It took me seven years to gather up the courage to enter Ahmedabad again. I was there last in 2002, some time after the carnage, when I went to join a group of volunteers who were documenting a few survivors' stories on video. The worst of the violence was over by then, and the national media, bored of hearing the same tales of violence of destruction again and again from Gujarat, had moved on to more juicy gossip. But in those months, I had the opportunity to talk to people in front of their destroyed homes, near desecrated mosques, in over-burdened camps, and to see and listen to their suffering from close quarters.
Getting off the train at Ahmedabad now, meeting the friend who had been inviting me to visit her for almost two years, the only thing I noticed was that the station seemed cleaner, more spruced up than it was years ago. The auto drivers at the station still haggled, wanting more than the actual fare, but the auto ride was not as 'breathtaking'—the switch to CNG meant the noxious cloud of diesel and kerosene fumes was nowhere in sight (or smell).
What I saw of the city over the next few days looked different too. My friend took me to dinner a couple of times, and we went and bought some stuff for her kitchen. We went with some family friends of hers to look at the flat she had just bought (nicely built, with a bit of greenery), some way from the heart of town. There was better signage on the roads, and bigger commercial buildings had come up. We went for a late night film, and when it finished at 1 AM, some burqa-clad ladies were also waiting with their families to get an auto home. The two of us didn't feel vulnerable, as we would have in Delhi, about being out late, at the mercy of autos to get us home.
And yet, I didn't feel comfortable going out alone into the city—too much baggage from my past experience? I wanted to visit the area where I had stayed in 2002, but each day passed without my actually doing it.
I did walk to the nearest cybercafé to check my email. I hadn't been to one in ages—blessed as I am with a 24x7 connection at home and work. The cybercafé in-charge wanted to see photo-id, then calmly proceeded to fingerprint me. I was so taken aback that I didn't ask any questions when he asked me to press my right thumb on the fingerprint scanner. However, some of my anger pushed me to press the contraption with such violence that the man quickly got up and snatched the device away before I could do serious damage to it.
Eventually, with only one day left before my return to Delhi, I could no longer put off my visit to the area I used to know, and I set off in the afternoon in an auto. I was startled to catch myself checking to see if I could tell whether the auto belonged to a hindu or a muslim. A habit from 2002, when hindu auto drivers generally didn't want to go to some of the areas we needed to visit—the muslim ghettos. I got off the auto and walked around for an hour near all three different flats that we had stayed in.
The first thing I noticed was the bakery. It was once quite big—three or four times bigger than the adjacent shops—and the most successful shop in the area, catering to students of a nearby institute. It had been burnt and severely damaged in 2002, but somehow managed to start functioning again from a small portion that they cleaned up after the carnage. Now the rest of the premises was a restaurant, obviously under non-muslim proprietors; but the bakery was still there, still limited to that small portion, though done up better. I didn't have the heart to go up and eat anything there—I walked on.
One of the people we interviewed in 2002 was a rather successful and prosperous dentist, who had a clinic in that part of town and lived there too. He was attacked by a mob in his house, and the story of how he managed to escape was interesting. Now, his clinic was gone—instead, some non-muslim doctors had their board up there. I remember how shocked he was that someone like him—well off, respectable—should have been targeted by the mobs. An expensive lesson that money and prestige, and a house on the 'better' side of the river did not make you any less vulnerable.
When I had first come to Ahmedabad in 2002, looking for the flat where I was supposed to meet the rest of the group, I remember being nervous about travelling alone in a city which seemed to have a certain sense of defeat in the air. The auto turned a corner, and I was struck by the sight—a two-storeyed house, sooty black, obviously torched in the carnage. It was deserted, and I never saw anyone there in all the months that I stayed in Ahmedabad then, not even anyone coming to look at the place. This time when I went, that house and a couple of neighbouring houses had vanished. Instead, what I saw looming in front of me was an ugly glass-steel multi-storeyed non-residential structure, jarring yellow and blue and grey. Looking very shiny, very antiseptic. I guess this is one way of 'cleaning' up the effects of the riots.
One of the local people who had helped us while we were in Ahmedabad was the caretaker-watchman of one of the apartment buildings which had been torched. None of the residents had wanted to come back, but he had stayed on, though there wasn't much to watch over. He felt he had to do his job, and that people would come back slowly. We had known him as Sheikh bhai—the man who continued to stay there while everyone had left in fear. I went back to those flats, and saw a man sitting on a chair at the gate. He asked me who I wanted to meet, and I told him Sheikh bhai, who used to be the watchman there. He grinned and told me he was the watchman now. I asked him for how long, and he said for about three years. I automatically noted that he seemed to be a non-muslim. He didn't know the Sheikh bhai I was looking for, but he said there was another Sheikh bhai watchman in one of the apartments in the next 'society' (enclave), who would know about the previous watchman. I walked to the other apartments and found the watchman's quarters—a small room with a corner done up as a kitchen. A lady was frying some kukris there, and an elderly man was lying down on the single cot. He got up when I came to the door, and I explained that I was looking for the Sheikh bhai who had been the watchman of the other apartments some distance away. They warmly invited me in and it took some ten minutes of clarification before we realised that we had been talking about two different people, both called Sheikh, both of whom had been watchmen at the very apartments I had just come from. The one they were speaking about was the brother of the gentleman I was speaking to. Finally, I discovered that my Sheikh bhai had lost his job soon after we had left, and had been doing odd jobs to support himself in that area. And when he couldn't, he had eventually retreated to live in the ghetto of Juhapura. There was no news, no address, no phone number for him. The Sheikh couple I was talking to also had moved from a hindu majority 'society' to this muslim majority one after the 'hullad'—the word many Gujaratis use to describe the 2002 carnage. They started to speak about the cataclysmic effect the carnage had had on their immediate family. The wounds of the carnage have not healed.
My friend, who works in the area of community video training, mentioned that in any serious conversation with underprivileged people in Gujarat, the carnage always comes up in some form, a hurdle to be negotiated before the conversation can proceed any further. On the surface, people are likely to refuse to talk about the 'riots'. Until they trust you and then their stories come pouring forth. “And then it seems like the riots happened last year and not 7 years ago!”, she says.
“Other than the threat of communal riots, do you think Ahmedabad is one of the safest cities in the country?”
That was an opinion poll in the Ahmedabad edition of a leading national newspaper during my visit. I think that question shows how the carnage still lingers in memories... and how blatantly you can exclude a certain section of the population. If you feel threatened by the communalism in the city, if you have nightmarish memories of riots, or fear that your home or job or business will be destroyed by another one—well, then, this poll is not for you! It is for those who are proud of Ahmedabad, who can afford to conveniently forget that 2002 happened. And the fact that there is not much outrage at such a blatantly communal poll shows that Ahmedabad has moved on, for the worse.
— Hassath
14 December 2009