‘I had some work to attend to, man! Do all the shops here shut by eleven at night?’

‘I guess you need cigarettes?’

‘No. I have them. I didn’t go to get cigarettes. I couldn’t do what I wanted. Let it be. Tell me your news, about that other matter. How far did you get?’

‘She’s agreed.’

‘Wow! If she’s willing, then who’s to say anything!’ Sandip said, laughing loudly. And then he said, ‘Come along with me tomorrow. We’ll make some arrangements.’

‘That’s not possible. I have to take her away tonight itself, in a few hours.’

‘What are you saying! How can I handle it if you people suddenly run away without any plan?’

‘Dada, you don’t have to handle anything. If Riziya can set out, why can’t I?’

‘Achchha, all right. And money?’

‘I have it. I have cash, there’s some money in the bank. There won’t be a problem.’

Suman looked excited. Sandip level-headedly thought about what he ought to do, and how. He said, ‘Do you have a marker pen? The thick variety?’

‘I do. But why do you need it?’

‘I need it. Achchha, can I come along with you, or join you in a day or two?’

‘You stay here. If possible, keep watch over Jogipara. But I don’t think anything will happen.’

‘What are you saying! Rubbish! Must make it happen!’

‘What?’

‘You know, there has to be a fake disturbance. That’s what I mean! I know these nedes very well. I have the keys for Abhijit’s motorcycle. I can drop you people somewhere.’

‘Great! Thanks.’

It was two at night. Riziya was ready. Ready, meaning, she had changed into fresh clothes. What else could she take? What did she possess that she could take along with her? She would not take a single thing. After all, her escape from Sadnahati was entirely out of compulsion. Stepping out of the house, she looked this way and that. No, there wasn’t anyone nearby. Returning to her room, she put on her black borkha. Now she had to be very wary. As she was about to exit the room for the final time, her eyes fell on the sleeping Ayan. He was sleeping beside the bed, on the floor. Riziya suddenly felt a void inside her, like a lapping wave. A rush of love for Ayan was filling the void. Gradually, Chhoto Mami, Chhoto Mama, and this Miya household, all began to feel beyond her reach. In her mind she felt as if she was wrapped in a white shroud and, finally giving up the allure of this earth, she was departing. But there were no tears in Riziya’s eyes. As if she had buried her heart under an immovable, unbreakable thousand-maund rock. If there was the slightest crack, attachment would seep in. Riziya did not bother about anything else. The moment she stepped out of the house, she felt a surge of anger at Rafiq Ali Sheikh. After his recent victory in the Panchayat elections, he had put street lights on every electric post. But the light could bring acute darkness in Riziya’s life. What was she to do now! How could she avoid the lights? She had to go nonetheless. She advanced cautiously. No, there was no one around. She reached the Shiva temple, unseen by anyone in Sadnahati, and went and stood behind it. After a couple of minutes, Suman arrived. There was a bag on his shoulder. He said, ‘We don’t have a moment to spare.’

‘Which way will we go?’

‘I’ve arranged for a motorbike. We need to wait. Sandip was supposed to come on the bike, I wonder why he isn’t here yet. He asked me to meet you first.’

Riziya stood there in silence. Suman observed that she was trembling. Suman could not think of how he could boost her courage. They stood like inert objects for almost ten minutes. Finally, when they heard the sound of a motorcycle, they knew it was Sandip. As soon as he joined them, they squeezed in behind him. Suman behind Sandip, and Riziya behind Suman. The bike advanced with a roar. As soon as the bike approached the mosque, Riziya glanced at Tahirul’s room. It was dark around the gate of the mosque. The bike sped past. She turned her head for another glance. She saw the mosque’s minaret. It seemed to be beckoning her from afar. The bike suddenly bounced up when it hit a speed breaker. Suman whispered, ‘Watch it, Riziya! Hold on firmly.’

Riziya unthinkingly placed a hand on Suman’s shoulder. She said, ‘Let’s go.’

Rahmat Saheb had been officiating as Imam for the last few days, in addition to calling out the azan. When he arrived for the azan, he noticed that it was dark in front of the mosque gate. The lamp on the electric post was smashed. What was up! A part of the mosque had been demolished a few days ago, a new wall was coming up there. The renovation of the mosque that had been initiated by Haji Saheb was still incomplete. Walls were being broken, one by one, and being rebuilt. The new walls had been freshly plastered with lime. Rahmat Bhai lit his torch to avoid stepping on the broken glass of the lamp lying in the semi-darkness. He never forgot to carry his torch when he went to call out the azan for the Fajr prayer. The slanting beam of light from the torch fell directly on the mosque wall. And then he discovered something terrible! Unimaginably terrible! There was something written on the wall of the mosque in large letters. Once he directed the light properly and read it, he was furious. He was numb with rage. What on earth was this! Who had had the audacity!

