So, it’s happened. No, that’s not quite right. It’s been happening. It’s been building up slowly and steadily. And now finally with a resounding force, the constructs of what I, as a privileged Indian, know to be safe, familiar and real have collapsed. Despite my education, access and partial NRI advantages, even my half-Hindu lineage, I have been reduced to what my last name denotes. I think of how having to build a life outside the country has robbed my father of a sense of rootedness, an inability to call one place his own. He’s postponed his retirement because he’s not sure how to return to today’s India. The colony he grew up in now has houses marked with saffron flags and routine morchas taken out by men, frothing at the mouth with chants of “Hindu khatray mein hai”, “Jai Shri Ram” and “Mandir yahin banaenge” – the war cries of a lost generation.
I sit on the floor in the middle of the new apartment I’ve recently leased at a highly subsidised rate from a friend’s family. Cardboard boxes pile up around me, taped and marked with labels – books, clothes, kitchen stuff, medical reports, electronics. The apartment’s situated in an old building with paint peeling from its walls and a smelly, narrow staircase, but it’s on the fourth floor and faces the east, allowing sunlight to filter through rows of buildings.
At night, a hush falls over the street, giving me space and time to reassemble my life after the spectacular failures of the last few years. I lie on the single mattress on one end of the room with a lone lamp by its head. A steady quiet permeates the house even though I can hear the footsteps of the neighbours upstairs. Next to it are some planks of plywood I plan to use to build a bookshelf, a two-burner stove not plugged in yet, some brightly coloured bedsheets Ma sent across with matching pillowcases, the expensive film textbooks from Prague that I haven’t opened in a few years and Polaroids neatly contained in ziplock bags. The only thing I’ve figured out in the last few weeks is the WiFi; the green buttons blinking in the night like fireflies.
I take a few books, create a makeshift desk and prop the laptop on it. I click on trending hashtags populated by the ruling party’s IT cell paid to troll on social media and scan doctored videos and smears of saffron across profile pictures – a digital collage of hatred. Social media channels like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram only echo my thoughts back to me, and yet I cannot look away.
I’ve always had a confusing history – an Arya Samaji Hindu mother and a Sunni Muslim father. They met at his older brother’s wedding in Lucknow, and my father immediately fell in love. They both stayed in Kanpur in the 1980s – Ma lived in Gulistan Colony, a predominantly upper-middle-class Hindu settlement. My father, the second of seven siblings, held a menial job as a warehouse manager– the only employment his bachelor’s degree from Kanpur University earned him. They both defied several societal norms to move to Delhi, where they got a home together in South Extension, an upcoming part of the city not yet hemmed in by jewellery stores and fancy clothing showrooms. A Muslim man and a Hindu woman living together before they got married – it was practically unheard of, but their reality nonetheless.
Rooting through my boxes, I find a wooden photo frame with my parents’ photo encased in it, and the words “love jihad” echo in my brain. Today, it might be impossible, even illegal what was once just difficult.
Nana-ji was a judge with the Lucknow High Court, and Dada-jaan worked in the railways. Ma and her younger sister, true to their Baniya roots, studied at AMU and IIMs, and were expected to hold down corporate jobs that would ensure a comfortable life. Nani was a Sanskrit PhD scholar, whereas Dadi was married at the age of fourteen. After her death, they found seventy thousand rupees hidden neatly in the folds of her crisp cotton saris – the only material remnants of her legacy.
Ma’s English was slick. They had a television at home, and she was taught how to play basketball even if she wasn’t allowed to wear jeans outside her home. My father started working at eighteen and did considerably well for himself – a mix of charm and street hustle that helped him rise through the ranks. At my parents’ wedding reception, nobody from my father’s side showed up except his parents, while my mother’s father offered him money to not marry her.
The grandmothers were the first to establish any real bond, extending what they knew best: empathy, perhaps because they’d had to exercise so much of it over the years.
On Twitter, amateur videos of manic mobs marching down barely lit back alleys surface, their chants of desh ke gaddaron ko, goli maron salon ko reverberating off bolted windows and padlocked doors. This country hates me. I see tweets about a spontaneous protest at Marine Drive, in response to what’s happening in Delhi. It’s almost midnight, but I decide to take a taxi there; part of me is relieved that I am in Bombay, and another part feels like I’ve betrayed the place where I should be, where the violence is happening.
Ever since the protests against the bills began, I’ve turned up at the Gateway of India and joined people in the chorus of “Bella Ciao” and “Hum Dekhenge” by Faiz, uncertain but spurred by the electricity of the moment. I’ve watched women in hijabs take the mic and policemen attempt to dismantle protest sites. I’ve craned my neck to catch a glimpse of student leaders and been taken with their poise and courage in the face of humiliation and distress. Students, activists, leaders from local Muslim parties and other community members pass biscuits and juice around. Some stand with a look of confusion, of disbelief that things have finally come to this, while others show the way, sing protest anthems and put their truth across with conviction and a lack of fear. But it disturbs me, this complete lack of fear, knowing that nobody sleeps in tents and braves police lathis and sanghi venom unless they’re determined and here to stay, and I know it disturbs “them” too.
The matter of “us versus them” is a convenient matter, a political tool strategically employed and intensified by the powers that be until it seeps into the subconscious of the country. That’s one argument. Another is that bigotry always existed and lurked in nooks and corners but is now emboldened and being worn as a badge of honour. There are clear camps and we must pick a side. I’m not a practising Muslim. I can’t be immediately identified as one on the street. I don’t wear the hijab, and have an ambiguous first name. But I’m immediately consigned to a community, handed the generational trauma I may have had some luck escaping.
Excerpted with permission from No Place to Call My Own, Alina Gufran, Westland.
