http://cafedissensus.com/2013/02/15/zahir-janmohamed/
We are more than our name: A Gujarati Muslim ponders life under Narendra Modi/Zahir Janmohamed
By Zahir Janmohamed
we dissent
By Zahir Janmohamed
I kept waiting for the phone to ring
during the Gujarat riots in 2002.
The week before I left for India, my
father invited his Gujarati Hindu colleague Rupa Aunty for dinner at our
house in California. When I was a kid, I tied the rakhi
brotherhood bracelet on her son. When my mom was diagnosed with cancer,
Rupa Aunty was the first to spend the night with us at the hospital.
“If you need anything at all,” she told
me just before I left for India, “my family is from Ahmedabad and we
will be there for you.”
I grew up in California mispronouncing names of Gujarati dishes like thepla
and my trip to Ahmedabad in 2002 was the first time anyone in my family
had returned since my grandparents left Gujarat for Tanzania in the
1920s. This – my father kept reminding me – was my trip “home.”
Twelve days after I arrived as a service
corps fellow with the America India Foundation, a train carrying Hindus
was attacked in the Gujarat city of Godhra on February 27, 2002. The
Gujarat Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, who may well become India’s next
prime minister, was quick to blame the attack on Muslims.
The next morning, a Hindu mob carrying
swords, torches, and kerosene filled bottles walked on my all-Hindu
street in Ahmedabad looking for Muslims – Muslims like me – to kill.
They made us shout names of Hindu deities that my parents taught me to
say with reverence. In the distance I could see a lone business, owned
by a Muslim, up in flames. When the mob passed, I ducked into an
internet café and passed the front desk, hoping I would not have to sign
in with my unmistakably Muslim name. But a young man stopped me.
“Sir, your good name, please?” he said, handing me a clipboard.
“My name,” I told him, “is Sanjay.”
I closed the curtain in the internet
booth and held back tears as I emailed my parents the lie I needed to
tell them: yes mom and dad, I am safe.
My father, a devout Muslim whose fondness
for Mahatma Gandhi and Hinduism prompted him to give up meat as a young
man, kept calling me during the riots.
“Have my friends contacted you? Have they offered to help?”
I did not need to tell him the answer. He knew.
“Just come home,” my father pleaded. India was suddenly alien and would never again be called “home” by anyone in my family.
During the riots I worked in the relief
camps of Ahmedabad where tens of thousands of displaced Muslims fought
for space and food in spaces half the size of a soccer field. I will
never forget 12 year old Sadiq who watched both of his parents burned
alive. In my six months working in the relief camps, I never heard him
say a word.
No one did.
When I returned to the US, the Gandhi
picture my dad gave me when I graduated from high school was no longer
hanging in my childhood bedroom.
“Gandhi is dead,” my father said.
***
All I wanted do after the riots was to
talk about the riots. I traveled across the US for a year giving
lectures. Everywhere I went I carried a small yellow plastic bag filled
with newspaper clippings and photos of the homes, mosques, and lives I
saw destroyed. When people doubted me, I would open up my bag.
“Here, this is what I saw. It really happened.” But many chose not to listen.
I grew distant from my friends. I stopped
watching basketball. I started taking anti-depressants. My smile,
friends kept reminding me, disappeared.
I switched my career to human rights and
spent nine years working in Washington DC, mostly at Amnesty
International. But I kept wondering: what happened to all those children
I met like Sadiq who saw so much? How do they – and how do I – move on?
In March 2011, I quit my job as a foreign
policy aide in the US Congress and returned to Gujarat for the first
time in nine years, against the advice of my psychiatrist.
When I arrived, Hindus would not rent an
apartment to me because I am Muslim and Muslims – now more insecure
after the riots – told me they did not trust me. I ended up staying with
a Hindu friend of mine. But there was one condition: I could not use my
real name in the apartment building. Sanjay was back.
I begun conducting interviews and when I
explained to Muslims in Ahmedabad that I returned using my own funds to
write about the riots – and that the riots filled me with a loneliness
that has not yet disappeared – some laughed.
“You are writing about 2002? Write about 2011.”
They have a point. Muslims I interviewed
say they want more than justice. They want an end to employment
discrimination. They want paved roads. They point out that in the Muslim
ghetto of Juhapura where over 350,000 live, there are only six high
schools – none of them government run.
But above all, Muslims in Gujarat told me they desire to be treated and viewed by their fellow Indians as Indians.
Last year, I interviewed a man named
Nadeem Saiyed who organized survivors of the Narodya Patiya massacre to
bear testimony to what they saw. A few months after I interviewed him,
he was fatally stabbed 28 times. When I learned of his death, I replayed
the audio from our interview. One line continues to haunt me.
“I was born,” he kept saying, “in the Gujarat riots of 2002.”
***
I hear this all the time. I think this
all the time. But sometimes the pressure to “move on” becomes too
intense and I fail to say these words.
Yes, the riots are over but the wound
continues. Narendra Modi, after all, is popular in Gujarat because of
the riots – not – despite the riots.
Today I am back in Gujarat and I live
just two blocks away from where Nadeem was stabbed. When I decided to
return to Gujarat this year to conduct more research, I was determined
to retire “Sanjay” because I am exhausted from inventing a Hindu family
that I do not have so that I may live in Gujarat.
After I failed to find an apartment in a
Hindu area using my real name, I was forced to live in Juhapura, an
area, some say, is the largest ghetto of Muslims in all of India. Police
line is the street that functions as the “border” that surrounds this
area and many Hindu rickshaw drivers refuse to enter Juhapura because
they are “afraid.” On my street, a rickshaw driver, a real estate
tycoon, a judge, and a nationally known journalist live side by side. I
hear all of them repeat the same thing: “We live here because we have no
other choice.”
Today in Juhapura I do not have regular
running water in my apartment and my electricity cuts out often –
something unusual in most parts, in particular in Hindu-dominated
sections of Ahmedabad. When I finally registered my apartment lease with
the police, a very kind Hindu officer told me I should be careful.
“The area you are staying is called mini-Pakistan and there are a lot of Pakistan intelligence (ISI) agents in the interiors.”
But it is here, only in this Muslim ghetto, where I feel safe.
I received the keys to my apartment the
day before the Muslim celebration of Eid-al-Adha. The next morning I
wore a crisp white Muslim style kurta over a pair of pleatless khakis and carried a white prayer skullcap in my hand.
All the men in my building had gathered at the front entrance. One man in his late 70s held his hand out as I came downstairs.
“Young man, I have not heard your complete name.”
I smiled and said the words I had to conceal so many times in Gujarat to survive.
“My full name,” I told him as we walked towards the mosque, “is Zahir Sajad Janmohamed.
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