A Chronicle of Hits and Misses

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A Chronicle of Hits and Misses

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My first memories of violence, fear, and insecurity go back to age four.

 “Don’t stand near the window!”

“Shut the lights, keep the chilli powder at hand…we will throw it in their faces if they come.”

“Mr. Nair has said not to worry, his Alsatians will protect us from the attackers.”

 This is on a prolonged visit to India, as my grandmother is observing her iddat there in our ancestral home. A Hindu-Muslim riot has broken out...

I remember the kindly Hindu gentleman with the fearsome dogs. He is one of our tenants, living nearby. I also remember Tai – everybody calls her that - an old Hindu lady, with a deep, almost masculine voice, she has also vouched to protect us come what may. She too lives in the vicinity. The Hindu servants of the household: ayahs Lacchia and Shanti, a driver, a maali, a maalan…they are the sweetest, most loyal people of the household, who have dedicated their lives for the service of our family. The loving care of all these people surrounds us, but despite this, the possibility of a mob-attack is scary.

Come1962, I am slightly older...

 There is a ramification in Karachi - my place of birth - of the anti-Muslim riots that have been erupting in some Indian cities. The sordid memories of the Karachi riots are still deeply etched in my mind.

 “Stay away from the windows!”

 “Let them pelt stones, we won’t give them what they want!”

These are the calls of my parents. There is a reversal of roles in these Hindu-Muslim riots. The attackers are frenzied Muslim ‘brothers’, driven by hate and revenge, urging my father to provide them with petrol or kerosene. They want to douse the belongings of our Hindu and Sikh neighbours living in the Guru Nanak Gurudwara just across the street.

The mob has already torched and broken down the main door of the temple, dragging out the family residing on the first floor. I shiver in terror, watching from a crevice of our enclosed balcony…the helpless gentleman and his wife pleading to the insane crowd for mercy. Imprinted in my memory is my father’s lone voice screaming and appealing all at once, urging the crowd to disperse. I remember watching in horror as the gentleman is given a blow on the head with a hockey stick and then a stone is hurled at my father as he pleads with the mob to release the couple. Bundles and bundles of the lady’s saris are brought out on the street for a bonfire.

Soon after that, scores of menacing men begin to bang on our doors with fists, kicks and hockey sticks, abusing us for not cooperating, for siding with the ‘kafirs’, continuously pelting our place with stones big and small.

Not a single glass pane of our house is spared. Our house, on Roop Chand Bela Ram Road, has a unique location; one side faces the Arambagh Road, another looks towards Pakistan Chowk, and the third has its orientation towards the Burnes Road. There are countless windows and ventilators in that double-storied house. My parents, my elder sister and I stand in the middle of a relatively safe room, but we are surrounded by glass – shards and splinters - all over the place.

It is a small price to pay for a principled stand. Thankfully, a police contingent arrives, dispersing the crowd and taking the Hindu couple with them but not before using lathi-charge and tear gas – the two kinds of weapons used by the police in those days.

For months the charred door of the gurudwara reminds us of the ugly incident. We did not see our neighbours again. The gentleman was a journalist who worked with an English daily.

Due to the close proximity of our house to several colleges, like the D.J. College, S.M. Science College, S.M. Law College, NED College (it was relocated at the present campus near the Karachi University some years later), we witness several student protests and demonstrations. In the late sixties and early seventies student uprising was a widespread phenomenon in many countries of the world, and in Karachi these almost always ended up in violence. Lathi-charge and tear gas used by the police to disperse agitating students is a common occurrence.

Our area is once again a victim of the reign of terror meted out by Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s supporters after he wins the election against Mohtarma Fatima Jinnah. The revellers of the victory procession, led by his sons, think nothing of avenging those who are believed to have voted for the sister of the ‘Father of the Nation.’

Another recollection of a mob attack that is also unsullied by the passage of time, on the tenth of Moharram, happens in the late sixties.  Processions are passing through Bunder Road (old name for M.A. Jinnah Road). My sister and I are with our father to witness these from the pavement, as is customary.

The words “Shia” and “Sunni” somehow get drummed into us at school – not by the teachers – but through other children our age who have no factual knowledge about the rituals practiced by the factions, but thrive on hearsay and disparaging tales for the followers on either side of the sectarian divide. But the loud beatings of the drums on Ashura day, and the beauty of the accompanying tazias hold a fascination for which we are more than willing spectators. Holding tightly on to my father’s hand, I remember running away from the crowd that particular hot afternoon, as it gets nasty. It doesn’t matter then whether it is the Sunnis who prompt an attack on the procession, or it is the Shias who have provoked it. It is difficult enough to save ourselves from glass bottle hurtles and brickbats of the rioters on the one hand, and police lathis and tear-gas on the other!

