right? What if Shakir did believe his father was indeed right. What if he actually felt his father’s fears were justified?

I suddenly felt an amazing alienation from a friend I had grown up with since I was six and seen everyday till I was 18. I felt unable to be sure about him. His responses. His situation. Had he changed? How had he changed? All those communal teasing from childhood, had they revealed new meanings to Shakir? Had he grown to realize vengeance hidden in innocence? To read the sub-text, as it were?

I remember that Shakir was in the tenth or eleventh standard when his mother had delivered his sixth sibling, another sister. Suresh, forever the prankster, started teasing Shakir.

“Allah miya deta hai, hum leta hai” Allah gives, and we accept, he said cupping his hands as Muslims do while offering namaaz.

Shakir laughed it away. And then, when Suresh had left, he had told me with wrenching honesty, but no shame.

“What can I do about it? Can I tell my father not to have kids?”
Shakir had since married. His wife was pregnant with their fourth kid. A lot of us I have seen growing up into our hated fathers. I have myself grown into several things I have hated in my father, in my teachers. Suresh will continue to tease. Shakir and he will share an intimacy that I am not privy to anymore.

But there were other intimacies being tested. When Shahnawaz, our Keralite Muslim neighbour’s youngest son, graduated as a software engineer, he was pleased. He soon found a job in Bombay.

He stayed close to me, because his father Shamsuddin was my father’s best friend, and as down and out bachelors, they had shared rooms, shirts, burnt food and memories of distant Kerala. They must have traded stories of their respective households. I had seen Shanawaz as a newborn. He was nearly ten years younger to me.

Years later, he had almost finalised a deal for a flat on rent with a real estate agent near my house in Bombay. But all of a sudden, the agent turned hostile and refused to ink the deal. He said he couldn’t get the house.

“But why? You had assured me the deal was to be inked today.

What changed things so drastically?” Shanawaz asked the agent.

“You did not tell me you were Muslim. And you don’t look Muslim also.
You are educated too,” was the answer from Shambu, the Bihari Hindu real estate agent.

The young tyro lost his temper. The matter was sorted out later. But when he told me the story I froze. I told him Shambu was an uneducated man and must have only repeated what the owner of the house told him. In as many words. Maybe the elderly Sardarji real estate broker would have said the same thing more subtly, saying something like “The owners do not want to let out their rooms to bachelors.”

Under the fearfully flitting shadows that Godhra’s flaming train bogies threw into my childhood landscape that night, once assured childhood friendships started to look menacingly vulnerable. I started to fear that I had missed Shahnawaz’s silent smirk at my explanation of the unthinking real estate agent. I felt, he would not have missed the only connection that I shared with Shambu; we both were Hindus. Under the searing of new experiences, the soothing worn out tissues of old ties must easily give way. And, the worst predicament for me was, I could not blame him if he did smirk silently at me.

That night in our hotel room Rohan got a call from his mother on his cellphone. He started to move away from me. But I knew what the conversation was about. Gujarat was not safe for her son to travel through, by road. Rohan, the young Turk, did not want to sound like he had chickened out of the trip because of his parents’ blackmail. That night I decided we would turn right into central India. No Hindu Muslim riots there. Besides, we just needed a road, not a roadmap. But that was as far as the road trip was concerned. The night’s conversation had set me thinking. There was a riot of emotions and half formed ideas all gasping for comprehension inside my head.

The confusion was not merely the sense of displacement that one confronts when one re-enters a familiar setting with familiar people, and find old relationships tested under the glare of new circumstances. There was another reason. In Hindu Muslim riots of 1992-93, I was a reporter covering the riots from the streets in Bombay. I had felt then too the opposing pulls of identification with either the majority Hindus, or the minority Muslims. I resolved the problem by merely identifying with the victims. I identified them as victims, and that was it. The pain of the victim was easy to ally with. But, my own role as a Hindu had not been subjected to any kind of serious, or sustained rational examination. I also had equal opportunities to hate both communities, but that sounded like a phony resolution then too. But a stressful job postponed it indefinitely.

In the new relatively benign atmosphere of a friends night out, the enclosing menace that gave eyes to the darkness, knotted me up slowly, very slowly. It made sure I had a night of fitful sleep, constantly made to turn over by hordes of feelings that refused to coalesce into either dreams or nightmares.

The glare of the morning sun brought as to more mundane and immediate problems. Our Enfield Bullet had been making some uncharacteristic noises. Rohan, almost an over sensitive mother to a new born, insisted he wanted to take the bike to a mechanic.

Sushil had told us the night before that there was only one mechanic who specialised in Bullets. Shambhu. Ironically, the same name of the Bihari real estate agent who annoyed Shahnawaz in Bombay. But he would have closed shop. We needed to leave town at the crack of dawn. Vapi was merely the first stop, and we had decided to move on to Nasik, in Northern Maharashtra, and later on to Dhule. On the way, we would pass another hot spot of communal tension, Malegaon.

“Wait. Give me your mobile phone,” Sushil had said. He called up somebody.

“I will have to go, I will go to Shambhu’s home, and call you late in the night,” he said. He’d bring the mechanic and pick us up from our hotel next morning, to take the bike to Shambu’s workshop. So the early morning departure from Vapi was delayed.

At the workshop the next day what struck me was that the name of the garage was also the name of the mechanic. Shambhu; the name of lord Shiva. Shambhu moved into the workshop, towing our motorbike with him. Rohan, forever clucking around his bike, immediately followed.
Outside Sushil had only me. He smiled wanly. I asked him what happened.

“This boy, he is not communal no?”

‘Why?’ I asked.

“No. Shambhu is a Muslim.”

I immediately moved towards where Rohan was next to the bike and Shambhu.

“Shameem mian, is the problem serious?” I said aloud.

Rohan stared at me. If he was surprised by my rather abrupt ejaculation, he did not say anything. But, I felt that was the best way to warn him, kind of reveal Shambhu’s Muslim identity. And that worked, Rohan immediately caught on. If he had some possible prejudices to air, assuming Shambhu to be of his faith, he did not. After the misgivings last nights talk had ignited in me, I did not want to risk even banter that might have a whiff of communal camaraderie.

Sushil later told me that Shambhu was the corruption of Shameem’s pet name, Shamu. Vapi had this habit of converting proper names into proper Vapi names. Shamu became a popular mechanic, and he was called Shambhu. So much so that when he could set up his
own garage, he named it Shambhu. Not out of any false security or real insecurity. Rather out of the simple thoughtlessness of living in a small town where nothing deserved too much thought. My own brother’s name Prasad was corrupted to a more pronounceable Prasand, by our neighbourhood children.