My name is AD. Alok Dandika. Once, a man who had lost his ability to write poems, and with it, the world he had once inhabited, came and took shelter beneath me. That was when he named me AD. 

His name was VP. Vipin Prasad. And then there was LK. Lallan Kumar, the dog. 

Together, we became a team. A motley little team perched at the edge of the street, watching the world go by and talking among ourselves in subdued voices. Well, VP did most of the talking. LK and I mostly listened, agreed, or disagreed. 

I was responsible for the light. I illuminated the small patch of pavement beneath me and offered VP a place to lean against. LK took care of the nighttime howling. He chased motorcycles, strutted about with the pride of a much larger animal, and coaxed an astonishing number of belly rubs from VP. 

As the nights passed, our communication improved. If I spotted, from a distance, someone shady or nosy approaching our little corner, I would blink or whirr softly. LK would immediately prick up his ears, stiffen his bony frame to make himself look more menacing, and begin to howl. VP would straighten himself and stare into the darkness, ominous in his ragtag clothes and frozen expression. 

Between the three of us, the danger was usually enough to keep its distance. Passers-by, however ill-intentioned, would think twice before coming too close. In the dead of night, on our empty street, we looked like an unlikely little fortress. Yes, at night, the street corner belonged to us. 

There were nights when nobody came. Every night, VP would talk anyway. He spoke to the darkness, to LK, to me, perhaps even to himself. He told us about poems he could no longer remember, people whose names he had forgotten, and places he would never return to. Sometimes he would fall silent midway through a sentence, as if he had suddenly reached the edge of a cliff. LK would rest his head on VP’s feet. I would keep shining. 

One day, while VP was retelling his ever-unfinished story about a faraway place called Mumbai, he told LK and me that money fluttered there like wild birds, and that one needed the wherewithal to catch them. Waves crashed against the sand from an endless body of water called the ocean, only to leave behind mountains of plastic bottles on the shore. 

People in Mumbai, he said, walked and talked very fast. Nobody had the time to stop and look at the actual birds, though they flew everywhere, darting about like mad creatures. Their sense of comprehension, VP explained, had been compromised by the constant transmission of mobile signals. 

LK listened, his head tilted to one side. I kept shining. VP continued. 

Suddenly, a car came hurtling down the empty street. It slowed only for a moment, stopped some distance from us, and a white bundle was thrown onto the road. Before any of us could understand what had happened, the car sped away. 

LK sprang up and ran after it, barking furiously. As usual, he gave up after a while and returned, panting and irritated. 

VP and LK approached the white bundle. It lay completely still on the road. LK sniffed it carefully and, after a few cautious moments, gave what I understood to be an all-clear. VP bent down and began untying the cloth. I leaned my light towards them, curious to see what was inside. It was the body of a woman. 

Later, VP would tell me that her face was as beautiful as Saira Bano. I never understood what a Saira Bano was, but VP seemed to think her beauty was something worth remembering. The woman's face, however, was smeared with blood.  

VP thought it was best to leave the Saira Bano on the footpath, wrapped tightly in her white cloth. He said that meddling in such affairs could attract the police, who, according to VP, were the nastiest creatures ever to walk the planet. LK and I agreed. 

Our story session that night had been interrupted by the sudden arrival of Saira Bano, and VP had completely lost his train of thought. There was no point trying to bring it back. He sighed, leaned against me, and decided it was time to sleep. LK, too, wandered around for a while, peeing here and there, marking his kingdom, before curling himself into a ball and falling asleep. Saira Bano lay alone in the distance, on the footpath. 

I was bored. But what else could I do? The story session had ended abruptly. So, I kept counting the morning stars, one by one, as they slowly disappeared into the pale light of dawn. 

The next morning, there was quite a commotion on our little street. A crowd had gathered, everyone wondering where Saira Bano had come from! 

She had first been discovered by the safaiwalas, who swept the road every morning. They told the milkmen and newspaper boys, who told the morning walkers and the members of the laughter club in the nearby park, who eventually called the nasty creatures known as the police. 

Before the police arrived, a group of men and women appeared, carrying cameras, microphones, and other equipment. They surrounded Saira Bano from every side. Everyone was shouting over everyone else. They were talking about sansani khez khabar, sensational news. 

“Nasik ke Indiranagar ke footpath par mili ek bewaris mahila ki lash.” 

(A woman's body, abandoned on the footpath in Indiranagar, Nasik.) 

“It seemed she had been murdered, and her body had been dumped on our street”. 

The cameras kept rolling. The microphones kept moving from one shouting mouth to another. 

“Ka Nasik hi mahilansathi ek asurakshit shahar banta aahe ka?” 

(Was Nasik becoming an unsafe city for women?) 

The same street that had belonged to us at night, by morning, became a crowded, chaotic crime scene. 

Then, from a distance, I saw a police jeep arrive. The policemen and one woman all looked groggy, sleep-deprived, and profoundly bored. They were a sharp contrast to the earlier group of impeccably dressed men and women with microphones and cameras, who had seemed almost delighted and so excited by the morning's developments. 

The nasty creatures, as VP called them, stepped out of the jeep and immediately began shouting at the enthusiastic crowd. They pushed people back, told them to move away, and grumbled at anyone who came too close. 

They marked the outline of Saira Bano's body on the pavement. For a moment, her shape remained there, a pale absence against the road. Then they lifted her and placed her inside a van. Just like that, Saira Bano disappeared. 

As the people with the microphones and cameras began one last bout of howling over one another, offering their opinions and speculative versions of what might have happened, a police officer strolled towards VP. 

He squatted in front of him and began asking questions. Had VP seen anything? Had he heard anything? He had been sitting right there, after all, almost directly beside where Saira Bano had been found. 

The people with the microphones and cameras suddenly realised that a possible eyewitness was sitting among them all along. Their attention shifted instantly. They surrounded VP, flanking him with microphones and cameras, each trying to catch his words before the others could. The crowd that had gathered followed their gaze. Now that Saira Bano was gone, VP became the center of their curiosity. They thronged around him. 

VP was annoyed. No, more than annoyed, he was actually scared. He did not like being watched, questioned, or having so many people suddenly interested in him. He shrank into himself, his eyes darting from one face to another. Seeing VP so uncomfortable made me angry too. I began to whirr, louder than usual, trying to make my protest heard. 

But daylight was cruel to me. My little mechanical voice was swallowed by the noise of the crowd, the traffic, the shouting, the cameras, the questions. LK, however, was much more effective. He barked loudly at the crowd and bared his teeth, standing between VP and the people who had begun closing in around him. The crowd hesitated. Then, slowly, they took a few steps back. 

It turned out that at that moment the most effective of them all was the apparently nasty creature in khaki. The officer who had been questioning VP suddenly lost his patience. He shouted and screamed at the crowd, ordering everyone to disperse. His sidekicks came running with sticks. They made the whole crowd retreat in no time. 

I heaved a sigh of relief. The nasty creatures were powerful, I thought. But just then, the police gathered around VP, ushered him towards the jeep, and drove away. I watched them disappear down the street. LK barked and followed the jeep, but to no avail. For the first time in months since he came, VP was gone. 