Although my generation is not a part of the Partition traumas that are faced by our parents when they migrated to Pakistan, we have nevertheless lived through two wars with India – in 1965 and in 1971.

At a young age, when nothing really prepared us for thinking critically, analysing, synthesising, and assessing information, or identifying misinformation and disinformation, the war of 1965 – glorified by our media – is justified in our minds, and no sacrifice seems big enough. But 1971 is different. The repercussion of this war and its indelible scars is felt deeply. I am not referring to the daily blackouts and huddling in trenches or crowding under staircases when the sirens signal an ‘enemy’ plane’s approach. I am referring to the impact felt due to the severing of one wing of the country.

My civilian psyche is etched with several other specific memories of such life-saving defences. However, it is ironic that at times the myriad problems, confrontations, and conflicts that our lives offer, are either personal or self-inflicted, but we also seem to have an equal number of our share for inadvertent incidences; of getting caught up in the wrong places at the wrong times. I feel I have had an ample share of it!

I am reminded of the shameful language riots of 1972, when our family barely manages to escape the wrath of a mob ready to set ablaze any moving vehicle. We have ventured out to meet my uncle at the airport, who is in transit there - coming from Canada and going on to India. The language riots are a product of the fear that the language of the mohajir community – Urdu - will overrun the Sindhi language – the lingua franca of the land. Therefore, this time around, it is these two communities at loggerheads with each other. The Sindhi-speaking Sunnis and Shias on one side, and the Urdu-speaking Sunni and Shias on the other!

But the worst first-hand encounter of being ‘in the thick of it,’ witnessing men turn into barbarians; lynching, looting, setting property on fire, and killing, is in 1984. By this time I have my own two children. Never before have I felt so utterly helpless, fearful and insecure. I guess it has also to do with the parental instinct of protection for the little ones who accompanied my husband and me to India.

For him it is a visit after exactly two decades. Our first stop is Bombay, where we have a swell Diwali-time before venturing to Jaipur, where the architecture and other street sights fascinate us. We fly to New Delhi on 30th October, and settle in a hotel on Connaught Circus.

My husband is not too happy with the small room that is allotted to the four of us, and discusses with me the possibility of moving to a nice spacious looking hotel located right across the street, perhaps the next day. We have plans to visit Agra on the 2nd of November, from where we would come back to Delhi to catch a flight to Indore – to meet his aunts, uncles and cousins.

 But destiny has other plans for us. On the morning of 31st October, while out on a stroll on Janpath, we hear the terrible news that India’s Prime Minister has been gunned down in New Delhi.

Bhindranwale, in tandem with the Akali leaders, had turned the sacred Golden Temple in Amritsar into an armed fortress of Sikh defiance. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s ‘Operation Bluestar’ against this most sacred site of the Sikhs, eventually brings about her assassination by her own Sikh bodyguards. All hell breaks out on that day, and for several more days, as thousands of Sikhs pay with their life for the crime committed by two or three persons. Police and the administration remain mute spectators to the violence, making no effort to stop or disperse the rioters.

We rush back to the safety of our cramped hotel room, but not before witnessing shops belonging to Sikhs being burnt and looted, taxies destroyed and burnt, and scores of people running after whosoever is bearded and turbaned, for lynching, killing…

As the riots escalate instead of simmering down on the second day, we are desperate to get out of the city. It is our first visit to Delhi. We had hoped to spend some memorable time here, in the beautiful autumn weather of late October. Our children, aged five and two, are not only terrified but they are also starved. There are no food supplies available. We plan to go to our other destination – Indore - but there are reports that it is the next worst-hit city after Delhi. We are therefore advised to return to Bombay, as that cosmopolitan city is perhaps the safest place to be in.

There is another piece of advice that is given to my husband. The manager of our hotel comes up to him and says politely, “Mr. Husain, Sir, I know you are a Muslim, but these are crazy times…you have witnessed scenes of the mob's fury. Bearded men are not safe even inside their hotel rooms, as they are being sought and killed. I strongly advise you to shave off your beard before you are mistaken for a Sardarji!”

My secular-minded, architect husband has sported a beard for many years. I plead with him to follow the manager’s sensible advice.  Reluctantly, he concedes, and with the help of a small disposable razor available for the job, he turns his ‘Pakistani’ beard into a ‘French’ one!

