As winter set in, the Bandicoot developed a deep, chesty cough. Anjum gave her teaspoons of warm milk with turmeric and kept awake at night listening to her asthmatic wheeze, feeling utterly helpless. She visited the dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya and spoke to one of the less mercenary Khadims whom she knew well about Zainab’s illness and asked him how she could neutralize Saeeda’s sifli jaadu. Matters had got out of control, she explained, and now that it concerned much more than the fate of one little girl, she, Anjum, who was the only one who knew what the problem was, had a responsibility. She was prepared to go to any lengths to do what needed to be done. She was prepared to pay any price, she said, even if it meant going to the gallows. Saeeda had to be stopped. She needed the Khadim’s blessings. She became theatrical and emotional, people began to stare and the Khadim had to calm her down. He asked her whether she had visited the dargah of Hazrat Gharib Nawaz in Ajmer since Zainab had come into her life. When she said that for one reason or another she hadn’t been able to, he told her that that was the problem, not anybody’s sifli jaadu. He was a little stern with her about allowing herself to believe in witchcraft and voodoo when Hazrat Gharib Nawaz was there to protect her. Anjum was not wholly convinced, but agreed that not visiting Ajmer Sharif for three years had been a serious lapse on her part.
It was late February by the time Zainab recovered enough for Anjum to feel that she could leave her for a few days. Zakir Mian, the Proprietor and Managing Director of A-1 Flower, agreed to travel with Anjum. Zakir Mian was a friend of Mulaqat Ali’s and had known Anjum since she was born. He was in his mid-seventies now, too old to be embarrassed about being seen traveling with a Hijra. His shop, A-1 Flower, was basically a hip-high cement platform, a meter square, located under the balcony of Anjum’s old home, at the corner where Chitli Qabar opened into the Matia Mahal Chowk. Zakir Mian had rented it from Mulaqat Ali—and now from Saqib—and had run A-1 Flower from there for more than fifty years. He sat on a piece of burlap all day, making garlands out of red roses and (separately) out of brand-new currency notes that he folded into tiny fans or little birds, for bridegrooms to wear on the day of their nikah. His main challenge was and had always been to keep the roses fresh and damp and the currency notes crisp and dry within the small space of his shop. Zakir Mian said he needed to go to Ajmer and then on to Ahmedabad in Gujarat where he had some business with his wife’s family. Anjum was prepared to travel with him to Ahmedabad rather than risk the harassment and humiliation (of being seen as well as of being unseen) that she would have to endure if she traveled back on her own from Ajmer. Zakir Mian, for his part, was frail now, and happy to have someone to help him with his luggage. He suggested that while they were in Ahmedabad they could visit the shrine of Wali Dakhani, the seventeenth-century Urdu poet, known as the Poet of Love, whom Mulaqat Ali had been immensely fond of, and seek his blessings too. They sealed their travel plans by laughingly reciting a couplet by him—one of Mulaqat Ali’s favorites:
Jisey ishq ka tiir kaari lage
Usey zindagi kyuun na bhari lage
For one struck down by Cupid’s bow
Life becomes burdensome, isn’t that so?
A few days later they set off by train. They spent two days in Ajmer Sharif. Anjum pushed her way through the press of devotees and bought a green-and-gold chadar for one thousand rupees as an offering to Hazrat Gharib Nawaz in Zainab’s name. She called the Khwabgah from public payphones on both days. On the third day, anxious about Zainab, she called again from the Ajmer railway station platform just before she boarded the Gharib Nawaz Express to Ahmedabad. After that there was no news either from her or from Zakir Mian. His son called his mother’s family home in Ahmedabad. The phone was dead.
