One day in August 2003, I heard that Qutubuddin Ansari was moving to Calcutta. This man, whose photograph had been reproduced a thousand times in newspapers and magazines, had, reluctantly, become a national figure. He was a tailor. In the photograph, now as famous in its way as the picture of the naked Vietnamese girl fleeing from napalm, he was imploring, his palms joined together, somebody either to forgive or protect him; his eyes were blurred with tears; his shirt was slightly torn, and only recently did I notice, after seeing an enlarged version of the photo, the blood-spots spattered on it.
Nobody knew very much about him. To be unknown, of course, is the lot of most people: a happy lot, some would say, and I think Ansari would agree. There are hundreds of millions of people like Ansari in India; paradoxically, they don’t exist. Then, once in five years, sometimes fewer, their presence becomes tangible during the elections; like spirits given leave to visit the earth for a limited duration, they queue up to drop their ballot paper in the ballot box (this time, in a slow symphonic swell, voting took place electronically throughout the nation) and have the tiny black stain imprinted upon one finger, the spot which will be indelible for a few days. It’s at this time that everyone says—by ‘everyone’ I mean the educated and economically empowered middle class—that the ‘man on the street’ has a proven maturity that we don’t always credit him for; after the elections are over, the moment passes, and we talk of other things. Ansari is a part of the national fabric inasmuch as he possesses this awesome, if underused, privilege granted him by the Indian constitution: the right to vote. He also has, as I discovered later, a family: a wife and two children; a mother; a brother and sister-in-law; two or three close friends.
Ansari became famous shortly after the riots in Gujarat at the end of February and early March 2002. About 2,000 Muslims were killed to avenge the sixty or so Hindu activists who were burned alive in a train in Godhra; the violence was both tacitly and openly supported by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party state government and its police force. (Muslims in Gujarat comprise about nine per cent of the population, slightly lower than the national figure, twelve per cent.) Qutubuddin Ansari’s photo was circulated everywhere in India as the face of an endangered minority asking someone—an army officer; policemen; the nation-state; the constitution; the reader who was now holding the periodical in his or her hands—for protection and justice.
This was the story I heard about Qutubuddin Ansari moving to Calcutta: that, after the picture had catapulted him to national fame, the tailor had received a great deal of unwanted attention—from the media, from friends and acquaintances, from passers-by and strangers. His old life had become difficult to sustain. He feared some sort of reprisal from Hindu militants in Gujarat, some form of harassment to him and his family. Others feared reprisals too; his employer, a well-meaning Hindu who was now understandably nervous, had politely asked him to leave his job.
Then a piece about Ansari appeared in a magazine called Communalism Combat; the magazine’s agenda is self-evident. The article had been brought to the notice of Mohammed Salim, the Minister for Youth in West Bengal; enquiries had been initiated into whether Ansari could be moved to Bengal, specifically, to Calcutta. The idea of a man seeking, or, being offered, political asylum in another part of his own country was unprecedented. Ansari had already tried, unsuccessfully, to move to Mumbai, where his sister lives. Had he succeeded in relocating himself there he’d perhaps have been less disoriented than I found him in Calcutta, for the distance between Ahmedabad and Mumbai is much smaller, both in miles and in culture. Mumbai abounds with Gujaratis, Gujarati Muslims, and Gujarati tailors. But there are other similarities he might have felt less at ease with; the sporadic but recurrent production of right-wing violence, the subterranean antipathy towards the Muslim.
Calcutta was an altogether more surprising destination. Ahmedabad and Calcutta lie at the extremes of east and west in India, with a thousand miles between them. And Calcutta is a city to which no one moves if they can help it; members of the middle class have been leaving Calcutta for decades now. The big companies began their exodus in the Sixties. More than twenty-five years of Left Front rule—the Left Front, at whose helm is the CPI(M), the Communist Party of India (Marxist)—has turned West Bengal, according to the government’s critics, into an industrial graveyard. The government, under its new Chief Minister, Buddhadev Bhattacharya, translator of Gabriel García Márquez and other Latin American writers into Bengali, has for some time now been making siren-like noises to attract investment; but investors, suspicious of a recalcitrant labour force long abetted by the Left Front, have been slow to respond. In the midst of all this, Qutubuddin Ansari’s arrival seemed like an astonishing event, a political migration to a place no one wanted to migrate to (I say this despite the daily influx of unskilled and semi-skilled labour from villages and neighbouring, poorer states).