LK and I did not know what to do. So we simply watched as the crowd slowly thinned and disappeared. We were creatures of the night, after all. Daylight had never belonged to us. 

During the day, VP would usually sleep. Every once in a while, he would wake up and walk to the nearby public toilet, then return and curl up beneath me again. He ate very little too. One bun and one chai in the morning from a nearby tea stall. Two chapatis and a chai in the evening. That was all. 

He often told us that, since coming here, he no longer felt hungry. In his previous life, he said, he had eaten a lot. A lot. But he could no longer remember much about that life.  

Soon, evening arrived, but there was still no sign of VP. I began to worry. What if the nasty creatures in khaki had done something to him? What if he had got lost on his way back? What if he had been taken somewhere and could not find his way home? LK lay curled up at my feet, unusually quiet and morose. 

Then night began to settle over us. Suddenly, LK lifted his head. It was as if he had caught a familiar smell carried by the evening breeze. His ears straightened. His whole body became alert, and then he began to bark. And no wonder. Far down the street, I saw a familiar figure walking slowly towards us. VP! LK sprang up and ran towards him, barking with excitement. I blinked my lights once. Then twice. I whirred softly, my little way of saying, Welcome home. VP smiled when he saw us. And for that moment, at least, everything was as it should be. Our little family was together again. 

VP sat down heavily and leaned against me. He looked exhausted. For a while, he said nothing. He simply caught his breath while LK rested his head on VP’s feet, as if making sure he was truly back. Then VP spoke. 

“The woman’s name is Nivedita,” he said. Her inlaws, according to the police, were very rich. Yet they had killed her because she could not fulfil their endless demands for money.  

VP told us that the police had questioned him for hours. They asked him, again and again, what he had seen. They showed him photographs and videos of people and asked whether he recognised anyone from the previous night. But VP insisted that everything had happened too quickly. He had seen only the shape and colour of the car, and perhaps a fleeting glance of the people inside. Nothing more. Still, the questions continued. 

The police also asked his name, his identity, where he came from, why he lived on the street, and where he had been before arriving here. To most of these questions, VP remained tight-lipped. Frankly, he did not remember much. Or perhaps remembering hurt too much. 

One police officer, VP said, became exasperated and remarked, “Even when we finally get a witness, it turns out to be a madman who is of no use.” Another officer disagreed. He said that even if the madman could identify the car, he could still become an important witness. 

VP smiled faintly as he told us this. “So,” he said, “they all seem to agree that I am mad.” 

He paused for a moment. “That is a relief.” 

Then VP recited a poem. It was about a woman who had been killed by her in-laws. The poem was not about Nivedita. It was about another woman, someone VP claimed to have known in his previous life.  

Strangely, VP remembered his poems even though he could no longer remember the people who had inspired them, or the places where he had met them, or the events that had once filled his life. The poems had somehow survived the forgetting. Well, almost. Sometimes even a poem would slip away from him. He would be halfway through a line, pause, and stare into the distance, searching for the next words. Sometimes he found them. Sometimes he didn't. I often wondered if the poems were the last pieces of his old life still hiding inside him. 

Suddenly, while VP was reciting his poem, his eyes closed and his back rested against me; a cavalcade of cars arrived. 

Two big cars. Three smaller ones. And, trailing behind them, a police jeep. 

What now? I wondered. LK began barking at the cars, his sudden alarm breaking the quiet of the evening. VP opened his eyes and stared at the approaching vehicles, completely flabbergasted. A few people stepped out. 

Then they rushed towards VP. They hugged him. Some began crying. Others began talking over one another, their voices rising into the familiar human chorus of grief and relief. 

“What are you doing here in Nasik?” an old woman cried. “On the street? Under the open sky? Beneath a lamppost?” 

She sounded as though she had just discovered the most terrible thing in the world. 

“We have been searching for you for months now, Papa!” said another man. He looked shocked and relieved at the same time, as if he could not quite believe that the man they had been searching for was actually sitting there, alive. 

“Let’s forget all this and go home, Papaji,” said a heavyset woman in a bright saree, her wrists and neck covered in jewellery. 

VP looked from one face to another. He seemed to half-recognise them, and yet he didn’t. Perhaps there were fragments of recognition somewhere inside him, but they were too faint to gather into anything whole. 

More than anything, he seemed overwhelmed by so many people crowding around him. Two people with cameras were filming the family reunion, capturing every hug, every tear, every question. 

“Today, we saw you on the news in the afternoon. We immediately set off. We drove for four hours, and in the meantime, the Nashik police called and alerted us too,” the man kept blabbering, as though he needed to fill the silence with words. 

“How did you end up in Nashik, Papa? Of all places?” asked another young woman, still hugging VP. Everyone seemed overwhelmed with emotion at seeing him. 

“Stop asking millions of questions. Let’s just go home first,” the old woman chided them. And just like that, she took VP by the hand and led him towards the car. Nobody asked what he wanted. Nobody asked whether he wanted to go. Nobody asked anything to me and LK either. They simply decided that he was going home. 

VP seemed too overwhelmed by everything to protest. Or perhaps, beneath all that confusion, he was happy to be going back with these people. Perhaps some part of him recognised what his mind could not. 

But before stepping into the car, VP stopped. He bent down and patted LK gently on the head. Then he turned back and looked at me. Just once. I think he smiled. But before I could whirr or blink to say goodbye, the others ushered him into the car. 

And then VP was gone. 

LK ran after the car for a while, but he did not bark. He simply ran until the car disappeared, then slowly returned and curled himself into a ball at my feet. He went to sleep.  

The two big cars were gone, along with the police jeep. But the two smaller cars remained, along with a few men and women. Two women stood before two cameras, facing in opposite directions, and began shouting into their microphones. 

“The scenes you have just witnessed, exclusively on our channel, are mind-blowing! Vipin Prasad Tiwari, the National Award-winning poet and Bollywood songwriter, missing from Mumbai for more than two months, has suddenly been found on the streets of Nashik!” 

Their voices rose over each other. 

“He has been living here all this while, on the streets, right under this very street lamp, for more than two months!” 

“While the Mumbai Police have been desperately searching for him, and various theories, including kidnapping by the underworld mafia, have been discussed extensively on news channels, including ours, Vipin Tiwari was spending his days right here, beneath this street lamp!” 

“The exclusive images of this extraordinary discovery are with us!” 

“As they say, truth is stranger than fiction!” 

The two women continued shouting, each trying to outdo the other, while their cameras dutifully captured every word. Then, just as suddenly as they had arrived, they packed up their equipment and left. The street fell quiet again. 

I looked at the patch of pavement where VP used to sit. 

For the first time, I wondered whether he had ever really belonged to us at all. 

He hadn’t. No one ever belongs to a lonely street  lamp. 

(This story was written as a writing exercise in the creative workshop curated by )

“We were leaving our home behind forever. We loaded all that we owned onto a bullock cart and set out from our village, Jamittya, towards the Padma jetty. From there we would cross the river, make our way to Nadia, and then catch a train to Kolkata. Well, that was the plan…” my grandfather would say.