THOUGH THEY HAD NO NEWS from Anjum, the news from Gujarat was horrible. A railway coach had been set on fire by what the newspapers first called “miscreants.” Sixty Hindu pilgrims were burned alive. They were on their way home from a trip to Ayodhya where they had carried ceremonial bricks to lay in the foundations of a grand Hindu temple they wanted to construct at the site where an old mosque once stood. The mosque, the Babri Masjid, had been brought down ten years earlier by a screaming mob. A senior cabinet member (who was in the Opposition then, and had watched as the screaming mob tore down the mosque) said the burning of the train definitely looked like the work of Pakistani terrorists. The police arrested hundreds of Muslims—all auxiliary Pakistanis from their point of view—from the area around the railway station under the new terrorism law and threw them into prison. The Chief Minister of Gujarat, a loyal member of the Organization (as were the Home Minister and the Prime Minister), was, at the time, up for re-election. He appeared on TV in a saffron kurta with a slash of vermilion on his forehead, and with cold, dead eyes ordered that the burnt bodies of the Hindu pilgrims be brought to Ahmedabad, the capital of the state, where they were to be put on display for the general public to pay their respects. A weaselly “unofficial spokesperson” announced unofficially that every action would be met with an equal and opposite reaction. He didn’t acknowledge Newton of course, because, in the prevailing climate, the officially sanctioned position was that ancient Hindus had invented all science.
The “reaction,” if indeed that is what it was, was neither equal nor opposite. The killing went on for weeks and was not confined to cities alone. The mobs were armed with swords and tridents and wore saffron headbands. They had cadastral lists of Muslim homes, businesses and shops. They had stockpiles of gas cylinders (which seemed to explain the gas shortage of the previous few weeks). When people who had been injured were taken to hospital, mobs attacked the hospitals. The police would not register murder cases. They said, quite reasonably, that they needed to see the corpses. The catch was that the police were often part of the mobs, and once the mobs had finished their business, the corpses no longer resembled corpses.
Nobody disagreed when Saeeda (who loved Anjum and was entirely unaware of Anjum’s suspicions about her) suggested that the soap operas on TV be switched off and the news be switched on and left on in case, by some small chance, they could pick up a clue about what might have happened to Anjum and Zakir Mian. When flushed, animated TV news reporters shouted out their Pieces-to-Camera from the refugee camps where tens of thousands of Gujarat’s Muslims now lived, in the Khwabgah they switched off the sound and scanned the background hoping to catch a glimpse of Anjum and Zakir Mian lining up for food or blankets, or huddled in a tent. They learned in passing that Wali Dakhani’s shrine had been razed to the ground and a tarred road built over it, erasing every sign that it had ever existed. (Neither the police nor the mobs nor the Chief Minister could do anything about the people who continued to leave flowers in the middle of the new tarred road where the shrine used to be. When the flowers were crushed to paste under the wheels of fast cars, new flowers would appear. And what can anybody do about the connection between flower-paste and poetry?) Saeeda called every journalist and NGO worker she knew and begged him or her to help. Nobody came up with anything. Weeks went by with no news. Zainab recovered from her bout of illnesses and went back to school, but outside school hours she was querulous and clung to Saeeda night and day.
TWO MONTHS LATER, when the murdering had grown sporadic and was more or less tailing off, Zakir Mian’s eldest son, Mansoor, went on his third trip to Ahmedabad to look for his father. As a precaution he shaved off his beard and wore red puja threads on his wrist, hoping to pass off as Hindu. He never found his father, although he did learn what had happened to him. His inquiries led him to a small refugee camp inside a mosque on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, where he found Anjum in the men’s section, and brought her back to the Khwabgah.
She had had a haircut. What was left of her hair now sat on her head like a helmet with ear muffs. She was dressed like a junior bureaucrat in a pair of dark brown men’s terry cotton trousers and a checked, short-sleeved safari shirt. She had lost a good deal of weight.
Zainab, though momentarily a little frightened by Anjum’s new, manly appearance, got over her fear and propelled herself into her arms shrieking her delight. Anjum held her close, but responded to the tears and questions and welcoming embraces of the others impassively, as though their greetings were an ordeal that she had no choice but to put up with. They were hurt and a little frightened by her coldness, but uncharacteristically gracious in their empathy and concern.