Bengalis were reminded at this point, as they were meant to be, of what is arguably the Left Front’s greatest achievement after the rural reforms of the Seventies: the creation in West Bengal, and its capital Calcutta, of a secular, non-sectarian civic space. Here’s the paradox: the institutions and infrastructure that sustain civilized living are often damaged or ruined in this city—sewers, buses; life, particularly for the poor, hard; and yet, for all that, people of different communities and religions have found a way of living peacefully with each other.
When Ansari reached Howrah station, there were photographers and TV cameramen waiting for him. In the picture in the Hindustan Times the next morning, the tailor looked harried and unhappy; he’d expected his arrival to be a quiet affair. It was said that Ansari suspected the Left Front government had tipped off the press; something it strenuously denied. According to another story, Ansari had been spotted at one of the stops on the way, and the information had travelled quickly to newspapers in the city.
I felt a curious urge to meet him. I say ‘curious’ because I’ve never wanted to meet celebrities or famous people before. Of course, Ansari is a savage parody of the notion of celebrity; he brings to it an unacknowledged humanity, an anxiety, a shabbiness, inadmissible to our current idea of fame. Nor is he, in spite of his suffering, a Christ-figure, a miracle worker; he is not blessed with a great gift; he was only a famous photograph.
I couldn’t just go and knock on Ansari’s door. For one thing, I didn’t know what his new address was. Besides, the government would have taken measures to make him inaccessible to the prying, the plain curious, and the hostile; and especially to journalists—although, vainly, I saw myself as a cut above the paparazzi.
I decided to follow up on a remark someone had once made to me, that Somnath Chatterjee likes my writing. Usually fans try and get in touch with the object of their enthusiasm, surreptitiously procuring telephone numbers and addresses; in this case, I tried to get in touch with my admirer. Somnath Chatterjee is one of the CPI(M)’s most senior and respected leaders, and its most effective parliamentarian; he’s recently been made Speaker in the Lok Sabha, the national parliament. I obtained his number from the Bengal Club, of which both he and I are members. The Bengal Club, one of the oldest clubs in the world, once a bastion of the British Raj, is, admittedly, an odd place for either a writer or a Marxist to frequent. For both Chatterjee and myself, it is, I suppose, part of our fathers’ legacy. Somnath Chatterjee’s father, N. C. Chatterjee, was one of the most successful barristers of his day; my father, who lost his ancestral property with Partition, was a successful business executive. My profession and Chatterjee’s suggest an uncomfortable relationship with our fathers’ world, but the Bengal Club implicates us both in a continuity with it.
When I finally got through to Somnath Chatterjee, he was most cordial. ‘Let me talk to Mohammed Salim, our Minister of Youth,’ he said. And it was Mohammed Salim who met me in one of those large cars that have recently become popular in India—Sumo, Qualis—which are called SUVs in the West. He was waiting for me, as he’d promised, in Park Circus, near the Don Bosco school. He had a smallish contingent with him, including someone called Mohammed bhai, who was a sort of minder of Ansari’s. I got out of my car and joined them, and asked my driver to follow, so he’d remember the route. Mr Salim, the Minister for Youth, is an understatedly debonair man in his mid-forties; he wore steel-framed spectacles and was in white, in kurta and aligarhi pyjamas. ‘I’ve impressed upon him,’ he said, ‘that you’re not a journalist, but a different kind of writer. Understandably, he’s nervous about journalists.’ I’d wanted this matter to be made clear—that I wasn’t writing for a newspaper. I was worried Ansari wouldn’t talk to me if he thought I was. I had two copies of Granta to show him. ‘I don’t think you need take those,’ said the minister. ‘They might confuse him.’
