(I was aware of my
family's pain but had never fully realized that our loss in Gujarat’s communal
riots was only a minor footnote in a vast library of rewritten lives.)
Revisiting Ahmadabad,
almost 10 years after my grandfather Ahsan Jafri's death during Gujarat riots
of 2002, I went with a somewhat undeveloped awareness of the loss. I was aware
of my family's pain but had never fully realised that our loss in Gujarat’s
communal riots was only a minor footnote in a vast library of rewritten lives.
Being so removed,
living in the USA, it had been difficult to truly comprehend the breadth of the
emotional ravages of severe injustice. For so long, I was unable to commiserate
with those who felt unheard, because I was in the enviable position of having
the ear of many, with nothing much to say.
It is mighty humbling
to learn lessons one didn’t think one needed.
I took a walk through
the now mostly deserted Gulberg society-- past the same bike shop and
corner-store my grandmother would send me off to. The houses and courtyards,
where we spent so much time as children, were all painfully stark.
Inside the abandoned
house, as I stood silent with shut eyes, for a moment I felt I was sweating
another hot summer in my grandfather’s beloved library. I could hear the same
chirping of the sparrows. Despite the heat, his ceiling fans would remain
always off; switches taped over, to make sure those birds could safely weave
through our house carefree.
Opening the eyes
returned me to reality. The gardens he tended so carefully now lay wild and
overgrown, only hiding the charred ruins of a once beautiful and bustling life.
As I spoke with my
grandmother, I realized time had treated her as harshly as it did the home she
lost. Beneath every deliberately hopeful conversation, the ravaged foundation
shone through the cracks.
Standing on our
terrace, looking out over the neighborhood we used to call home, I wondered how
people who shared so many common bonds could have let those threads so quickly
unravel to a breaking point. She did not want to speak of what we lost as a
family, only of those who had so little in this world to begin with, now the
ones rendered truly destitute.
Looking out from that
terrace which once served merely as a platform for my kite-flying, I suddenly
had a panoramic view of a community still feeling the aftershocks of too many
decade-old tensions.
With acquired
maturity, I could now comprehend the distinct word -- be-ghar. It conveys the meaning which eludes perfect
definition in English language, despite my better grasp of it. Literally, it
means to be without home, but such simplistic terms seem vapid when
articulating the sentiment behind a word of such potential depth. Beghar encapsulates the chill of loss and emotional
vacuum, pairing homelessness with hopelessness. Though a home can be built, or
rebuilt, to become beghar is to have a loss of
identity and crisis of belonging which compromises the very basis of one’s
being.
To fully understand the
importance of any of life’s necessary gifts, one needs to try and appreciate
the substantial void which would manifest in their absence. Even one decade
after destructive injustice, after rebuilt homes, after rebalanced families,
after repressed nightmares, so many families still learn daily what it is to be
beghar. This is a city which has seen riots in decades
past but risen back, resurrected—always rebuilt, always repopulated, even if
always marred by its own acquiescence.
Once again we find
ourselves at a crucial juncture, seemingly prepared to claim closure without
actually answering the difficult questions such tragedies always leave in their
wake. This is not the first time. It was the same after the Sikh Massacres of
1984, the Bombay Riots of 1992, and countless other instances of communal
carnage.
Honest introspection
is always discouraged on the specious grounds that a transparent analysis would
only reopen old wounds that have healed, releasing, as if, unsavoury demons
that we won't be able to deal with. Let's think of the future, we are told
repeatedly. Why rake up the past? Move on, think of the future, it is
constantly chanted. The dead will not come back, we are told. Why seek
retribution? we are counseled. Rebuild your lives. Participate in vikaas, in development.
The dead can indeed
not be brought back, but is it possible for those who survived to move on,
debilitated by lasting and festering wounds of injustice? Can these wounds even
begin to heal in the absence of justice? When some of those talking of development
now are the very ones who perpetrated ghastly murders and rapes, and continue
to strut around with impunity.
Cicero preached that
the foundation of justice is good faith, and when we pursue justice in good
faith, we should be brave enough to face the answers we seek, no matter if it
involves a troubling look in the mirror. Allowing such injustice to linger on
is antithetical to what it means to be an Indian, and indeed human.
I hope with sincere
reflection we will realize we all deserve better, from our India, and from
ourselves.
Tauseef Hussain is a recent
college graduate and lives in the US. He was 13 years old when his grandfather,
the former M.P. Ahsan Jafri was killed in the Gujarat riots of 2002.
