It was the middle of January; another year had just started. A westerly wind blew stirring dust in the urban air. The usually bustling streets wore a deserted look, except for a few stray dogs loitering, stupefied by the sudden absence of humans after the frenzy of violence the previous day. Some had curled up on the ashes left over from fires lit last night, seeking warmth. By the roadside, at the entrance of a narrow side street, a small group of policemen sat desultorily on plastic chairs around a fire made of burning wooden crates, their rifles leaning against the shutter of a small store.

The shop shutters, some painted blue and orange and some green, were all down and padlocked. Some carried advertisements for flour, rice, and cooking oil brands. A large store shutter carried the name of a multi-national brand seeking to make inroads in the Indian heartland. Most of the small stores were family-owned and their names gave away the identities of their owners. Not that the frenzied mobs yesterday would have needed to verify one way or the other. They had lived side-by-side in the same city for generations, walking the same streets and purchasing at the same shops.

As the car with a now worried family slowly moved ahead, it was stopped at a temporary barricade made up of empty bitumen drums. Next to the barricade, a sand-bagged position was manned by two policemen. Nearby, along the railing of an empty children’s park with its swings, slide and see-saw, a Provincial Armed Constabulary truck was parked. A greying constable peered inside resting his forearms on the edge of the front window and saw the anxious faces of a middle-aged man, a woman, two girls and a boy. The middle-aged man asked, “What was the matter,” trying not to sound too alarmed. “Why were the streets so quiet?” The policeman asked rhetorically, “You do not know? There was a riot yesterday between the Hindus and you know who? Some people were killed.” Then he asked for the man’s name. The middle-aged man said, “Govind; I am a local businessman traveling with my family. We are returning from another city after attending a function in the family. The car had broken down mid-way and we got delayed.” Gaining confidence, the man added flippantly, “In some stretches, the pot-holes are big enough to swallow a whole vehicle.” 

Paying no attention to the assessment of the road, the policeman informed, ‘the administration has imposed Curfew in the city after riots broke out yesterday. The situation seems under control today, though some men on both sides are still missing. It is expected to be relaxed for a couple of hours tomorrow morning. However, going inside the city at this time would require a Curfew Pass.’ There was an anxious silence in the car. He asked for their address, pointing the way forward. The man noted down his address on a piece of paper and slid a five-hundred rupee note in the policeman’s palm along with the slip. Expressionless, he pocketed the money unhurriedly and moving to the back called out the vehicle’s number. The policeman then waved them and advised them to take the outer roads to avoid barricades. A drum was shifted and the car moved ahead. The family heaved a sigh of relief. Looking out, the elder sister felt the quiet on the streets further deepen.

The previous day, it had been a usual winter afternoon in the city – hurried and chaotic; people trying to complete their tasks before dusk fell and the cold gathered on the streets. It had started with a minor accident between a young motorcyclist merrily weaving between cars and rickshaws and a cyclist in a busy area. No one was seriously injured, just a few scratches on the cyclist and a mangled bicycle. The ensuing argument between the two was over the amount the cyclist should get from the motorcyclist for repairs. The cyclist was asking for five hundred rupees in damages, with which the growing crowd that had gathered at the site seemed to concur. However, the motorcyclist was reluctant to pay the entire amount asserting that it was not wholly his fault.

Two youths from the crowd wearing skull caps stepped forward in support of the young motorcyclist. The harmless haggling between the cyclist, who appeared to be a gardener, and the motorcyclist over the amount to be paid suddenly acquired an edge and turned angry. Positions on both sides hardened and the exchanges rapidly degenerated to oblique and then more direct references to the behavior and history of the two communities. Then, someone at the back of the crowd shouted an abuse, adding, “These people need to be taught a lesson.” The everyday, familiar atmosphere of the market place turned menacing as festering biases and fears reared their cold, communal head.

A man shoved the motorcyclist and he stumbled, a growing fear replacing the initial bravado on his youthful face. Half-kneeling on the road, in a haze of terrified frigidity, he saw a closing ring of angry, excited faces even as the old cyclist tried to intervene to calm down tempers. Brushed aside, he quietly left the scene dragging the broken cycle in his wake. A few men in the crowd had hockey sticks and someone had got hold of an iron rod. The frenzy abated at the first sound of an approaching police vehicle its siren wailing and the attackers quickly melted into the milling crowd, leaving the victim bleeding on the dusty road. His supporters had escaped in the melee.

The motorcyclist died in the city hospital’s ICU that evening. As news of his death spread, a small crowd gathered in front of the hospital shouting “Allah-u-Akbar” and demanding action against the culprits. By the time the administration could respond, the crowd had swelled and broken the windshields of all the vehicles parked outside the hospital and set a police jeep on fire. A group broke away and attacked shops nearby; a couple of shops were set on fire. Police in riot gear used tear gas to disperse this more aggressive group of rioters and then baton-charged – chasing them down the main streets. For some time, it appeared that the situation had been regained and was under control.