His voice invariably softened whenever he spoke of his Desh. The word is often translated simply as “country”, but for him it meant something far deeper. It was the homeland of his birth, the landscape of his childhood, the place where his ancestors had lived and died. It was the East Pakistan he had been forced to leave behind forever, the land that would later become Bangladesh. Even decades later, the memories lingered in his voice like an ache that time had never managed to heal.

“We were moving slowly in the bullock cart. The children and your grandmother were seated inside, while my younger brother and I walked alongside,” my grandfather recalled.

By “the children”, he meant my father, his elder brother, and his two sisters, all of them no more than toddlers or young children, the eldest barely ten years old. Too young to understand that they were not merely travelling to another place, but being carried away from the only home they had ever known.

The partition did not take place with the consent of the ordinary people like our family, but they were the ones who bore its brutal brunt. My family too walked down their familiar village roads, leaving all their property behind, towards an uncertain future in a completely unknown land. They had no choice. However, the passage till the Padma jetty didn’t turn out to be a smooth walkout. They were stopped on the road.

Around ten or fifteen men, accompanied by a few teenage boys, suddenly stopped their bullock cart and dragged it towards a nearby school building. The upheaval of Partition had already brought ordinary life to a standstill. The school had long ceased to function and its abandoned classrooms stood as silent witnesses to the violence engulfing the land.

The men ordered my grandfather and his younger brother to remain beside the cart and warned them not to move. They obeyed without protest. Each of the men held a large chopper whose polished blade caught the afternoon sun, making resistance seem unthinkable. As they stood there, paralysed by fear and drenched in anxious sweat, every passing moment stretched into an eternity.

Then one of the teenage boys walked up to them. Wearing a smile that seemed grotesquely out of place, as though he were bringing welcome news, he said, “Tomago kaitya phalaibe.” They have decided to chop you to pieces.

My grandfather and the rest of the family had nowhere to run. Helplessly, they watched as the men began sharpening their choppers.

“Were these men all Muslims?” I asked, my own breath growing heavy. I could not bear the thought of my entire family being hacked to pieces.

“Yes,” my grandfather replied quietly. “They were all Muslims.”

Years later, while teaching narrative in a Methods of Sociology course, I often found myself returning to that conversation. I wondered what might have become of me had my grandfather chosen to end his story there. What if he had stopped with a group of Muslim men, their choppers gleaming in the sun, threatening to massacre my entire family? What if that was all he had left me with?

I had learnt that the men were Muslims. That single fact, detached from everything that followed, could easily have planted the seed of an enduring hatred in the mind of an impressionable child. As I grew older, I might have watered that seed with selectively remembered stories of violence committed only by Muslims, allowing it to take root until it grew into a dense forest of prejudice. Such is the power of narratives. They do not merely recount the past; they shape the moral worlds we come to inhabit.

But my grandfather did not stop there.

“Suddenly we heard a commotion,” he continued. “Hundreds of people came running from the nearby village towards the school. They were led by the imam of the local mosque. As soon as they arrived, they grabbed those men by the collars and began beating them. The women rushed to your grandmother, held her close, and assured her that no harm would come to us. Somehow the village had learnt that we had been held captive, and everyone came running to our rescue.

“They took those men away and then escorted us safely to the Padma jetty. Again and again, they apologised for what had happened. They called those men rogues and said, ‘We did not ask for this Partition. We do not know who did.’ They were ordinary people, just like us. And every one of them was also Muslim.”

That ending settled something deep within me, perhaps forever. I grew up knowing that a handful of rogue Muslims had almost butchered my family, but that hundreds of ordinary Muslims had risked themselves to save them. It was a story that refused to let hatred find a permanent home in the heart. It taught me at a tender age that evil belongs to no religion, no community, no nation. It belongs only to those who choose it.

Had my grandfather ended his story a few minutes earlier, I might have inherited fear. Instead, because he chose to tell the whole story, I inherited gratitude. His narrative became a balm upon a wound that had never truly been mine, yet had somehow lodged itself in my chest. The terror of almost losing my family was transformed into something else entirely: an enduring remembrance of strangers whose names I will never know, whose faces I will never see, but to whom I shall remain indebted for as long as I live.

Two ideas have always made me profoundly restless: a permanent job and a permanent home.

Years ago, when I was teaching as an ad hoc lecturer at Delhi University, I lived through the annual ritual of renewing my appointment. Every academic session brought with it the familiar anxiety of uncertainty. Once two semesters ended, nothing was guaranteed. The insecurity was exhausting, yet I never once applied for a permanent position, despite being fully qualified to do so. My colleagues found this incomprehensible.

“How can you not apply?” they would ask, often with genuine disbelief, urging me not to throw away such an opportunity. My answer was always the same. “What if I get selected?” That response usually left them speechless.

But the thought of waking up every morning knowing that I would spend the rest of my working life doing the same thing, in the same institution, within the same walls, felt less like security and more like confinement. It seemed to ask me to surrender the possibility of becoming someone else, of wandering into unfamiliar worlds, of allowing life to surprise me. There was something unbearably final about it.

Of course, the obvious counterargument is that no permanent job is truly permanent. No one forces you to stay. You can always resign when something better comes along.

In theory, that is true. In practice, permanence has a gravity of its own. The comfort of a secure salary, the predictability of routine, the quiet assurance that tomorrow has already been taken care of begin to anchor you. In ways you scarcely notice. The chains are soft, almost invisible, which is precisely why they are so difficult to break.

The same is true of a permanent home.

Owning a house, whether inherited or painstakingly bought, does not mean you are condemned to live there forever. You can always move. The doors are not locked. Yet leaving is never as simple as it appears. Moving demands money, time, effort, and emotional energy. It requires dismantling a life and rebuilding it elsewhere. Unless there is a compelling reason, the sheer cost of beginning again often makes the idea seem unnecessary, even wasteful.

A permanent residence has a peculiar way of growing roots around you.

It is not that those roots cannot be pulled out. They can. People do leave homes, cities, even countries. But most of us do not. We slowly mould ourselves to the place, and the place quietly moulds itself around us. Neighbours become familiar, streets become memory, and walls begin to hold fragments of our lives. Without ever making a conscious decision, we settle.

Once that happens, movement no longer feels like possibility. It begins to feel like disruption.

More often than not, we remain where we are until the next generation inherits the house and decides its fate. The home outlives our restlessness, and permanence quietly becomes our default condition.

There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with permanence or security. In fact, they are among the greatest achievements of human civilisation. For thousands of years, people have struggled to build exactly these things: a stable home, a secure livelihood, a predictable future. They offer protection against uncertainty and shelter against the chaos of life. In the grand logic of civilisation, permanence makes perfect sense.

It is only that I have always been strangely allergic to this ideal.

The promise of permanence, which comforts so many, unsettles me instead. Perhaps this is merely a personal eccentricity. I have consciously tried to keep a slight distance from certainties, wary of how easily security can turn into attachment, and attachment into inertia.