Tiljala, Ansari’s address, is not far from Ballygunge, where I live. But a universe separates the two localities. When I’d told my family I was off to Tiljala, my elderly parents had baulked, as if I’d announced I was going to the Gaza Strip. One of the surprises of this part of South Calcutta, in fact, is how the demography and population change fluently and seamlessly within the span of a few miles. Ballygunge is one of the two most affluent districts of Calcutta—the domain of old money—and, increasingly, of new money as well. The conquest of old money by the new is evident from the number of multi-storeyed buildings that have come up here in the last twenty years; in the lanes, the decaying mansions that indeterminately await destruction slightly outnumber, or at least rival, the mansions owned by families that can afford to maintain them, and throw the occasional garden party. In a quarter of a mile, beyond Mayfair, the locale begins to change. The first sign of this is the mosque a little distance from the Modern High School. Then, in the interiors of by-lanes, tailors’ shops, more mosques, and butchers’ shops begin to appear. The cluster of mosques, tailors, traders, and skewers on open fires culminates in Beck Bagan market; and, at the other end, after the interruption of Ballygunge Road, continues into Shamsul Huda Haq Road, a long street whose inhabitants are almost entirely Muslim. This street is no more than a fifteen or twenty minutes’ walk from where I live in Sunny Park, but visiting it, in my mind, is like being in a street in Cairo or Lahore, although I have no idea what either city is actually like. There’s a sense of huddled community here, of festivities at Id and fasting before Mohurrum, of a different auditory life with the muezzins’ call at dawn. This area, and beyond it, is no longer Ballygunge, but is collectively called Park Circus.
Beyond Park Circus, accessed by a narrow lane, is Tiljala. That day it looked less remarkable to my eye than its reputation as a place of shelter, in the past, for itinerant terrorists had suggested; a congested and somewhat down-at-heel Muslim enclave awaiting the gentrification that’s been coming to other parts of Calcutta. The traffic was mainly scooters, cycles, and people lounging about in the middle of the street; and then the lane straightened. We got off busily in front of a beedi stall and a parked scooter. There was a narrow driveway on our left, alongside a building.
Here, on the ground floor, was a packers’ shop, a carpenter’s shed, and a small yard in which it seemed there was a makeshift workshop where spare parts were made; and, next to these, a flight of stairs. Ansari’s flat was on the third, the topmost, storey. One or two children looked at us curiously as we went up. Then, finally, the flat: before you entered it, you had to climb up a slope, and then enter a tiny room which was the sitting area. The door was already open.
Ansari was as I’d seen him in the photograph, but a little smaller than the photo suggested. He is a dark, pleasant-looking man, about five feet six inches tall, with light brown eyes. He was wearing a grey shirt, the sleeves of which were rolled up at the wrists, and dark trousers—the way I always saw him dressed, and the way he appears in the photograph. He smiled, but was a bit anxious; not so much about meeting me, but about life in general: about being where he was. He had the ill-at-ease air of a recent migrant; and little of the air of relief and release you imagine an asylum-seeker who’s reached his destination might have.
There was a single bed on the left, and two white plastic chairs before it. We sat down and Mohammed Salim introduced me briefly: I was a writer, well known outside India, I was not a reporter, I’d been curious about Ansari and wanted to meet him, to listen to his story, I wanted to write about him. Salim spoke in Hindi interspersed with elaborate Urdu words I didn’t always understand, perhaps to emphasize to Ansari their common Muslim lineage; perhaps because he didn’t get a chance to speak in Urdu too often. Ansari nodded, attentive to the minister, and smiled at me absent-mindedly and a little dismissively. He knew the minister was an important man; but what sort of creature was a ‘writer’? He knew, though, that this little occasion had been rustled up at my request. Different emotions flitted through his face as he listened. ‘But nothing will be written that will bring harm to my family?’ he asked no one in particular. The language he used was an ordinary street-Hindi inflected with a faint Gujarati intonation. His tone was polite but firm. By ‘family’—parivar—he meant, I think, the family he’d left behind in Ahmedabad: his mother, his brother, his brother’s wife, their children.
I hastened to reassure him that I didn’t intend to write that kind of piece. I was not writing for a newspaper, I continued; the place in which the piece would eventually come out was a magazine which was, in fact, something like a book; its aims were not sensational, and it was published in England; it was unlikely anyone in Ahmedabad would see it. I blabbered this to him solemnly, and he looked unconvinced, probably taking it for the nonsense it was.
He turned back to Mohammed Salim. I was a diversion, almost a waste of time; it was the minister he was interested in. By this time, Qutubuddin had been in Calcutta for about a month. The West Bengal government had promised to set up a tailoring business for him. Nothing had happened so far; and Qutubuddin was feeling nervous. He received an allowance, he told me later, that covered his family’s daily costs and the rent; but he was uneasy living on government charity; he felt lost not working.
He went a few times a week to a tailor’s factory in Dum Dum, to learn the local cutting methods, the local requirements. (Earlier, Mohammed Salim had said he was also receiving psychiatric counselling.) This was probationary work, Mohammed Salim explained, necessary to his initiation into the business. The machine with which Qutubuddin’s operations would begin was still to arrive.
