little seeds of anger in her ravaged face. Quickly rinsing out my mouth I stumbled from the room.
After the fiasco at the brothel Deepak kept his distance from me, and my craving for company vanished for the moment. I was still at an age where I believed every setback should only be seen as a spur to advancement, so I attacked my work with a new ferocity. In time I might have tried to do something about my situation, but that was not to be. I and all the other inhabitants of the city were about to see our world rearranged in a way that would drive everything but fear from our minds.
4
City of Fear
In Mr Sorabjee’s cluttered and utilitarian office there was a single decorative object. The room faced east and on the wall opposite the window was an antique mercury wheel barometer. When the morning sun slanted in, it would kindle a deep caramel glow within the instrument’s satinwood finish. Catching me staring at it one day, Mr Sorabjee told me that he had bought it cheaply almost thirty years ago in Chor Bazaar. He had been advised to get it valued because it was a fine example of the work of Francis Pastorelli, a renowned maker of scientific instruments in the mid-nineteenth century, but as he had no intention of selling he had done nothing about it. When I remarked on the fact that the pointer seemed to indicate that it was stormy when it was in fact a fine day he said that a barometer told you what the weather was going to be, not what it was like at the present moment; then he smiled and said the needle had been stuck in that position for as long as he could remember.
A week after we’d had our conversation I would have occasion to think ruefully that my employer’s barometer may not have been very good at predicting the weather but that it was prescient when it came to the political situation in the country. The Hindu right-wing organizations bidding for political power had embarked on the final phase of their campaign and the stage was set for what Mr Sorabjee’s editorial later described as the fourth greatest tragedy to befall independent India since the partition riots, the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and the 1984 massacre of Sikhs in Delhi.
On 6 December 1992, as a supine government watched, hundreds of rioters demolished the mosque in Ayodhya that had been the object of their venom. Immediately, a long comet’s tail of violence swung across the country and tens of thousands of lives were affected.
In the past Bombay had always taken a sensible view of riots elsewhere in India. It believed that it was its own country, and if it was going to have riots and other disturbances it would manufacture them itself—it had its own crooked politicians and gangsters, it had no need to follow the lead of some politician from the Hindi heartland. Also, as the city’s riots were usually restricted to the poorer sections of town, nobody you knew, except perhaps the office peon or the dabbawallah who brought you lunch, was affected. Work went on as usual in the great steel and concrete canyons of Nariman Point and Dalal Street, the parties continued in Malabar Hill and Cuffe Parade, and the great ship of the city would rock briefly on the swells caused by the commotion and then continue to sail serenely on.
This time, the riots were different. Immediately after the mosque was demolished, there were reports of scattered cases of stabbing or assault by Muslims outraged by this insult to their faith. The reaction from Hindu mobs, egged on by fundamentalist political parties, was unimaginably savage. Muslims were sought out and killed wherever they could be found—in crowded tenement buildings, slums, mosques where they had sought shelter, trains and buses. They were burnt alive in their shops and places of work. If the victims were young and pretty and female they were raped before they were killed. Older women were merely beaten up before they were murdered. Milkmen and bakers, neighbours and people who
After the fiasco at the brothel Deepak kept his distance from me, and my craving for company vanished for the moment. I was still at an age where I believed every setback should only be seen as a spur to advancement, so I attacked my work with a new ferocity. In time I might have tried to do something about my situation, but that was not to be. I and all the other inhabitants of the city were about to see our world rearranged in a way that would drive everything but fear from our minds.
4
City of Fear
In Mr Sorabjee’s cluttered and utilitarian office there was a single decorative object. The room faced east and on the wall opposite the window was an antique mercury wheel barometer. When the morning sun slanted in, it would kindle a deep caramel glow within the instrument’s satinwood finish. Catching me staring at it one day, Mr Sorabjee told me that he had bought it cheaply almost thirty years ago in Chor Bazaar. He had been advised to get it valued because it was a fine example of the work of Francis Pastorelli, a renowned maker of scientific instruments in the mid-nineteenth century, but as he had no intention of selling he had done nothing about it. When I remarked on the fact that the pointer seemed to indicate that it was stormy when it was in fact a fine day he said that a barometer told you what the weather was going to be, not what it was like at the present moment; then he smiled and said the needle had been stuck in that position for as long as he could remember.
A week after we’d had our conversation I would have occasion to think ruefully that my employer’s barometer may not have been very good at predicting the weather but that it was prescient when it came to the political situation in the country. The Hindu right-wing organizations bidding for political power had embarked on the final phase of their campaign and the stage was set for what Mr Sorabjee’s editorial later described as the fourth greatest tragedy to befall independent India since the partition riots, the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and the 1984 massacre of Sikhs in Delhi.
On 6 December 1992, as a supine government watched, hundreds of rioters demolished the mosque in Ayodhya that had been the object of their venom. Immediately, a long comet’s tail of violence swung across the country and tens of thousands of lives were affected.
In the past Bombay had always taken a sensible view of riots elsewhere in India. It believed that it was its own country, and if it was going to have riots and other disturbances it would manufacture them itself—it had its own crooked politicians and gangsters, it had no need to follow the lead of some politician from the Hindi heartland. Also, as the city’s riots were usually restricted to the poorer sections of town, nobody you knew, except perhaps the office peon or the dabbawallah who brought you lunch, was affected. Work went on as usual in the great steel and concrete canyons of Nariman Point and Dalal Street, the parties continued in Malabar Hill and Cuffe Parade, and the great ship of the city would rock briefly on the swells caused by the commotion and then continue to sail serenely on.
This time, the riots were different. Immediately after the mosque was demolished, there were reports of scattered cases of stabbing or assault by Muslims outraged by this insult to their faith. The reaction from Hindu mobs, egged on by fundamentalist political parties, was unimaginably savage. Muslims were sought out and killed wherever they could be found—in crowded tenement buildings, slums, mosques where they had sought shelter, trains and buses. They were burnt alive in their shops and places of work. If the victims were young and pretty and female they were raped before they were killed. Older women were merely beaten up before they were murdered. Milkmen and bakers, neighbours and people who
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