By not seeking permanent jobs or permanent homes, I am not rejecting stability itself. I am only trying to remain alert to the gentle traps that civilisation sets for us, the comforts that slowly become anchors, and the anchors that, before we realise it, become our boundaries.

Now, listen to my theory about why some of us are wired this way.

I often wonder whether a few of us have inherited, in some faint and stubborn form, the instincts of our earliest ancestors. Before cities, before property, before civilisation itself, human beings lived as hunters and gatherers. They followed the rhythms of the seasons, hunted animals, gathered fruits, nuts, and roots, and moved constantly from one landscape to another. When the resources of a place were exhausted, they had little choice but to leave and search elsewhere.

Life offered no permanence.

Nor was there much room for accumulation. What they hunted or gathered could rarely be stored for long. They took from nature only what they could consume before it perished. The idea of surplus, of savings, of stockpiling for an imagined future, had little meaning in such a world. Survival depended not on possession but on movement, not on ownership but on adaptability.

Their lives were uncertain by necessity. Tomorrow could never be guaranteed. Home was not a fixed address but wherever the group happened to rest before setting out again.

Sometimes I wonder whether a fragment of that ancient restlessness still survives in a few of us. Whether, despite everything civilisation has taught us to desire, some part of our minds remains more at ease with movement than settlement, with possibility than permanence.

The rest of the world, the sensible majority, it seems to me, carries the temperament of the settled cultivator rather than the wandering forager.

These were the people who chose to stay. Instead of searching for food, they learned to grow it. Instead of consuming only what they needed, they discovered the value of storing grain against drought, flood, winter, and famine. In time, surplus ceased to be merely insurance against uncertainty. It became wealth, trade, profit, and power.

With settlement came boundaries.

Fields had to be marked, villages defined, kingdoms defended. The invisible lines drawn around cultivated land gradually became the visible frontiers of states and, eventually, nations. Property acquired meaning. Ownership became sacred. To belong somewhere was no longer simply a matter of memory or companionship. It became a legal, political, and emotional condition.

This settled imagination also gave us the idea of home as a permanent refuge. It promised the warmth of a familiar hearth, the security of a fixed address, the comfort of neighbours who knew your name, and the reassuring certainty that tomorrow would look much like today. It is, by every practical measure, a remarkable achievement of civilisation.

But then there are a few of us who, for reasons we scarcely understand ourselves, continue to feel an inexplicable pull towards the road rather than the hearth, towards departure rather than arrival, as though some ancient wanderer still whispers beneath all the layers of civilisation.

It is a quiet whisper, but an insistent one. It urges us to leave before we have fully settled, to loosen our roots before they grow too deep, to remember that movement is also a way of belonging. It reminds us that permanence is only one way of living, not the only one.

More often than not, we do not obey it.

We, too, after all, are creatures of civilisation, bound by its obligations and seduced by its comforts. Families need us. Careers anchor us. Society rewards those who stay, who build, who accumulate, who remain. And so we negotiate with that ancient voice. Sometimes we resist permanence. At other times, we surrender to it, telling ourselves that this is simply how life must be lived.

Yet the whisper never quite disappears. Beneath our carefully cultivated routines, beneath the habits that civilisation has patiently taught us, something older refuses to fall silent.

Perhaps it is only imagination. Or perhaps, hidden somewhere beneath our skin, lodged deep within the memory of our bodies, the hunter-gatherer has never entirely left us. It waits, patient as ever, reminding us that long before we learned to build homes, we kept walking.

For more than two decades, the people of Thoothukudi (Tuticorin) in Tamil Nadu resisted the establishment and operation of the Vedanta Sterlite copper smelting plant in the heart of their town. Their opposition did not emerge overnight; it was born of lived experience, sustained by collective memory, and strengthened by an unwavering conviction that economic development cannot come at the cost of human life and the environment. Before arriving in Tamil Nadu, the project had already been turned away by three states: Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Goa. Yet in 1996, it found a home when the Tamil Nadu government allotted it land.

Tamil Nadu has long nurtured a distinctive tradition of environmental resistance. Time and again, its people have risen to defend the air they breathe, the groundwater they depend upon, and the coastline that sustains millions of lives. Unlike in many other parts of India, environmental struggles here rarely remain confined to courtrooms or the campaigns of a handful of activists. They evolve into people’s movements, drawing into their fold fisherfolk, peasants, small traders, daily wage workers, students, and shopkeepers, or ordinary citizens whose lives are inseparable from the landscapes they inhabit.

This was true of the movement in Kodaikanal against the Unilever thermometer factory, accused of mercury contamination. It was true of Kudankulam, where local communities waged a long and determined struggle against the nuclear power project. And it was equally true in Thoothukudi. In Tamil Nadu, nature is not viewed as an abstract ideal to be preserved from afar; it is the very foundation of everyday existence, livelihood, health, and dignity. Consequently, environmental degradation is never merely an ecological concern; it is experienced as an assault on the lives of the people themselves. It is for this reason that environmental questions in the state have repeatedly transformed into powerful mass movements, carried forward not by a privileged few, but by entire communities determined to protect the world they call home.

By 2018, the movement had reached a breaking point. Mounting evidence of contamination from the plant’s copper waste, coupled with the worsening health of Thoothukudi’s residents, lent renewed urgency to the struggle. On 22 May, the 100th consecutive day of protest, thousands marched towards the Sterlite plant in a final act of collective defiance. The police opened fire on the unarmed crowd, killing twelve people. The following day, another protester was shot dead.

This was neither the first time that protesters in India had fallen to police bullets, nor would it be the last. Yet the Thoothukudi firing bore a chilling distinction. Photographs emerged of a police sniper calmly taking deliberate, aimed shots at the heads and chests of protesters. These were not the indiscriminate shots of a force struggling to contain an allegedly “unruly” mob, as the Tamil Nadu Police later claimed. They revealed something far more disturbing: the calculated use of lethal force against citizens. This was not merely excessive policing. It was murder.

The Thoothukudi uprising, and the sacrifice of thirteen lives, ultimately compelled the government to permanently shut down the Sterlite copper smelting plant. The Supreme Court, too, declined to order its reopening. Since then, Vedanta has repeatedly sought to revive the plant through legal and regulatory avenues, but without success. In that sense, the people’s movement prevailed. It achieved what years of petitions, warnings, and appeals had failed to accomplish: the closure of a factory they believed had poisoned their land, water, and air. Yet while the movement won, those who laid down their lives never received justice.

In the aftermath of the killings, the Tamil Nadu government constituted the Justice Aruna Jagadeesan Commission of Inquiry. Its findings were unequivocal. The police firing, it held, was “avoidable and unjustified.” It found grave failures of leadership by the district administration and the police in handling the protests. The use of live ammunition, it concluded, was disproportionate and in clear violation of established procedures. The Commission found no credible evidence that the protesters posed an imminent threat warranting such lethal force. It recommended disciplinary as well as criminal proceedings against several police officers and senior officials, while also condemning the failures of planning and intelligence that allowed the situation to spiral into bloodshed.