‘It’ll be here any day now,’ said Salim, rising swiftly and patting him on the shoulder. ‘I’ll phone you. Now why don’t you talk to each other—we’ll leave you.’ And he and his contingent were gone.
‘This won’t affect my family in any way, will it?’ Qutubuddin asked again. Reassuring him, I turned briefly to other subjects.
‘What is this “cutting” you have to learn? What kind of things do you make?’
‘I make ready-made shirts. That is what I’m trained to do.’
‘My mother’s tailor is called Qutubuddin too,’ I said. ‘He’s an expert at making blouses and salwar kameezes.’
The other Qutubuddin has a shop in a lane off Beck Bagan, behind a tube-well; his charges are steep, and his behaviour erratic. Sometimes he will take more than a month to finish a blouse or salwar kameez. This Qutubuddin—the famous one—smiled; he seemed pleased to discover a namesake.
On February 27, 2002—it was a Wednesday—Ansari was in his factory when, after lunch, he and his fellow workers saw on TV that a train at Godhra station carrying vociferous and rowdy Hindu activists had been set alight by a Muslim mob. After a couple of hours, the apprehensive Hindu factory-owner (a good man, said Qutubuddin) asked the workers to go home. (Qutubuddin was almost always understanding of the fears of his Hindu employers or neighbours.) They usually left the factory at seven or eight o’ clock; that day, they went home at five.
‘There was tension in the air. We knew something would happen. My friends Sunil and Chandrakant and I got on to the bus, and I said goodbye to them when they got off at their stops. My stop was further on.’
The next day, a bandh—total closure—was declared in the city. This was not unusual, since there had been disruptions already after the train-burning the previous day: buses had been attacked in Ahmedabad. An auto-rickshaw driver from Qutubuddin’s mohulla—his locality—had been beaten up that day, and his auto burned. Still, Qutubuddin and his family couldn’t have expected the ferocity of the reprisals to come: after three hours of rioting in 1992, he said, the police had acted swiftly and things were brought under control. His mother was nervous; watching the news that night, she said, speaking of the incident at Godhra, the words Atal Behari Vajpayee and his second-in-command Lai Krishna Advani had so wanted to hear from the Muslims: ‘They shouldn’t have done what they did.’ But her words were meant for her family, and not the nation. Despite her nervousness, and theirs, they did not move, as they’d had to during riots in the past: their Hindu neighbours, whose settlements faced theirs from the other side of the national highway that divided the Muslim and Hindu mohullas, assured them there would be no violence on their part.
Qutubuddin now came to the heart of his story: ‘On the morning of the 28th, Sairaj Bano, who lived in the front part of the mohulla, came running to us to tell us of disturbances on the road. Ten or eleven of us rushed towards the road, I and my friend Aslam included. We went out and found people standing with pipes and rods in their hands, telling shopkeepers to pull down their shutters. The elder of the mohulla waved the younger men in; then elders from both communities went on to the highway and spoke to each other. This was between 10.30 and 11.00 a.m.
‘At about 11.45 a.m., six or seven jeeps full of policemen arrived on the scene to dissuade the public from going any further towards the mohulla.’ ‘Public’, I noticed, is the English word Qutubuddin uses when he means ‘mob’. ‘We in the mohulla were too far away to hear what was said. Later, at six or seven o’clock in the evening, the police returned and aimed tear gas shells towards our basti—this was the first sign that the police were not with us. And now the public began attacking and burning the shops. There are 700 shops in this area, and the public were throwing stones at them, while we retreated into our basti. This went on for about four hours.
‘At 1 a.m., jeeps gathered outside the mohulla with their headlights turned on, and blew their horns continuously. Children and women were shouting; people couldn’t decide what to do. One camp thought of vacating the basti; the other, because the stone-throwing had by now stopped, thought the main troubles were over.
On Friday morning, we woke up to find we had no fresh provisions, no vegetables, or milk; we drank black tea for breakfast.’
At this point, Qutubuddin interrupted himself to say two things. The first, as it turned out, was a commonplace among most Gujaratis, and has become one in all political conversation in India—that the reason the BJP returns to power in Gujarat is because it orchestrates riots and creates panic, a false sense of endangerment which makes its reign seem necessary. The other thing was that it was only then that it dawned on Qutubuddin and the others in the mohulla that the police had turned against them—for the police had helped, apparently, during the earthquake in 2001, in which thousands had died or been left homeless.