Hare Krishna, Hare Ram! I have given up Islam and become a Hindu. It’s that imam of yours who is at the root of the rot. I declare that no one should heed the imam.

Yours, Riziya Khatun.

‘Hare Krishna, Hare Ram’ on the wall of the mosque! And by Riziya? He began trembling with rage. It was time for the azan. He performed his ablutions and called out the azan. It would be quite a while before the worshippers gathered. It was as if Rahmat Bhai, the discoverer of such an abominable outrage, couldn’t stay still. None of the musulli had arrived yet. He had no clue what he ought to do. This was bound to lead to a massive scandal! He took out his handkerchief and wet it at the tap. He tried to wipe out the writing from the wall with the wet cloth. But it could not be removed. Rahmat Bhai had assumed that it had been written with charcoal, or something like that. But this ink could not be wiped out. After his futile effort, he thought there was no need to inform anyone before the gathering arrived. He went into the mosque silently. There was a small group of musulli at the Fajr gathering. First, they recited the prayer inwardly. And it was concluded with a short verse from the Koran recited by Rahmat Bhai. And then he informed the gathering. The ten or twelve musulli rushed to the spot with alarm on their faces. It was no longer dark. In the dim light of dawn, the writing glared out on the white wall. A couple of people couldn’t control themselves. One man screamed out, ‘Riziya! If I find you, I’ll cut you to pieces.’

‘Let’s go right now to Salaam Miya. Let’s see if Riziya is there!’

‘Wherever she might be, I swear on Allah, I am going to kill her!’

The people living near the mosque woke up in the commotion and shouting. They too arrived and saw the writing on the wall. Shocking! Riziya had become a Hindu! She had written ‘Hare Krishna, Hare Ram’ on the mosque wall. Such audacity? All the rage accumulated inside everyone flared up like a conflagration. Quite a few protectors of religion gathered there. They raced towards the Miya house.

fifty-eight

The worst kind of inhumanity in human civilization is the riot. It was manifest among animals as well, but most of the time humans surpassed even the beasts. They were no longer human then.

There were essentially two distinct kinds of riots. The first was a spontaneous outbreak of violence between two communities, both of whom were bent on vengeance. And the second was one that was pre-planned. The first kind was hardly seen these days, but it was the second type that was witnessed now. And that was how the earth was bloodied time and again. Such riots turned out to be violent and deadly. The battle between two equally strong forces standing face to face could be called a riot. But when one of the two communities was weak in every way, and was a minority in terms of population, it could not be called a riot. A riot was between equals. If that was not the case, it could be called a pogrom, or genocide instead. In that event, on the basis of past experience, the minority was like someone proverbially ‘once bitten, twice shy’. They were beside themselves in panic. The horror of witnessing outrages on their wives and daughters in front of their eyes, the ghastly murder of one’s near and dear ones, displacement from their homes, as well as blows to their livelihood. Anticipating all this, they all huddled together. The more they tried to extend the hand of friendship, the more the majority community turned arrogant and contemptuous. They tried to demonstrate how powerful they were. They threatened to finish everyone off in a moment. In such a time, the terrified lot realized that unless they built up the capability to mount a counter-attack with all their strength, they would cease to exist. They prepared themselves inwardly. The battle for self-defence thus began. This scenario hardly changed across eras and countries. The morale of the minority was comparatively much stronger than that of the majority; they were better prepared for self-defence. But people wanted to live, and to live like humans.

Subodh Saha was the proprietor of Saha Garments in the marketplace in Sadnahati. He too had had to abandon his birthplace and homestead, lose a brother forever, and come away from faraway Rajshahi. That brother was not a Hindu. He was a Muslim by the name of Ahad Ali. And in spite of Golam Rasool being his childhood friend, he had been the first one to make a sugar-coated threat: ‘Subodh, give up your attachment and sell whatever land you have acquired to me. How long can we protect you?’ He sold his land for a pittance. Ahad was an employee in Subodh’s shop. He secretly took away everyone in the family, one by one, in safety, to his own in-laws’ house across the border. The head of the household was the last to leave. Subodh had been able to come away because the loyal employee had risked his own life. Subodh was educated. That could neither be sold off nor looted. After several ups and downs in the struggle for life, his sons were now well established. Everyone here knew of Saha Garments! But how many people knew their painful history?

The people of Jogipara were not supposed to know about all that either. Despite having lived in Sadnahati for centuries, they had never imagined riots taking place and had never been subject to terror. Even though they had an inferiority complex. But they had never regarded the people living just next to them as their enemies by faith. They had, of course, heard stories about the great riot that had taken place in their fathers’ and grandfathers’ times, and learnt about the situation at the time of the partition of the country, but they had never experienced the terror of an actual riot.