Yet despite these categorical findings, not a single police officer has been held criminally accountable. Not even the self-styled sniper, photographed taking deliberate aim at the heads of protesters, a haunting image that travelled across the country and came to define the massacre. Some cops were temporarily suspended, but no one was indicted in the long run. The state killed thirteen of its own citizens in Thoothukudi. Their killers still walk free. Justice never arrived. And perhaps the cruelest tragedy of all is this: have we already forgotten them?

Tell me, do you remember Mohsin Sheikh?

Well, many do not remember him. Because when Mohsin Shaikh was killed, he was the first victim of what would later become the epidemic of mob lynching in India. The word “lynching” itself had not yet entered our everyday vocabulary by then. Not in English television debates, and certainly not in the spoken lexicon of our native languages. The sight of a helpless man, usually Muslim, sometimes Dalit, being beaten to death on the street over the flimsiest of pretexts, while the police looked away and the nation slowly learned to shrug, had not yet been normalized. That would happen in about three more years. 

Actually, Mohsin Sadiq Shaikh’s murder was going to open a magnificent can of cannibal worms that would multiply enthusiastically over the next decade and slowly chew through the foundations of a painstakingly built democracy, all while television anchors screamed about civilization and culture.

Mohsin Shaikh was lynched on a road in Pune by goons of the Hindu Rashtra Sena. His offence was truly extraordinary. Some unknown persons, from some foreign corner of the globe and in absolutely no way related to Mohsin, had uploaded objectionable and indecent images of Balasaheb Thackeray, Chhatrapati Shivaji, and Hindu gods a year earlier. Then, after Narendra Modi came to power, some especially tender-hearted Hindu extremists stumbled upon those images and exploded in righteous grief and patriotism.

About 200 public buses in Pune burned in the fire of their wounded sentiments, while there were scuffles, vandalism, performances of rage, and the usual audition for majoritarian masculinity. And in the middle of all that fragile heartbreak, 24-year-old techie Mohsin Shaikh was beaten to death.

Why? Well, because he was Muslim. A skullcap-wearing, beard-sporting, visibly Muslim man who happened to belong to the same religion as the alleged uploaders of those morphed images, sitting somewhere else on the planet. A year earlier.

Mohsin Shaikh, the IT manager of a textile company, was returning home from work on his bike on 4 June 2014. Narendra Modi had taken oath as Prime Minister barely days earlier, on 16 May, and the country was already learning how quickly triumphalism could mutate into menace.

A group of around 25 rioters from the Hindu Rashtra Sena, many of them startlingly young, two reportedly minors, stopped Mohsin near Hadapsar on the outskirts of Pune while they were busy terrorizing the city in defence of ‘wounded’ religious sentiments. They dragged him off his bike, hit him on the head with stones, and killed him on the road.

Apparently, in his skullcap and green Pathani kurta, Mohsin looked a little too Muslim for the intoxicated gaze of enraged HRS zealots to tolerate. And when mobs are drunk on power and purported grievance, certain visibility itself becomes a punishable offence.

After killing Mohsin Shaikh, one of the zombies sent a chillingly revealing message: “Pahili wicket padli”, first wicket down.

This established two things very clearly.

First, a game had begun. A thrilling national sport in which Muslims most enthusiastically, but also Dalits, OBCs, Adivasis, queer people, inconvenient women, troublesome students, annoying journalists, and frankly anybody at all, could be heckled, harassed, intimidated, jailed, or eventually killed for crimes that mobs merely hallucinated they had committed.

Second, scores were being kept. And, naturally, “settled.”

Once human beings become wickets, democracy quietly turns into a stadium full of spectators pretending not to notice the blood on the pitch.

It began with a sudden shortage of coconuts in the market that day. The local administration took note that there had been an unusual surge in coconut sales in Deorala village, Rajasthan. There was no festival, no ritual marked on the calendar to explain it. Something else was unfolding.

Curiosity turned into unease as the local head constable with two juniors traced the trail of coconuts to the outskirts of the village. There, they found a swelling crowd, hundreds of people gathered, not in alarm, but in anticipation. At the center of it all was an eighteen-year-old girl, Roop Kanwar. Just a day earlier, she had lost her 24-year-old husband, Maal Singh. Now, she was being consumed by the flames of his funeral pyre.

What should have been a moment of horror was rather transformed into a spectacle of devotion. The air was thick with chants, drumbeats, and the piercing sound of conch shells. Reverence hung heavy over the crowd as the young girl was elevated, almost sanctified, as “Sati Mata.”

And in that moment, as the fire rose and the crowd watched in awe, something far greater burned alongside her. Not just a young life, but a promise, the fragile, hard-won ideals of a constitutional republic. On the pyre of Maal Singh, a piece of modern India’s conscience seemed to turn to ash. It was the 4th of September, 1987.

By the time the police arrived, it was already too late; Roop Kanwar could not be saved. What remained was not just ash, but a question that refused to die. Who compelled her to burn?

The spectacle had already revealed one crime: the open glorification of sati, wrapped in celebration and reverence. But beneath the chants and rituals lay darker, more unsettling doubts. Was there coercion hidden behind that devotion? Did Roop Kanwar walk toward the pyre of her own will, or was she led or pushed into the flames?

Did she choose death, or was it chosen for her? As the fire raged, fed by heavy logs and heaps of coconuts, it was impossible not to wonder: did those flames consume a willing participant, or did they silence a resisting body?

This was a time before television cameras and smartphones could carry such spectacles into every home in an instant; a time when even the most devastating events in remote villages could unfold unseen, unrecorded, unchallenged.

Roop Kanwar’s own parents did not know. They had not been told of Maal Singh’s death. They had not been told that their daughter, barely eighteen, was being led to his pyre, whether by choice or by force. No one thought it necessary to inform them.

They learned the truth the next morning, not through a voice, not through a messenger, but through a small, chilling news item buried in a local newspaper. The headline read with cruel finality: “Aakhir Roop Kanwar Sati ban hi gayi.”

In that moment, the words did more than report an event; they delivered death. Her parents discovered, in print, that their living daughter had been reduced to ash, surrounded by reverent onlookers, none of whom chose to intervene.

Gradually, the silence broke, and the news began to travel. National newspapers turned their gaze toward the incident, probing, questioning, refusing to let it pass as ritual. Fact-finding teams, many led by urban activists, arrived in Deorala, determined to uncover what had really happened that day.

Sati had been outlawed long ago, in 1829, under colonial rule. It was meant to be a closed chapter, a practice buried in history. And yet, beneath the surface of a modern republic, it had not entirely disappeared. There had been a quiet, troubling resurgence, particularly in parts of Rajasthan, where women continued to be consumed on their husbands’ pyres.

Most of these deaths passed without notice, unrecorded in public memory, but they existed. In fact, as many as 37 other women had burned as satis in independent India since its birth on 15th August, 1947. Thirty-seven lives, reduced to ash in silence, long before the nation was forced to confront the fire again.

