उन्होंने मस्जिद गिरा दी, ना

[
Much as I wanted this account to be as honest as possible, it didn't seem right to extend that transparency to the lives of those about whom I was writing. The details about my family are all true, anything marked with an asterisk (*) has been changed to protect the identities of those mentioned.
The issue of why I felt the need to make this change can fill many more posts!
]

Seher Khan* is a remarkable woman. I don't know her maiden name, in fact I don't know much about her at all; you wouldn't think she was anything special if you went to her house, because it just isn't done, talking about oneself, and one's experience(s) to strangers, especially if you are the lady of the house.
But even then, I know aunty is remarkable, because I know her daughter. To call Sabah* my best friend would be understating our relationship greatly. Sabah and I grew up together, both feeling slightly out of place in Lucknow; I had come from Lagos and she from Bombay. Our baby pictures look exactly the same, uncannily so; we were both born of displaced urban confusion, unlike most of our classmates here.
I knew some things: aunty knew how to make hummus, she used to watch Happy Days and The Bold and the Beautiful on TV, read novels before bed. When I went to their house for the first time I discovered a Turkish cook-book. She and her siblings had grown up in Saudi Arabia*, where her father was working then. As kids, things tend to become exaggerated in our heads, I always thought (until recently) that she was Arab*.
She was different, but not evidently so, she might have just been a cool mom. Meanwhile Sabah, her sister Sameera* (whom I have never managed to call baaji or aapa, she's just a year older than us), her younger sister Shazia* (who has played, literally, in my lap, when she was little) and I got to know each other.
I don't know how prudent it is to put up such an account on the internet, or whether I have any right to give details, but I cannot tell her story without her name, her identity.

[This post has subsequently been edited]

So let me put it this way; I know from Sabah's accounts (from the spoken or the unspoken?) that her mother has been a tower of strength and support for her daughters through some trying times as far as their education is concerned, and had managed to yet create and re-create herself: she recently finished her BA in Sociology by correspondence, she is more in touch with current affairs than most people from my generation or hers, she keeps herself on her toes, notwithstanding the trouble her back gives her.
Sabah is not home these days, she is in the second year of her BA at a reputed college* in Mumbai; we will not graduate in the same year, since she, like so many others, dropped a year to prepare for Medical. Needless to say, she is not in that line of work now.
Amma and I went to her house the day after Id, we didn't get a chance to go on the day of the festival. Aunty and Amma, we've always felt, (Sabah and I), have some connection - they seem to understand each other. Perhaps simply because two things not equal to anything else may be equal to each other...
On Id, your identity is so much more pronounced. It is not a simple matter of going to someone's house, Id milna for me (and I think Amma also feels this way) is a powerful statement, one that we will have failed in making if we do not manage to do. It was after the Delhi blasts too. I don't remember how the conversation started, or where it was heading, but she began to tell us of her days in Delhi right after she got married: she was talking about 1984, the riots. How it was unbearable, the stifling atmosphere, shops shutting at 7 pm, not a soul on the streets. How it could be me next.
We were in Nigeria when Babri Masjid happened, Appa had just been posted to Lagos, we had moved there in September, 1992. It didn't mean much to us, I think. I wouldn't know, I suppose, I was very young, but I think it's pretty telling that I hadn't so much as heard of the riots till I was maybe 14 or so, an certainly not of the demolition till a little later still. I saw Mani Ratnam's film Bombay I think in 2005, and couldn't believe my eyes. And Bombay is not, mind you, a very scary film, in that its ending is so very idealistic. Even Amma mentioned once that till they saw the movie, the magnitude of the massacre had not registered..

For the Khans, I cannot even begin to imagine what it was like.

I just phoned Sabah to ask her where they were in December '92, January '93, she remembers being in Bombay on vacation, they were living in Lucknow by then. They were at her naani's place, in Andheri. Sabah would have been about to turn 5 in a few months. She remembers talk of somebody's house getting burned down. She knows the stories of Hindus, the neighbours, going to camps at night, camps run by the Shiv Sena.
I don't know if I remember right, but I think Seher aunty was in Lucknow when she heard the news that the masjid had been broken; she and other women were supposed to stay indoors, at some safe place, in case things got out of hand.