Later that afternoon, the hotel across the street – the one we had been eying - is also torched. We see it go up in smoke from inside our own hotel. Apparently, its unlucky proprietor is a Sikh.

                                           
Finally, on the third day, we gather courage to traverse this city of death in a taxi, and manage to reach the airport. On our way we witness several grotesque scenes - fire and smoke, charred bodies inside charred taxies…

The airport is spilling over with people who do not belong to Delhi and want to get out of here. We have made it to the airport at eleven in the morning, but no flights are available until midnight. There is no food and no water either. We are famished. The only consolation is the high security as dignitaries from the world over are pouring in for Mrs. Gandhi’s funeral. Our own General, Zia-ul-Haque, also arrives while we are waiting it out at the airport.

As we take off from Delhi, we know that this nightmare will always haunt us.

According to the reports reaching the airport, some 1,000 Sikhs are killed in east Delhi alone. Some 72 gurudwaras are torched, Sikh houses looted. We later learn that frenzied Hindu mobs killed nearly 10,000 innocent Sikhs across north India down to Karnataka in the 1984 carnage. At the time, those riots are said to be the worst-ever after the Partition riots of 1947.

Four years later, in 1988, we are on a pleasure trip to Turkey, and also to meet my husband’s many friends there. He has studied architecture in that country and wants to show us around. After a memorable stay in Istanbul, we reach Ankara on the very precise moment when an unsuccessful attempt is made to assassinate Prime Minister Turgut Ozal.

We have begun to feel guilty…

For a long time to come, our friends and family make us the target for jokes, as our presence in any capital city becomes synonymous with physical attacks on that country’s Prime Minister!

Then there are those long years from the mid-eighties until the mid-nineties, when uncountable incidences take place in which our family comes face to face with ugly situations. North Nazimabad, where we lived then, boasted better planning and wider streets and boulevards than our present abode in the elitist Defence Society. Nevertheless, we feel trapped from all sides, as there is always trouble all around us. Likewise, millions of people living in the Federal ‘B’ Area, Nazimabad, and Liaquatabad areas suffer a torturous, insecure existence. The fight for the control of Karachi - for the riches to be had from bhatta or ‘protection money’ – goes on for several years to add funds and fuel for politics. Kidnappings, political assassinations - with bodies found stuffed in gunny bags – blasts, attacks, torture cells and stockpiling of automatic weapons, are the order of the day. The most horrendous crimes are being committed, continuously, for a number of years.

Our children attend school in the Saddar area, and we work across the city from our home. It is a daily ordeal to not only plan a relatively safe route but also to circumvent the areas that are under a perpetual curfew. There is also the eternal fear of getting caught up in cross fire. Burning vehicles, mobs on streets, police and rangers brandishing their weapons, bullet-pockmarked apartment blocks on our various routes…all those features combine to contribute to a daily trauma. Our children are being subjected to these experiences, perhaps hallucinations, and flashbacks too. We have therefore become overprotective, hyper-vigilant parents!

I am back in Bombay in December 1992. This is immediately after the riots there in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition in Ayodhya on December 6, and the riots resume on the day I leave the city in early January 1993.

The ‘Operation Demolition’ of the 450-year-old structure of the disputed Babri Masjid-Ramjanmabhumi edifice, has been carried out by thousands of ‘volunteers’, and there is no resistance to the operation by the police. In fact the destruction takes place in full view of the top brass of some political parties. As a result of this, large-scale communal riots, especially in Bombay, Ahmedabad, Surat, and Calcutta leave more than 1,000 dead and almost 3,000 wounded in Bombay alone where there are two phases of bloodshed.

I am in the relative safety of the Bandra suburb, but almost every suburb has a chilling incident to narrate. An uneasy calm prevails. Walking the streets, I look over my shoulders every now and then. The violence in Bombay is most ferocious despite the fact that there has been no history of Hindu-Muslim tension in this city. This particular trip again brings home some hard facts. Once again, along with some public figures, numerous policemen are accused of complicity and of severe atrocities during the violence.

“For decades the Indian subcontinent has been haunted by mass fratricide in the name of religion. The tragedy of riots lies as much in the destruction of life and property as in the destruction of our fundamental beliefs — in justice, in reason, in humanity.” In Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India by Paul R. Brass; Oxford University Press, New Delhi, the author claims that large-scale Hindu-Muslim riots are primarily organised political productions. He focuses on "who - individuals, organisations or groups - produce riots, how and when do they produce them, and how is our attention diverted from questions that could be answered to questions that cannot?"