Since Roop was turned into ashes and her in-laws were taken into custody and not many people were ready to open their mouths about what exactly happened, it was tough for media persons and fact-finding teams to recreate the exact chronology of incidents. However, after going through various accounts, all quoting different eyewitness testimonies, one could recreate three situations. Which one you believe depends on your perspective rather than the narrator’s.

Scenario 1:
Maal Singh complained of acute stomach pain and was taken to the Sikar hospital on the 3rd of September. He did not survive; the cause of death was recorded as gastroenteritis. The next day, as preparations for his cremation began, Roop Kanwar, his young, grieving wife, told her father-in-law that she wished to become Sati.

She dressed in her bridal clothes and walked at the head of the funeral procession. Word spread quickly, carried from mouth to mouth, and by the time they reached the cremation ground, hundreds had gathered, many carrying coconuts as offerings.

She is said to have told her father-in-law that her only regret was that she had not been able to serve him enough. Those were believed to be her final words.

She then sat upon the pyre, recited the Gayatri Mantra, and raised her hands in a gesture of blessing. The pyre, some claimed, lit itself with fire. As conch shells echoed and gulal filled the air, Roop Kanwar was transformed, from a teenage widow into a deified figure. In that telling, she did not die; she ascended, becoming Sati.

Scenario 2:
In another account, the same procession looks very different. Roop Kanwar walked, but unsteadily, her body swaying, her steps unsure. She appeared dazed, as if drugged, her consciousness slipping in and out. Seven Rajput boys, swords in hand, joined her in support in the procession.

When she was made to sit on the pyre, her composure broke. She cried out for her parents, “Mummy, Papa” her voice cutting through the ritual chants. Her last words, in this version, were filled not with devotion, but with longing: “I couldn’t even say goodbye to my parents.”

The fire did not ignite on its own. It was lit by Pushpendra Singh, Maal Singh’s 15-year-old brother. The flames struggled; the pyre had to be fed again and again, relit when it faltered for lack of ghee. At one point, the structure gave way, and she nearly fell.

Those who watched saw not serenity, but struggle, her arms moving frantically as the flames closed in, a body resisting even as it was being consumed.

Scenario 3:
The decision for sati was not Roop Kanwar’s at all, it was taken by Maal Singh’s family. Preparations began swiftly, almost methodically. When Roop learned what was being planned, she fled. For some time, the ritual halted not out of doubt, but because she was missing. They found her cowering inside a barn.

Dragged from her hiding place, she was dressed up, transformed against her will into the image of a “Sati.” As she was brought out before the gathering crowd, witnesses say she was frothing at the mouth, her body betraying trauma and intoxication of some kind. The sword-wielding men encircled her, and ensured there would be no second escape.

When she was placed on the pyre and the fire was lit, her voice rose above the chaos “Bachao, bachao” (save me). But her cries were swallowed by the deafening sounds of conch shells, by chants, by celebration.

The flames faltered in between the burning and had to be reignited. The pyre broke; she tried to come out. But the weight of the logs, the coconuts, and the bodies guarding the fire held her down. Her hands moved wildly, not in blessing, but in desperation, until even that movement disappeared into the fire.

As I said, which of these versions one chooses to believe often depends on where one stands. History is rarely a single, settled narrative; it is shaped, contested, and retold through many competing voices. But in the case of Roop Kanwar, those differences in perspective were not just academic; they determine whether her death would be remembered as devotion or as violence.

In 1987, it ultimately fell upon women’s organizations to push the state into action. They moved the courts, demanding accountability, not only the arrest of Maal Singh’s family, but also a ban on the Chunri Mahotsav, a ritual celebration that openly glorified sati, held just thirteen days after her death.

The arrests did not come easily or immediately; they followed intervention from the then Union Home Minister, P. Chidambaram, and sustained pressure from social groups and women’s rights organizations who refused to let the matter fade into silence.

And yet, even as the law spoke, the ground told a different story. The Chunri Mahotsav was not physically stopped. The police, so often swift and forceful when dispersing crowds demanding rights or justice, stood by passively. Their benign presence was reduced to mere distribution of precautionary pamphlets, citing the High Court ruling against the gathering.

The Commission of Sati Prevention Act was passed first in the Rajasthan Assembly in 1987 and then in the Union Parliament in 1988. It henceforth banned the occurrence and glorification of Sati. A total of 45 people were arrested on the charge of murder and abetment of suicide of Roop Kanwar. Of these, 25 people were acquitted of all charges in November 2004. Some died, and nine ultimately stood trial, but all of them were acquitted of all charges in 2023.

So, at the end, the perspective that prevailed is that Roop Kanwar voluntarily killed herself on her husband’s pyre, and the onlookers, provokers and abettors committed no crime by letting her die. Even if they did, there is no sufficient evidence. Even if there were, it doesn’t matter anymore.

For two years prior, a chariot, less a vehicle than a travelling theatre of purported grievance, rolled across the nation, cloaked in the language of devotion but freighted with division. It provoked, it inflamed, it sharpened old suspicions into fresh hostilities. Words turned to confrontations; confrontations to riots. And when the Babri Masjid fell on 6 December 1992, it did not fall alone; it dragged the fragile fabric of secular coexistence in the country down with it.

What followed was not merely unrest, but a kind of unravelling. Communities that had shared centuries of quiet familiarity began to eye one another with a startling, almost rehearsed hostility. The same neighbours who once borrowed sugar in the evening or exchanged vegetables from their kitchen gardens woke up, as if on cue, to the discovery that they now despised each other. They summoned rage for injuries neither of them had inflicted, for histories neither of them had lived, stretching back six centuries into a past both distant and selectively remembered and conveniently evoked for propaganda.

Among the cities scarred by the violence, Mumbai bore the deepest wounds. The nation watched, almost disbelievingly, as its financial nerve center, which was so fond of advertising its cosmopolitan ease, its tidy fiction of equality under the benevolent gaze of capital, was consumed by a far older fire: hatred, division, and bloodletting.

But this is not a recollection of the riots themselves. By early 1993, the violence had ebbed, though not before claiming close to a thousand lives and injuring many more. By June, the city had begun the slow, awkward business of recovery, wounds scabbing over, if not quite healing; the smoke clearing, though the air still heavy with what had been lost.

And then, almost incongruously, came a cinematic intervention. In June 1993, Bollywood released a music video directed by Subhash Ghai, with lyrics by Javed Akhtar and music composed by Laxmikant-Pyarelal. It was not just a song, but an attempt, tentative, perhaps, to speak into the silence that violence leaves behind.

In this video, a procession of Bollywood’s leading men (only men, lest we forget), both hindu and muslim stars, earnestly lip-synced to a song that mourned the riots and sermonised on communal harmony. “Pyar ki Ganga bahe, desh mein ekta rahe”, let the river of love flow, let unity prevail. Between verses, they turned to children, boys and girls alike, as if deputising innocence itself, urging them, through melody and mild insistence, to inherit a gentler country than the one right now on display.