‘As the stone-throwing and violence began once more, we regretted not leaving during the night. The men fought back a little: we leaned over the partition of the mohulla and threw stones at the public, while the women packed. My brother took the children to a safe place. Meanwhile, even the gate to the Hindu mohulla had been forced open, and the house of the head of the society looted.’
It was our first meeting; it was late; neither of us had eaten. Qutubuddin, who’d been hesitant about speaking to me, was now gripped by his own tale. ‘Qutubuddin bhai,’ I said, ‘I’m keeping you. I should come back in a couple of days.’
When I visited him a week later he looked unhappy. ‘My business hasn’t started yet. It’s been more than a month. How will I support my family? My daughter’s going to school.’
‘They give you money, don’t they?’
‘They do, but how long can you live on an allowance? I want to start work.’ Then he said, ‘This flat is too big. I have to pay a lot of rent for it.’ The flat was tiny.
‘Too big?’
‘Yes, in Ahmedabad we used to live in a room.’ Later, he told me what its size was—twelve feet by twenty feet.
He resumed his story. ‘On Friday the 1st, we began to evacuate the mohulla in trucks. People moved to Bapunagar, half a kilometre away—lots of Muslims live there.
‘My friend Aslam, and his brothers Arif and Liaqat—all married men—were urged to leave by their mother. Aslam lived with his family in a room on the first floor of a building facing the main road. I treated it like a second home; I used to spend a lot of time there. This room, which still had some valuables, some jewellery and possessions in it, was now locked up by Aslam’s mother. When we were inside the car, we realized that Ruhanna, Aslam’s wife, was not with us: there was panic. Had Ruhanna stayed back in the room by mistake? Aslam and I took the keys and returned to the house; the room’s ground floor was being vandalized by six or seven boys. They had a look of enjoyment on their faces: Oh, I can slap anyone I feel like now. We ran upstairs. Ruhanna was in the room; she’d been sitting silently, so as not to draw attention to herself—she’d lingered on because of the valuables. The boys were downstairs. But by this time the soldiers had arrived; there was a sardarji before me, a Sikh from the Rapid Action Force. I turned to him for help—please do something. The press had reached the scene too; and someone, at that moment, took the photograph of me.
‘By 2.30 p.m., our families had left, but Aslam, Farooq and I remained. Prayers were offered at one of the three mosques in our locality; the two others had been set alight. A godown full of plastics was also on fire, and the fire spread. We were helping the fire to grow by adding things to it, because we felt it created a barrier which kept us safe.
‘At five or six o’clock in the evening, the Border Police and a unit from the army came to the mohulla; the soldiers were from Kerala.’ This last detail wasn’t offered perfunctorily; Qutubuddin knew that a complete failure on the state police’s part had forced someone in the government to bring in soldiers from outside. Who had taken that decision? ‘Amit bhai, the colonel in charge wept at what he saw. An army driver wanted water, and Farooq went back to the building on the main road to fetch two bottles of water from the fridge; from the balcony he saw the public running; the army were firing into the air. By 6.30, the public had disappeared.
‘The army positioned themselves in the locality in the following days. People were transferred to another mohulla; a relief camp was set up; my own mohulla became a museum for people to look at.
‘On 2nd of March, my photo appeared in the papers; I knew nothing about it. On the 10th, I was chatting with friends when a group of Europeans who’d seen my photo and were looking for me finally found me. They showed me the paper, and I saw my own image in print. I was very anxious.’
Ansari’s infant son toddled in. He was born after the riots, Qutubuddin tells me.
‘Other reporters came and took down notes like you. Once they got what they wanted, I never heard from them again.’ He is suffering from a constant sense of betrayal and abandonment. His story is done; he probably thinks I’m about to lose interest. He knows the BJP and the government in Gujarat for what they are. It’s those who’d make him a secular mascot that he’s disappointed by; he knows that, in his post-riot life of supporters, well-wishers, empathizers and protectors, he has made no real friends. Uprooted from his habitat, he misses the friends he left behind: Aslam, Farooq.