In Saudia, she said, everybody was Muslim...your identity became "Indian". She never thought then that the kind of horrors that have been perpetrated in India now, were possible in India. It can't happen in my country.

When she heard what was happening, she thought, it can't happen in India, no, not if it's illegal, the law's in place, it can't happen.

उन्होंने मस्जिद गिरा दी, ना

It was a drastic loss of faith for me.

Later, she was talking about the visitors on Id, how they display their austerity, the stricter you are keeping every roza and praying religiously, the more your brownie points. You are looked down upon if the display in your house is less then that in your neighbours'. Tiny children are shown off if they keep fast.

I think my mother was a genius!
She says this laughingly, but the irony is not that her mother, Sabah's naani was a genius, but that she would never be ackowledged as one, not for her views. Her children were brought up learning the principles of Islam, they grew up following the tenets of Islam without knowing it. Then whatever rituals they choose to follow are that: chosen.
This does not mean Seher Khan is an iconoclast. I don't think she is. The customs in their house are not broken. But where is the scope for free thought within religion?

She fears she'll be next. My mother does too. They feel like targets, sitting ducks. Why? Because they are the liberals. They enemy within the home, the traitors. How does one have a balanced opinion without feeling threatened?

The Shiv Sena can catch me and put me in jail if I meet my boyfriend on Valentine's Day.

It seems to be hep to be an atheist. Or agnostic. Or one of those categories of unbelievers. What if I want to believe in GOD, and in a HINDU GOD, but still retain my relationship with my friends, people I love?

There are comments you hear, in your own house. There are BJP supporters in your workplace. There are Hindu children who know no better than to ape what they hear, and these children hate Muslims.
I remember a particularly self-righteous child, one year my junior, in school. I was in class 5, I think, so he would have been in class 4. We were in the choir group and the swimming team together. I was once (between song practices), describing दही चावल (dahi-chaaval, curd-rice, a quintessentially Tamil meal-ender) to somebody. Then for some reason I started saying that the South Indian Diwali is not on the same day as it is in Lucknow, because the culture is different there. In a way that only children can pronounce judgement, he said, snootily, "इनके तो cultures ही अलग होते हैं!"
Why have I never forgotten this? I know it is the nonsense of a ten-year old, but then I wonder. This is too silly to even be quoted, really. But I still wonder.
You are still a child at 14-15. There were children in the Bombay riots. Rioting. I'm not talking of the victims, although they are victims in a rather peculiar sense...it wasn't like only 50 year old पुजारीs (pujaaris, Hindu priests) were in the riot. It wasn't Hindu fundamentalists. They might have started it, but they didn't do it all. It was people like you and me.
Listen to your children. Watch out for what they say, because we often don't check ourselves before we make a prejudiced remark; we don't know we made it. Watch out for what they say, they say what we say. Catch yourself. Don't do it, don't look at the dashboard or the windscreen, from the inside of the auto-rickshaw, to see whether there is a 786 anywhere, or a Hanuman, a Jai Mata Di, or a Guru Nanak.

I don't know what my point is; or whether this was supposed to have a point.

The liberals, the fundamentalists, they're all the same. Bottomline, peer pressure doesn't happen only to teenagers. How far are we from being fundamentalists? How close to it?

I added this article [written by Samina Mishra] to my blog as an act of...solidarity? I don't know exactly how to say it. I didn't think the article was making any point. I told Sabah as much. But now I realise that it is incredibly difficult to make a point. To take a stand.

It has taken me years to write this; I have been wanting to write about my relationship with Sabah for so long. Why has is taken so long for me to write it? I'm a writer, after all!

When we were about 10-12, our group in school (it was a co-ed, but groups are one sex only!) had me (Tamil), Sabah (Muslim), Mouli* (Bengali) and Chanchal* (Punjabi). We were really proud of this. We knew we were different. We are, naturally. But we were happy about it. How strange it sounds now.

Why is Seher Khan a remarkable woman? I don't know exactly, but she certainly inspired me to write this.