One would think that with this my chronicles of hits and misses would come to an end, but wait…

14 June 2002, I am sitting inside the room of an official of the U.S. Consulate on Abdullah Haroon Road in Karachi, where two other persons are also present. We are all invitees of the US State Department for an International Visitor’s Programme, and are asked to come in that morning to collect our passports and visas. I have nipped out of my office, and as soon as my passport is handed to me, I get up, look at the wristwatch and request my leave. But I am told that we must wait for the completion of another formality, as two other persons going with us are also expected to arrive any minute. I sit down once again. In the next four minutes, there is an earth-shattering explosion, throwing us off on the floor. The lights go off.

“Earthquake?” I wonder aloud, as I find my balance and grope for the sofa, dizzied by the sudden impact, but relieved to be alive.

“It’s a bomb!” the three other voices in the room say in cohesion. (Much later, they make fun of me that as a full-bloodied Karachi person, an earthquake, instead of a bomb, is foremost in my mind!) Simultaneously, there are some more loud bangs, mixed with the sound of shattering glass. We can also hear people outside the room…running helter skelter…shouting, screaming…there are voices urging everyone to come out.

The four of us run outside, led by two US marines, into a dark corridor. There is broken glass everywhere. We are asked to squat on the floor. A shaft of light is coming in from somewhere…and I can see that at least ten more people are crouching in that corridor, all lined up with their backs against the walls.

It is eerie, surreal. And my heart is sinking. My limbs have gone numb as thoughts such as: “Will there be more explosions?”

“Will the roof cave in?”

“Will we make it?”

“Is this the end?” drift in and out of my mind.

The marines are back in the next few minutes, saying it is not safe to be inside the building, so it must be vacated. We are herded outside, to assemble in the parking lot facing the side-road between the Consulate and the Marriott Hotel.

We move like zombies …

The fifty or more people gathered in that lot all seem terribly shaken. Nevertheless, we are all grateful to be alive. Some people are treating those who have received minor injuries from flying glass shreds. Mobile phones are not working…I am worrying myself sick thinking how desperate my husband would be to learn of my safety. I am also thinking about my colleagues back at the office, and my two children in faraway USA, who too know that I am to get my visa from the Consulate this morning. The entire world must have learnt of the bomb blast by now!

But the person I am most concerned about is my driver who is sitting somewhere outside, waiting for me. I want to get out and look for him, but we are not allowed to go anywhere for two long hours, as there are security concerns.

The explosion is massive. A senior employee of the Consulate says that earlier in the mayhem, she ran outside on the road. It was littered with blood, mutilated human bodies, and remains of vehicles all over the place. Devastated, she is feeling faint and sick, barely able to stand.

We learn later that the car bomb has killed 12 passers-by and seriously wounded more than 20. Thankfully, my driver is safe, although he is temporarily deafened by the impact of the explosions.

For a long time, I cannot stop thinking that I would have been walking on the pavement outside the Consulate - towards the car parked on the side-road - at precisely the time of the explosion and blown up into pieces. It is a hit and miss.

Despite coming face to face with a number of dreadful, life-threatening situations in my life, I have not come to any physical harm so far, but for how long can one remain lucky?

In September 2003, I attend a three-day regional meeting on Education for Peace and Conflict Prevention in Kathmandu, Nepal. Upon arrival at the hotel, we are informed that we should prepare for a ‘bandh’ (curfew) declared for three days by the Maoists. It means that the entire country, in particular Kathmandu, would be virtually shut. That afternoon, as I stroll out to buy some books about contemporary Nepal, the intimidating presence of soldiers and tanks on the main streets force me to make a hurried retreat to the hotel. Violence has now become a regular feature in this beautiful Himalayan country, a far cry from the peaceful and serene Nepal that I visited with my family some years ago. It is ‘bandh’ on arrival and ‘bandh’ on the way back to the airport after three days, but it is useful to exchange views on the socio-political realities of our South Asian countries, and look for ways and means for working together to achieve amity in the region. 

It has become imperative that we work locally and regionally for a human-rights sensitive education. This necessitates that we teach our children the difference between intolerance and tolerance, war and peace, apathy and activism, despair and hopefulness and also about rights and responsibilities. Let us teach them that a better world is indeed possible if we wish for it with sincerity, and work for it with commitment.