I met Farooq in December last year. It was my first visit to Ahmedabad. I took the taxi from the Ellis Bridge Gymkhana, where I was staying, across one of the bridges over the River Sabarmati that connected the Hindu and more prosperous part of Ahmedabad to the less affluent and mainly Muslim areas of the city. Farooq was waiting for me in his small shop, behind the glass doors. I had not expected a man at once portly and dapper, a dark friendly man dressed impeccably in white.
His shop, which sells ‘electronic goods’, is air-conditioned. In fact, it might be the only air-conditioned shop in the area. ‘Please have a cold drink,’ he said.
We deferred the cold drink and got into my car. The mohulla in which Qutubuddin lived was not far away—only a few minutes’ drive from the shop. Farooq pointed out personal landmarks from the riots (‘They came down here’; ‘they burned that shop’) as if we were retracing some ancient historical journey.
‘Wait, wait,’ said Farooq to the driver. He had noticed Qutubuddin’s elder brother, Siraj, and wanted to introduce him to me. I wasn’t sure if this was a good idea. Before I left Calcutta, Qutubuddin had asked me not to look up his family. But it was too late; Farooq had already got out of the car, he was walking towards where Siraj was standing next to his scooter.
Siraj is quite different to look at from his younger brother—stocky, moustached—and he also seems unlike Qutubuddin in temperament. Rais Khan, Communalism Combat‘s Ahmedabad representative, had told me, only the day before, that Siraj is more hoshiyar—more a man of the world than his brother is.
I liked Siraj instantly; I liked his warmth, his openness. He’d heard about me from Qutubuddin; he, too, wanted me to have a cold drink. We went inside a restaurant, climbed up the stairs to the first floor, sat solemnly at a table with a soft drink before me, and discussed Qutubuddin’s welfare and the present state of the mohulla. The only other people besides us—it was four o’clock in the afternoon, after all—were a thin young man and a woman in a red sari. Most of the shops along this line of buildings had been burned on February 28 and March 1.
And that was our small meeting, Siraj’s and mine; I don’t know when I’ll see him again, but we behaved as if it might not be before too long—we embraced—and he rode off on his scooter. Here, in front of the tiny ‘hotel’, Farooq and I stood facing the featureless national highway number 8, which led, in the direction opposite to the one Siraj had taken, to Bombay. We proceeded towards Qutubuddin’s former home in Rehmatnagar. Everything here had the look and air of a working-class settlement in an industrial suburb: the Muslim mohulla on this side, and the Hindu mohulla on the other side of the highway. Almost two years after the event, I tried to sniff the smell of burning in the air; but inhaled only gasoline fumes and dust. No one had been prosecuted.
We came, at last, to the gate of the mohulla where, on its right, was the building on whose first floor Ruhanna had been hiding while hoodlums were on the rampage; Qutubuddin had stood on the balcony, the palms of his hands joined together, when his photograph was taken.
Beyond, a narrow dust road led to the interconnected rows of houses and other paths. Children, goats and men loitered at various spots as Farooq gestured towards a path and said, ‘We escaped down there.’
‘Can I have a look at Qutubuddin’s house? I won’t disturb anyone inside it,’ I said. Farooq seemed unsure of what to do; then he seemed to think it could do no harm, and he nodded. The house was absurdly near where we were; we turned right, and then left. Farooq pointed out a small one-storey house on the left, after a couple of other houses, and retreated. A woman emerged from the door of Qutubuddin’s house; it must have been his sister-in-law. I turned back and retraced my steps.
This, then, was Qutubuddin’s world—his mohulla. This interlocking network of houses, of human beings and animals, which bear few marks of the conflagration that had once engulfed it, is the home from which he is in exile.
From here Farooq took me to the man Qutubuddin had urged me to meet, the maulana who ran the madrasa nearby. The madrasa was a three- or four-storey building which still bore, on its upper wall, the imprints of the bullets that were aimed at it on the 28th. The maulana Mehboob Alam Qasmi, the light-eyed, very gentle man of religion who peered at us from behind the gates, guided me and Farooq into the building through a throng of buffaloes standing in the courtyard. He took us to his room on the first floor; next door, children were rocking back and forth and memorizing verses from the Qur’an. The maulana offered me coffee; I was grateful at the prospect of caffeine. He told me how this room we were sitting in, and the classroom next to us, were burned till they were unrecognizable. ‘This room was not like this,’ he said, looking around him. He retrieved a photo album; it is an important document. The heavy and innocent tome, meant for wedding or holiday snapshots, was full of photographs of the debris, the aftermath, of the event: the madrasa’s transformation. I browsed through them to the accompaniment of the maulana’s soft-voiced commentary. ‘This is the classroom,’ he said. ‘This is this room, where we are now. And this is the photo of the burnt Qur’an.’
