Chapter Two

“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”

- Søren Kierkegaard

I can only begin from the end. Not the end of my story, but the end of our lives as we knew it. Anna’s family, the Fernandeses, and mine were neighbours in Billimoria Building. Though we were neighbours, we grew up as one family. But all that changed the day we saw the Muslim bakery on fire, that December of 1992. Dad, who worked as a Police Inspector in the Nagpada Police Station, had warned us that there was some kind of trouble fomenting, but its magnitude took us all by surprise.

The previous evening, on the 8th of December, Mohamed Farooqui, who lived in room no. 26, several rooms away from us, got stabbed. When I call them rooms, you will have guessed that these apartments were small, with no separate bedrooms as in the flats inhabited by more prosperous families. Two strangers, not from our neighbourhood (where we knew every resident either by name or face), followed Mohamed as he returned from the small but flourishing hardware shop he ran. Sometimes his son, Ali, would sit in for him, but I don’t think Ali made such a good fill in, being only sixteen and more interested in anything other than hardware. Fortunately, this was one of those days when Ali stayed home, and so he escaped his father’s fate.

Waylaying Mohamed as he reached the junction of Nesbit Road and St. Mary’s, nearly home, the two strangers asked him whether he was Mehmood. “No,” he said, unsuspecting, volunteering more information than asked for; he pointed to his room on the second floor. “I am Mohamed. I live in Billimoria Building, there, the window with the sheets hanging out to dry.” At which they stabbed him, screaming, “Mussalman, suvar—Muslim pig.”

Anna, who spent much of her time at the window, for she suffered from asthma and felt claustrophobic within the small confines of their apartment, witnessed the stabbing. Shaking till her teeth chattered and gasping asthmatically she pointed and gestured as she told her father, “They k-killed him, they killed h-him.”

Mr. Fernandes, peering past Anna out the window, caught sight of the backs of the two men running away from the bleeding Mohamed down the silent, deserted street. He rushed over to us in room no. 18, two doors down the verandah of the second floor, and both Dad and he raced down the stairs. In a normally crowded street, under normal circumstances, crowds would by now have surrounded Mohamed, cogitating on what best to do, talking to each other, sharing notes on the happening. But this, we realised, not being normal times, Mohamed lay there alone, huddled and bleeding on the desolate street. Dad and Mr. Fernandes hailed a passing taxi and lifted Mohamed between them, hauling him into the back seat. Both of them sat in front with the driver. They took him to the J.J. Hospital, very close to where Mohamed ran his business.

Later that night Mohamed died. Just moments before, he opened his eyes and called for Mr. Fernandes, who stood at the foot of his bed. Mr. Fernandes mistook this sudden spurt of life as a sure movement to recovery. Mohamed then enunciated clearly, though weakly, “Mehroonisa aurAli ka khayal rakhna—watch after Mehroonisa and Ali,” and then, as we Catholics say, gave up his spirit.

We did not connect that event to the larger situation until the next morning, when someone torched the Muslim Bakery.

It had been almost fifteen years since I picked up the book that’s sat in my drawer looking forsaken but as fresh as when she gave it to me. Anna’s neat notebook lay under my socks and undergarments in the top drawer, covered in brown paper with a white label, much like those we stuck on all our notebooks in school. She had tied it with red string, securing it with a neat bow on the top of it. Every time I glanced at the book I felt anger tic under my eyes. An anger that never went deeper because I allowed barely a moment to pick out what I wanted from that drawer, pushing it shut before succumbing to any unwelcome desire to read it. But with Anna’s imminent arrival announced by Mother, I looked at the diary once more, for a very long moment…Anna had always wanted to be a writer.

With trembling hands I untied the thread that bound the book and opened it randomly. Clutching at my chair, I lowered myself mechanically, words flying at me as if I’d opened Pandora’s box; the evil in our lives bursting out from my repressed memory. It was as though it were just yesterday that our lives had been turned upside down. Anna’s words brought it all back—the year that I turned 21, an adult and yet so much a child.

On that fateful day in December of 1992, as we rushed to the window and watched the fire brigade noisily hurry down our street to rescue a burning bakery, I first learned that Ali was Muslim.

For all the sixteen years of my life, there were only two kinds of people in our world—the Catholics and the non-Catholics. In the Catholic school that I attended, there were the Catholics who sat together for the Religion period, and while we discussed the gospel or other issues that kept us being ‘good Catholics,’ the non-Catholics moved over to another classroom for a separate lesson in Moral Science. I never was inquisitive enough to ask what they actually taught there, but really, that was the only time we knew anyone was different from us.

A burning bakery can wipe innocence. It is no accident that they stabbed Ali’s father the night before, we were soon to realise. That bubble of innocence that was once opaque now became transparent, giving us a glimpse into a world that soon would be ours; like drawing heavy curtains open and looking out with surprise and a bit of difficulty at the world out there in bright sunshine. That day, we looked at our neighbours differently. Who were they? Ali was Muslim. The Surves on the first floor in room no. 16 were Hindus. Ms. Ezekiel, a Jew, a very mysterious Jew. Mimosa? We knew nothing about her except what she told us. She’d escaped from Burma and lived here as a refugee, till she met Paddy and married him. Paddy, Irish, tall, red-faced, and most of the time drunk, had stayed here even after the British left, making him incongruous in the neighbourhood. He’d later gone the way of most drunks—cirrhosis of the liver, leaving his widow with no means whatsoever. Mimosa did some odd jobs, baby-sat, and often went scavenging from neighbour to neighbour enquiring what they had cooked for the day, mostly in a very refined tone. But more than these personal details, our neighbours were Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Anglo-Indian, Indo-Burmese, and we were Catholics. In a sense, I understood how Adam felt after he ate the apple. Suddenly Eve was a woman and they were naked.

Daddy said we were all the same and Mummy, silent and thoughtful, looked infinitely sad. Mummy generally never looked sad. She says she did feel this way once before: She had a pet pig, or so she thought. She bathed her pig, talked to him and she sat on his back as a child playing pretend Cowboys and Indians. Oh my God! Is that how the word piggyback came to be used? Anyway, she even gave him a name—Balthazar, after one of the Magi. Lots of bonding with the pig later, she realized that Balthazar was no pet but bought as a piglet to be fattened in time for her First Holy Communion party. That was the only other time Mummy was really sad, or so she says. Seeing her shake her head from side to side made us all sad. We always reflected Mummy’s feelings on most things.

That day we became more Catholic than we had ever been in our life. Mummy took out a box of religious treasures—little crucifixes, miraculous medals, rosaries that sparkled, scapulars and such-like, which we had received over the years from Don Bosco’s church in gratitude for the charitable donations Daddy made regularly. They were kept away, almost like reserves for a rainy day. Our rain had arrived in torrents.

Mum opened the box silently and first took out the ‘miraculous’ medals and laid them aside. She then reached for the crucifixes, strung them on black cords and passed them around the circle we had made around her, instructing us to wear them prominently outside our clothes. Even Daddy, used to meting out the orders, silently put the cord over his head and adjusted the cross outside his shirt.

The Marchon family from room no. 19 never went to church. They said they were Catholics, and I suppose they were. What with names like Joe, Mili, Miriam, etc. But they did not go to church. Mummy strung all the crosses she had in her box and sent Daddy with them to the Marchons, who lived in what we considered a House of Sin for more reasons than their lack of church attendance. Mummy knew they would not have crucifixes to hang around their necks.

WE ARE CATHOLICS, our crucifixes announced.