In Sadnahati itself, there were two Muslim families that had fled from another village. They had been in Sadnahati for two generations. They used to live in Biradingi, in Howrah district. Biradingi–Nischintapur and Liluah–Chakpara were supposed to be areas that were densely populated by settlements of Muslims. There were mosques and maktabs there. But there was no sign of those today. Most of the people had been killed. Those who survived had scattered and taken shelter with relatives and in-laws. Some had gone away to East Pakistan. Sadek Ali was from one such family. He was an old man of seventy-two. A brother and a sister were the only members of the family who survived. Everyone else had been sacrificed to the violence. Sadek’s father had left the children with a milkwoman from the adjacent hamlet, who used to come to their house to sell milk. And then the riot began. The woman had hidden them in her room. She had protected the two lives. She had secretly and artfully been able to make them reach Sadnahati. Another family which was housed in the heart of Howrah city, the Howrah Maidan, also came away, with all their family members, to Sadnahati. Sadek Ali was only a ten- or eleven-year-old boy then. But he still clearly remembered the terror and the clamour. Sadek also spoke about that from time to time. As he narrated the carnage of murder that he had witnessed, tears streamed down his eyes. No one disbelieved him. They wondered, can people be so barbaric? During winter nights, a large group sat around a fire. Suman’s brother, Abhijit, used to be there; Akhil Nath’s grandson, Prasun, as well. No one viewed this as having been committed by Hindus. They pointed their fingers at politics and crime; the politics of the division of spoils of that time. When confronted by that situation today, old Sadek Ali asked his eighteen-year-old grandson, Anwar, ‘What’s happening, Ano? What’s all the shouting?’

‘You are an old man, Dada, why do you pay attention to everything you hear? Suman, from Jogipara, has run away with Riziya, from the Miya household. And Riziya has written something about the religion on the mosque wall. There’s been a ruckus about that since morning, Dada.’

‘What are you saying, eh?’

‘It’s true, Dada.’

A picture of the riot appeared clearly in Sadek Ali’s otherwise blurred vision. His throat choked in fear. In a quavering voice, he asked, ‘It won’t lead to a Hindu–Muslim riot, will it, child?’

‘It’s always the same thing. Now start talking about Biradingi, and just sit and cry. But I don’t have the time!’

He didn’t have the time to hear the tales, but all these fellows had all the time to create trouble. Meanwhile, Salaam Miya’s household had been rendered devastated. Everyone in the mob in front of the house was foaming at the mouth after screaming abuses and profanities from morning to noon. As soon as a few overeager youths from the mob dragged out the elderly Salaam Miya from his house, everyone screamed out – he needed to be taught an appropriate lesson. Salaam Miya moved forward in humiliation and terror, with the look on his face of a thief who had been caught. There was a group of youths behind him. He was taken to the Eidgah field. The interrogation began. ‘Instead of keeping someone else’s daughter in your family and raising her to be human, you raised her to be inhuman, Chacha? Tell me, how long has this been carrying on?’

‘I don’t know anything. I swear on Allah!’

‘Don’t act coy! Do you think we’ll accept it if you say you know nothing?’

‘Believe me, we don’t know anything. I’m dizzy. I knew about the matter with Maulana Saheb, but with Suman, when she—’

Someone there interrupted him with a taunt, ‘Did Suman too visit the house?’

‘He did once in a while.’

‘Your niece seems to have become a whore, dear! No one knows whom she leaves and whom she grabs. Doesn’t discriminate between Hindu and Muslim. But does that mean she will write such things that insult the religion on the mosque? How did she get such pluck?’

Salaam Miya likened himself to the elephant who had stepped on quicksand. And all the good-for-nothings of the world were kicking him. It became unbearable. Especially after hearing Riziya being called a whore, he couldn’t be still any longer. Startling everybody, he suddenly landed a slap on the fellow’s face. And then began Salaam Miya’s mass thrashing. He was freed after a while through Rafiq Ali Sheikh’s intervention. Once he arrived, everyone stepped aside. He, too, asked various questions. New information emerged. Maruf’s friends, Suman and Farid, had visited the previous night. So Farid might know something, and Nazir’s wife, Reshma, too, may know. The enraged mob rushed to find them. The more Farid said that he knew nothing, the more he was thrashed. Reshma, too, was subjected to a long interrogation. But how could the menfolk of the household accept such torment of a woman? And did Kalim Mirza in particular have to be subjected to this in his old age? Nazir was full of bluster. By dusk, all the fury turned towards a single direction – Jogipara. How did they have the audacity? All right, so you ran away with a Muslim girl, but to make her into such a hardcore kaffir! How dare she write such offensive things on the mosque wall! No, there was no way they could do this in Sadnahati. They were only a few families, they had to be driven out now!