More and more people, young and old, of different skin colours and
cuts of face, believers and non-believers, speaking as many different
languages as this country has to offer, need to get on to trains
heading for Gujarat.

We should go alone or in groups, whenever we can, for as little or
great a while as possible, again and again, over at least the next
one year.

Udit, Ditee, Nakul and Arindam, students from Delhi University,
worked with Anandi in the relief camps at Halol and Godhra. They
played with kids, helped them paint, took classes with them,
conducted need-assessment surveys for adults and children and helped
organise marriages between men and women from different camps,
marriages which could wait no more for the return of an ever elusive
'normalcy'. They travelled to the neighbouring village, Boru, and
listened to stories from the people of Delol, where 37 Muslims were
massacred.

The camps at Halol and Godhra were sheltering hundreds of people from
villages such as these in the Panchmahals, where death had ruled,
homes, crops and livestock had been plundered and devastated, and the
air was thick with threats of more murder and mayhem should Muslim
survivors attempt a return. In some cases they were being invited
back provided they forget and forgive and surrender their iman, their
Muslimness.

Arindam, too, escaped the potential wrath of young Bajrang Dal goons
lurking in the alleys of Godhra one night, whereupon Udit, a
god-fearing, spirit-scared, janeyu-wearing Brahmin lad from Assam,
sick of it all, freed his torso of the sacred thread and chucked it
in the garbage. It was his way of "registering a resounding silent
protest".

It was great seeing the four of them at work, and the affection and
regard that they had come to command among camp inmates without
themselves resorting to convenient populism. Arindam spoke of how he
gently and successfully challenged ideas of vengeful, retaliatory
communalism which he encountered among some young male Muslim
survivors of this pogrom.

Talking, discussing issues threadbare, is difficult and dangerous
work that is being undertaken by concerned citizens and activists all
over Gujarat. Anandi in the Panchmahals and Action-Aid's aman-pathiks
in Ahmedabad are trying, among other things, to encourage Hindus and
Muslims to re-invent their neighbourhoods by dialoguing with each
other and crossing communal 'borders' that have come to divide
Ahmedabad, for instance, since the late Sixties. Drops in the ocean,
stray strands of hope, these efforts need huge shots of imaginative
and energetic help, if Ahmedabad, Gujarat and, I dare say, large
parts of the rest of this country are not to go the way of Northern
Ireland, Beirut and Palestine.

Seven of us, six students and I, stayed in Ahmedabad between May 5
and 12 while the other four were in the Panchmahals. After four days
of calm, the dhamaal kept its date with the city, breaking out on
Sunday, May 5, like it had on every other Sunday during the past few
weeks since the toofaan got going, at exactly 2 pm, "after people had
had a good night's rest, an easy morning, a good lunch and then set
out for 'time-pass', looting, burning and killing". A three-wheeler
driver, a Hindu, stated the last bit rather matter-of-factly about
some of his co-religionists.

During the week that we were in Ahmedabad, people, mainly Muslim
labourers, venturing out fearfully to try and earn a day's wages,
were being burnt alive, hacked to death, their skulls smashed to
bloody pulp. Muslim bastis on the periphery of the old city were
torched and firemen had struck work for a couple of days because some
of them had been beaten up in Khaadia, a den of the Hindu Right-wing
in the heart of the old city.

Nobody who has ever stepped by and paused to look at these and so
many other cadavers of Muslim life and work in Ahmedabad is likely to
disbelieve stories about Kausar Bano and Naroda Patiya, Ehsan Jaffrey
and the Gulbarg Society, the enormous trishul and sword-wielding,
lust-filled tolas of Bajrang Dal and VHP men ruling the streets of
Ahmedabad, out to rape, maim and teach Muslims the lesson of their
lives, put them in their place as unequal beings in Gujarat's 'Hindu
Rashtra'.

I was really glad Divya and Emma were there because in camps the
women mobbed them and spoke. In the midst of it all, Emma would steal
a grimace at some children, and invariably, before they knew it,
children were coming out of the woodwork as it were, had displaced
the women, and were at play with Emma and Divya, squealing and
laughing with abandon. Alberuni, who has a way of attracting kids to
himself, remained in a supporting role while Banajit, thin and tall,
would look on, rubbing his chin, flashing the odd smile, the loss of
his spectacles hardly seeming to matter.

During playtime, the simple impromptu games that were played were
watched and enjoyed by almost all camp inmates. Divya and Emma would
suddenly become like performers of old, the madaari or the jaadugar
enchanting children not with the khel they performed for them, but
with the khel they played with them. For that precious slice of time
when everyone played, I think everyone forgot where we were, forgot
all that can never really be forgotten, all that must never be
forgotten. The vast majority of non-Muslim, largely Hindu Gujaratis
couldn't give a damn, at least right now, for the fate of Gujarati
Muslims.

With each passing day we felt increasingly unsafe and oppressed
living and walking in 'safe Hindu' Ahmedabad, simply because we were
not 'Hindu' enough for the Navrangpura-Naranpura Ahmedabadis. We were
visiting relief camps for Muslims and meeting with non-camp Muslims,
labouring people, Hindus too (not that this would redeem us in the
eyes of the west-side Ahmedabadis), many of them migrants from
eastern UP and Rajasthan, whose work and lives had spun down black
holes. We were meeting with families such as the Jawhers, who were
living in Paldi, professional and secular to the core, dazed, shocked
and sad at feeling forced to take refuge among people as different to
them as heaven from hell, but people who happened to be of their
religious kind.

Fifteen minutes before we boarded the Ashram Express for Delhi on May
12, I remember bursting the dam, showering unstoppable, intense
verbiage, letting off steam, and feeling much better. The insecurity
must have persisted like a bad hangover because I was actually
relieved to see men of the Rajasthan police board our compartment
once we'd crossed the border out of Gujarat. I felt we were in 'safe'
hands, perhaps one of the few times I've felt safe with the police.

In January 2000, a few months after the Kargil war and immediately
after the Kandahar hijack, when relations between India and Pakistan
were at their worst in many years, I travelled with students into
Pakistan. Despite the paranoia before the trip, all of us felt at
ease there. This is certainly not something that any of us can say
about our trip to Gujarat.

(To be continued)

The writer is a historian and filmmaker