The maulana was an articulate and exceptionally intelligent man; his tone was entirely devoid of anger or grievance or moral righteousness. In spite of having been attacked and terrorized—he showed me, from his window, the vegetable patch and field at the back where rioters exploded oxygen and cooking gas cylinders—in spite of all this, he knew the problem he faced was primarily a political one: a calculated chafing of old wounds, rather than a spontaneous outburst of hatred. The BJP Chief Minister Narendra Modi and his party had a landslide victory in the assembly elections that had been brought forward and held soon after the riots. ‘During the elections they displayed cardboard cut-outs of Musharraf and warned people that Gujarat would become Pakistan unless they voted for the BJP. Tell me, what does Gujarat have to do with Pakistan?’
As I left, he showed me where the attackers, that day, wrote jai shri ram on the wall in large letters—’Victory to Lord Ram’—and improvised a Hanuman temple underneath a switchboard.
It was Rais Khan of Communalism Combat—a gentle, burly man with faintly hennaed hair—who’d introduced Qutubuddin to the organization’s most prominent activist, Teesta Setelvad, who, in turn, had first discussed with the West Bengal government the matter of Qutubuddin moving to Calcutta. In his office, in Ahmedabad, Khan told me more about Qutubuddin’s background.
The family were migrants from Uttar Pradesh, and Qutubuddin belonged to the third generation in Ahmedabad. They lived in the old mill area, Gomtipur, where the majority of workers—eighty per cent—were from Uttar Pradesh. On the way to Rehmatnagar, I’d noticed the abandoned textile mills for which Gujarat had once been famous, the tall chimneys like sentinels. Qutubuddin’s grandfather worked in a clothes mill, a daily wage-earner, as Qutubuddin was.
I had assumed, wrongly, that he’d at least had fixed employment at the factory he’d worked for; I’d thought of him simply as a tailor, like that other Qutubuddin, my mother’s tailor, who, indeed, was fortunate by Qutubuddin Ansari’s standards, and had his own small business in Beck Bagan. But, as Rais Khan said, a daily wage-earner gets no bonus, no leave, and risks forfeiting his job to another man if he falls ill. The daily wage-earner has no future such was the existence of Qutubuddin Ansari before he was photographed.
Many Gujaratis who’ve gone abroad have an ideal Gujarat in their heads: braj dham. This is the mythic zone in which Radha and Krishna dally with each other eternally, in which the child Krishna, in his haste and greed, steals curds from a pot in his mother’s kitchen, in which he loiters as a cowherd, his flute mesmerizing those who listen. Braj dham exists in song and artistic representation and the imagination, an endlessly fertile playground.
Of course, there are neither Muslims nor textile mills in braj dham—how could there be? But the great nineteenth-century Muslim ruler of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah, whose province was wrested from him by the British after the Mutiny of 1857, had been enthralled—hypnotized—by the possibility of its existence. Composer of several semi-classical love songs about Radha and Krishna in the form called the thumri, and one of the great patrons of kathak, the classical dance whose narrative content is entirely to do with the same erotic subject, he is part of the shadowy, unacknowledged, but substantial Muslim authorship of braj dham.
On my last evening in Ahmedabad, I went to a restaurant called Vishala to eat authentic Gujarati food. Vishala is a restaurant that’s built, very charmingly and successfully, as a heritage site; it showcases folk arts and folk dancers, puppet shows which enact particularly violent family quarrels, and the place itself is a series of thatched huts in which you sit on the floor or on a very low stool, and are served by men in traditional costume. I thought I was in braj dham. Here and there, men and women wandered about in groups, speaking English in accents from Leicester and London.
Six months have passed since that visit. The great, exhilarating surprise of the national election results in May is already history; so is, at least for now, the BJP government. I happened to be in Delhi at the time of the formal investiture of the new Congress government, to give a reading at the India International Centre, where I was being put up by the Sahitya Akademi, the Indian government’s literature wing.