But exaggerated versions of the incident and rioting had reached other localities and tension ratcheted rapidly across the city, especially in the few remaining pockets with mixed populations and the so-called ‘frontline zones’ that adjoined an area identified with the other community. Rumours spread like wildfire on both sides – stories of innocents trapped in ‘enemy areas’ with nowhere to escape and butchered in cold blood in narrow lanes with dead-ends. Of deep, secret underground mazes where those abducted were kept. The rumours revived and fed into the old communal memories of violence and hurt. And people started preparing for the worst.

Seth Ramdas was returning home, located in the relatively well-off Kutchcheri area, after closing his shop in the pucca mahaal (old city), when he first heard news of the riots. Sethji’s initial instinct was to return to check if everything was alright but his Munshiji advised against it. It would be difficult to get into that area and more difficult to get out from there alive. Just then Sethji’s wife called asking about his whereabouts as there was news of widespread violence in the city, especially in the main market place. Ramdas knew the Senior City SP and called him to check but his number was showing as busy, in a way confirming the news. By the time he reached home, the news was on all TV channels, strangely claiming to have first broken the story as if it was the result of a piece of investigative reporting. Strangely, the hackneyed footage being shown was from riots having occurred earlier in other towns and cities.

Another much larger crowd started forming in the Chowk area shouting ‘Har-har-Mahadev’ and ‘Jai Bajrang Bali.’ And then it poured down streets with a dull roar – a black amoeba-like mass slowly spreading into the nooks and corners. Clashes went on till late in the night between mobs and between the police and mobs on both sides. The army was called in and it held flag marches in the affected localities. By morning, the toll was six dead and scores injured many with knife wounds or injuries caused by blunt objects. The wounded included many policemen. The damage to property was enormous, estimated to be in hundreds of crores. Given the suddenness and the intensity of the conflagration, the administration heaved a sigh of silent relief at the casualty figures.

The young District Magistrate hurriedly formed a Harmony Committee comprising eminent members and religious leaders from both communities to maintain peace and help with the issue of persons missing from both sides. The age-old measure was effective. The volatile situation stabilized and the committee managed to find all the four missing persons. Curfew was lifted a day after the missing persons were found. Instead, as a precautionary measure, Section 144 was imposed for a couple of days. Shops slowly lifted their shutters and gradually over the next few days the familiar life of the city limped back towards normalcy.

Compensation was announced by the State government for the families of the dead and those injured. At a public function at the Town Hall, speeches underlining the need to maintain communal harmony were made and the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb of the region was recalled. Some lauded the prompt action taken by the administration that had saved many lives and the maturity and tolerance shown by the two sides. The marketplace returned to its familiar sights, sounds and smells. But underneath the veneer, the crippling reluctance to come to terms with the ‘other’ and empathize with them remained, and further condensed. 

In a school that reopened a week after, the elder sister asked her teacher, “If that day the cyclist and the motorcyclist were either both Hindus or both Muslims would the riots still have happened and so many people killed or maimed”? The teacher responded, “Most likely no, though fights between individuals within the same community over small issues did take lives sometimes. These communal riots were, however, different – a bane for the land.” Unsure he ventured, “These were born out of alienation, a lack of respect for human life, fears that enveloped entire communities and perceptions of historical injustices and humiliation. These remained like formless, dark creatures biding their time below the surface, waiting to come up at an opportune time and devour humanity.” Thinking hard, the teacher added, “Forgiveness was the only way to avoid such violence. To go ahead with life in the face of an irreversible past, as one could not change the past, but one could certainly try to change its tyranny over the present. It also meant keeping the hope in the possibility of being able to create a better world alive.” The girl said she was not in town when the riots took place. The day after when their car entered the city, it was late in the evening and the city looked as if covered in a death shroud.

The Pagalwa with his greying matted hair and beard sitting under the lamp-post in front of the railway station hummed an inchoate song. It was about a little girl Gudia Rani being lulled to sleep by her mother. No one knew his real name; the children sometimes teased him, threw stones at him and scampered in fright asking him to catch them. He vaguely remembered a similar madness from before, from many years back that had changed his life forever. Only a few old citizens knew that he once used to work with the Railways, as an Engine Driver for long-haul goods trains – sincere and God-fearing. He was returning to the city from another city far off when he had learned of the rioting and with each red signal, his heart sank.

He had returned a day after the riots to find that his young wife, son, and baby daughter had been charred to death in their ancestral home in the old quarters. Senseless with sorrow, he had put their ashes in a large urn and pushed it out into the holy river on a final journey. A pinch of their ashes he had kept tied in a small piece of cloth. He never went back to work after that and never ventured back to the street in which their home was.

Wide-eyed and alert, the Pagalwa looked around slyly before getting up and ambling off as if going nowhere drumming his stick on the electric poles along the way. At the corner of the railway yard where the crowds thinned, he stopped to check if anyone was following. Then he quickly disappeared behind the long-rusted tin shed. A small grove survived the ever-expanding city. He hurried straight to the large Neem tree with its dark, scabby bark riven with furrows standing in the middle. In a hollow, his wife, daughter and son rested safely expecting his return – three mud diamonds he had molded from the city’s dust and ashes.

♣♣♣END♣♣♣

First published in Muse India as a Short Story in Issue 119 (Jan-Feb 2025), ISSN: 0975-1815