Now, why does this unabashed manel, this all-male roll call of virtue, fail to stress me as much as it perhaps should? Because those riots themselves were, in no small measure, a grim theatre of male machismo. A sixty-something male politician, burnishing his electoral ambitions, invoked a resolutely male deity exalted as Maryada Purushottam (the supreme man of  moral rectitude) and found backing in an organisation whose women’s wing exists, but whose corridors of power have always exclusively echoed with male voices alone.

Yes, a decade later, figures like Maya Kodnani and Uma Bharati would step into more conspicuous roles during the pogrom in Gujarat. But in 1992–93, women were largely cast at the margins, present, affected, but seldom allowed authorship in a script written, directed, and performed overwhelmingly by men. So perhaps it is no surprise that, once the dust settled, a line of conscientious men stepped forward, part penitent, part performers, to make lyrical amends for a catastrophe their own fraternity had so enthusiastically choreographed.

All that said, let’s be fair. Gender imbalance notwithstanding, the video was, at heart, an earnest attempt by the filmmakers to coax a bruised society back toward harmony, a society that had, for a time, misplaced its moral compass.

Its most arresting moment came with the lines: “ab naa dushmani pale, ab naa koyi ghar jale; ab nahi ujde suhaag, ab nahi faile yeh aag” (let there not be anymore enmity, let no more houses burn, let no woman lose her husband, let’s not allow this fire to spread anymore), a plea as simple as it was devastating. And crucially, the song did not float above reality. It grounded itself in it. The visuals drew from real footage of the violence and its victims, refusing the easy temptation to sanitise the recent past in the name of reconciliation.

In that sense, it stood apart from the usual sarkari choreography of “peace committees,” where harmony is often manufactured by amnesia, forget, forgive, and move on, preferably without asking inconvenient questions or demanding justice. This video, by contrast, did not look away. It acknowledged the scale and cruelty of what had unfolded, and only then, pleaded for harmony. 

The song was played on a loop on Doordarshan, that old, omnipresent custodian of the national gaze, slotted just before prime-time news, when viewership reliably peaked. The state, in effect, endorsed it: an official admission that something had cracked, and a tentative attempt to mend it is necessary.

No, the video was not perfect. Neither, for that matter, was the government. And yet, today, when scorched aftermaths of many violences seem to flicker everywhere, when the air feels thick with the acrid residue of communal hate and the slow, steady seep of division, we are left with a different kind of spectacle altogether: a Bollywood increasingly fluent in jingoism.

Against that backdrop, the song acquires an unexpected dignity. It did not posture, nor did it peddle amnesia. It was, at the very least, an attempt to speak of repair without pretending there had been no rupture.

And so, when I now encounter the spectacle of Bollywood actors, once again Hindu and Muslim alike, though once again conspicuously male, bouncing about with all the solemnity of a circus chorus, chanting “Gobhi Gobhi, Gobhi hai toh Pumpkin hai,” I find my mind drifting back to that older, almost monotonous refrain.

 A song that did not dazzle, did not amuse, but tried, however imperfectly, to offer a moment’s reprieve to a wounded society.

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin has pointed out that the process of redrawing constituency boundaries, ostensibly to ensure fair representation in keeping with rising populations, will punish the more affluent southern states.

These states have been more successful in controlling their numbers, so they would have a lower proportion of representatives in Parliament than the more populous northern states if delimitation is conducted in line with results of the next census.

But it is not just southern states that will lose out. A look at the manner in which delimitation has previously been undertaken shows that the representation of Dalits and Muslims could also be reduced.

What is delimitation?

Articles 82 and 170 of the Constitution say that the number of seats in the Lok Sabha and state legislative assemblies should be readjusted after each census. This delimitation process is performed by the Delimitation Commission, which was set up under an act of Parliament.

The delimitation process also determines whether a constituency will be reserved for members of the Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes.

Constituencies were redrawn after the 1951, 1961, and 1971 census operations. However, in 1976, the process was stalled for the next 25 years to encourage population control programmes. It was decided that the 1971 population would be considered the baseline to determine the number of constituencies.

In 2001, when the time came to readjust the size of constituencies as per the Constitution and to increase seats, the Vajpayee government, due to the fragility of its coalition, decided to postpone the decision on increasing the number of seats for the next 25 years.

However, a delimitation commission was set up in 2002 to focus only on redrawing the boundaries of many constituencies and on reserving constituencies for members of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Its recommendations were implemented in the general elections in 2009.

The decision to increase the number of seats was kept on hold for another 25 years.

The 2021 census, which would form the basis for the next set of changes, had to be postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic and delays from the Central government. As a consequence, the next delimitation process is likely to start in 2026.

In the meantime, two pilot projects have taken place: in Jammu and Kashmir in 2022, after its special status under the Constitution was abrogated, and in 2023 in Assam, which was kept out of the purview of delimitation in 2009.

These previous exercises show that delimitation has often resulted in discrimination against minority communities. It has also failed to advance the cause of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities.

Muslim representation

One of the most common forms of discrimination is gerrymandering: electoral boundaries are drawn in ways that divide Muslim-majority areas, diluting their voting strength.

This can prevent Muslims from having enough influence in any single constituency, making it harder for community representatives to win elections.

After the scrapping of the former state’s special status, the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019, mandated fresh delimitation, by increasing assembly seats from 83 to 90. The seat count in the Jammu region increased from 37 to 43. This strengthened the region’s influence in the state assembly.

In the Muslim-majority Valley, however, after delimitation, seats increased by just one, increasing to 47. Besides, six of the nine newly reserved Scheduled Tribes seats are in Valley, while three are in Jammu.

In Assam, when fresh delimitation processes were undertaken in 2023, some problems became evident.

For example, Dhubri and Barpeta used to be Muslim-majority seats. Both had Muslim populations of more than 60% and always elected Muslim MPs. After delimitation, three Muslim-majority assembly seats of Barpeta – Chenga, Baghbar, and Jania – were transferred to Dhubri, increasing its voter base drastically by 10 lakh.

As a result, only Dhubri Lok Sabha now has a high Muslim population but Barpeta was realigned, reducing the Muslim population to 35%.

In West Bengal, the Katwa Lok Sabha seat had a Muslim population of around 40%. From 1952 to 2009, it has always elected a Muslim MP. In 2009, this constituency was divided into two Lok Sabha seats – Bardhaman Purba and Bardhaman Durgapur.

Both have an estimated Muslim population of around 20%. Besides, Bardhaman Purba is reserved for a representative of the Scheduled Castes. Since delimitation, neither of these constituencies has elected a Muslim MP.

Muslim-majority seats reserved for SCs/STs

In some cases, the Delimitation Commission has reserved seats for members of the Scheduled Castes or Scheduled tribes even though there are fewer members of these communities and more Muslim residents. This has effectively reduced Muslim numbers from the legislatures.

Here are some examples, though the actual list is much longer.

Discrimination against SCs, STs

Ironically, some seats have been reserved to benefit Dalits and Adivasis but there are several seats, in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies, that have significant populations of these communities but are unreserved and open to be contested by all communities.

This has hindered the emergence of effective community leaders from the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in areas where they have strong numbers and can raise the issues of these communities.