As I sat at lunch, I saw around me, in the dining hall, members of a class that has, in the last twenty years, hardened and congealed into India’s post-Independence ruling elite. It was an uncomfortable sight, watching these people greet each other, eat soup, raise their cutlery, whisper to a waiter. I could spot, among them, members and supporters of both the new and the superannuated regime: secretaries, under-secretaries, hawkish editors who’d once reasoned on behalf of the BJP’s nuclear programme. In a corner by one of the large windows sat Maneka Gandhi, Sanjay Gandhi’s widow, who had joined the BJP some years ago, and had just been re-elected as an MP although her party had been thrown out of power. As I sat in the hubbub in the dining hall—everyone was talking—I was startled and chastened by the self-absorption of this ruling class, and by the way they had betrayed the world outside this room—a world that, for twenty-five years or more now, they had been too busy with their own negotiations and gains and losses to notice.
This sense of disconnection, I think, gave rise to the disgust I sensed in Qutubuddin when I spoke to him before I left for England. Before and during the elections, I rang him at his new shop which the West Bengal government had set up for him with two machines and two workers. He was not there; he’d gone back to Ahmedabad with his family, to be with his mother and brother during the elections. I presumed it was because the period leading to the elections is seen to be a difficult time in Ahmedabad, a time when, as the maulana had said, violence is orchestrated to inflame and influence the electoral process. But the main reason Qutubuddin had made the journey, he said later, was because it was his daughter’s vacation-time; besides, he was homesick.
Then, a week before I flew out, he called me; he was back. ‘Amit bhai,’ he said, ‘many people have written about me for their own purposes and gone away and I’ve never seen them again. But with you I felt there was something different.’ I concluded this was a mixture of goodness on his part, and of wishful thinking; the longing for, more than the discovery of, trust.
I visited his flat in Tiljala three days later. It would be easy to give this piece a happy ending in the sense that my writing it has coincided with an electoral outcome that, for me and many others, is as satisfying as it was startling. Even in Gujarat, to Narendra Modi’s discomfiture, the BJP fared worse than expected. Far from Tiljala, a new government was in place; and here in Tiljala itself, and its contiguous neighbourhoods, there was a new MP; Mohammed Salim, the Minister for Youth, had been elected to the Lok Sabha.
I asked Qutubuddin if he was happy with the election results. But, for him, there was no simple answer to this simplistic question. Continuity was what he valued most, and even, intriguingly, a return to his old life. That was going to be difficult, though; Qutubuddin had become part of the anti-BJP campaign in various parts of India, including his own street, where, later, he showed me posters with his face in the centre bearing the slogan in Urdu: do you want your locality to become another gujarat? He then picked up an Urdu newspaper—there, on the pages in the middle, was his own picture alongside Atal Behari Vajpayee’s, surrounded by Urdu text. ‘Won’t people think that I am responsible for this?
‘People made use of me, and forgot me. They put my banner up everywhere during the elections. My photograph is everywhere again.’ ‘Banner’ is the English word he uses for ‘poster’. ‘Amit bhai‘ big men have security and Black Cat commandos. I am not a big man. I fear for my life and my family’s.’ And he began to weep; I saw before me the man as he was in the photograph, frightened, his eyes full of tears.
It is true. Qutubuddin is India’s first celebrity who is also anonymous and poor; the fame has left him no better off, but robbed him of the protection of being no one. Every month almost, some nameless man somewhere in India will try to insert himself into history, usually via the Guinness Book of World Records, by growing his nails two feet long, or by spending a night in a room full of poisonous snakes, or by eating crushed glass. Qutubuddin really has passed into history, one of the first ‘ordinary’ men in independent India to do so, and he’s resistant to it.
He was desperate for the photograph to cease to exist: as if the man in the photo and he are competing for the same oxygen. We discussed the possibility of litigation, of invoking some privacy law that will banish the photo once and for all; and also whether this will have the opposite effect, of drawing to him more attention than he already has.
Finally, we realized it’s impossible: history can’t be changed or undone—not the burning train, the razed shops and houses and mosques, the dead that Qutubuddin says he saw lying by highway number 8, the landslide victory for Modi in the assembly elections after the riots, the advent of a new Congress government in parliament in May 2004. ‘But, Qutubuddin bhai,’ I said to him after a minute, ‘the photo will stay where it is. You will have moved on; you’ll have your own life. People will cease to connect the two. That Qutubuddin will be associated in people’s minds with a moment in history; you’ll be elsewhere—people will stop confusing you with the photo.’ He stared at me—it was impossible to know if he believed me.