South Indian states

Since the size of constituencies was frozen in 1976 with the census data of 1971 as its basis, India’s population has witnessed a manifold increase, coupled with substantial shifts in internal demographics.

In Bihar, for instance, each Member of Parliament represents approximately 3.1 million citizens, while in Kerala, the corresponding ratio stands at 1.75 million.

If the delimitation is undertaken based on the 2026 census, southern states – which have implemented family planning measures effectively – may experience a reduction in the number of parliamentary seats allocated to them.

If the total number of seats in the Lok Sabha is retained at the current figure of 543 and reapportioned among states based on the projected population of 2026, the difference between some North Indian and Southern states will be significant, as the table shows.

Further, if the number of seats is increased to 848, based on the projected population of 2026 in a house in which proportional representation for all states remains the same, the difference between some Northern states and the Southern states will be as follows:

A decrease in representation will diminish the political influence of southern states in the Lok Sabha, affecting their ability to advocate for favorable policies and secure adequate resource allocation from the Central government.

Road ahead

In October 2024, a Supreme Court bench passed an order upholding the court’s power to review orders of the Delimitation Commission if they are deemed arbitrary or in violation of constitutional principles.

This has left a window of hope open for citizens to challenge delimitation principles that limit the representation of marginalised communities or certain states.

However, more than judicial intervention, it will take definitive political action by political parties to ensure equity in the process. Instead of merely highlighting how Southern states will be underrepresented after the process, the Opposition should also speak out on how delimitation will hurt the representation of Muslims and members of the Scheduled Castes and Tribes.

[The original article can be found here ]

Do you remember? Ganesh drinking milk? No? Fair! Cause Gen Z wasn’t even in the group chat yet, and early ’90s millennials were still busy being adorable toddlers. But the older crowd will definitely recall this one.

On September 21, 1995, a rumour did what rumours do best, travelled faster than facts, and caught the whole country in its grip (and then even hopped on a metaphorical flight overseas). It all began one morning in New Delhi, where someone claimed that an idol of Lord Ganesh in a temple was… drinking milk. Yes, sipping it from a spoon.

Within hours, the story spread nationwide like gossip at a family wedding. Devotees lined up outside temples across the country, clutching bowls of milk, eager to witness, or assist in, this divine dairy preference.

Right outside our house in Kolkata stood a Shitala Devi mandir, dedicated to the popular local deity thought to guard the masses against smallpox. By afternoon, however, the temple priest had a revelation of his own, not exactly spiritual, but rather entrepreneurial. Sensing the scale of the frenzy, he quickly installed a makeshift Ganesh idol in the temple, ready to make the most of the day’s… liquid assets. And no wonder, queues of devotees soon appeared outside the temple’s gate with bowls of milk in their hands.

And mind you, this was all happening in a time when “going viral” didn’t involve hashtags. Mobile phones weren’t glued to every hand, cable TV was still a luxury, and the internet hadn’t yet taken over every waking moment of our lives. And yet, the rumour spread, efficiently, enthusiastically, and with impressive logistical coordination for a pre-digital age. However, later sociological analysis found the frenzy to be limited to urban spaces alone and did not make much of a dent in the rural ecosystems. That was possibly because the landline telephone network connected the cities more; while news travelled fast from New Delhi to New York (Courtesy ISD), it could not penetrate much into the villages, because telephone exchange had not reached there extensively in the 90s.

Why did I remember this episode now? Well, we’ll get there. But first, a quick throwback to the media’s role that evening, which, refreshingly, decided to put on its thinking cap instead of joining the milk queue.

Private news channels were just beginning to find their feet in India. Prannoy Roy hadn’t yet launched NDTV and was still hosting the now-iconic News Tonight on Doordarshan, an era when prime-time news didn’t shout at you, it gently reasoned with you. Whether it was that show or others on DD, the coverage came with a side of science.

Experts stepped in to demystify the so-called miracle. With the help of humble props like pieces of wood and stone, they demonstrated that this “divine thirst” was really just good old capillary action at work. Turns out, idols weren’t picky: milk, water, even whiskey (purely for experimental purposes, of course) would do the trick, all thanks to surface tension quietly doing its job.

Meanwhile, investigative journalists took things a step further. Cameras ventured behind the scenes, literally, to capture milk trickling out from the backs of statues in steady streams. Not quite the celestial sipping people had imagined.

And then came the gentle but pointed reminder from the media: in a country where many infants go hungry, this wasn’t just a curious phenomenon; it was an unfortunate waste. A sobering note, served alongside the science, in a moment that briefly proved facts could still cut through frenzy. The invisible guillotine-blade labelled as ‘hurting religious sentiments’ hasn’t hung on the general public yet in this country. Religion and particularly superstitions emanating from religious discourses, under the garb of spirituality, could still be questioned/ criticised freely.

And that, perhaps, is why the memory came rushing back. Watching visuals of 11,000 litres of milk being poured into the Narmada, with TV channels and newspapers reverentially branding it a “grand ritual,” felt like déjà vu, only this time, the script had been… lightly edited.

To be fair, a few channels did attempt to squeeze in a dissenting note. Some scientist did appear on some English TV channels, a touch cautiously, explained how such large quantities of milk in a river might not exactly be a treat for aquatic life. Fish, one assumes, didn’t sign up for a sudden milk spa. But those voices were fleeting, almost apologetic, as if they had wandered into the wrong program.

Vernacular media, in particular, seemed far more invested in poetic fervour than inconvenient facts. The coverage leaned heavily into words like aastha, bhavya abhishek, aitihasik dharmic ayojan, each more grandiose than the last, turning the event into a spectacle of devotion rather than a moment worthy of scrutiny.

Take for example this report from Aaj Tak:

MP के सीहोर जिले से भक्ति और श्रद्धा की एक अद्भुत तस्वीर सामने आई है. भेरूंदा इलाके के सातदेव स्थित पातालेश्वर महादेव मंदिर में 21 दिवसीय महायज्ञ का भव्य समापन हुआ. इस अवसर पर 11 हजार लीटर दूध से मां नर्मदा का अभिषेक किया गया, जिसका वीडियो अब सोशल मीडिया पर तेजी से वायरल हो रहा है.

(From the district of Sihor in MP, we are getting an incredible image of devotion and reverence. In Satdev of the Bherunda area, is the Pataleshwar Mahadev temple, where a grand 21-day-long maha yajna was recently concluded. On this occasion, 11000 liters of milk were used for the coronation of Maa Naramada. The video of this event is going viral on social media.)

The rest of the report also uses the same language of veneration and admiration.

Promoting scientific temper isn’t just a nice idea we occasionally dust off; it is a constitutional duty. And yet, today, it feels like that duty is quietly, almost tragically, slipping away. It is being drowned out in a loud, relentless chorus of unquestioned religious fervour, communal noise, and the easy spread of misinformation.

What makes it more unsettling is not just what we are losing, but what we are passing on.

Children are growing up in this atmosphere, watching and listening, absorbing it all as truth. They are being taught implicitly and insistently to admire the spectacle of 11,000 litres of milk being poured away in the name of devotion. To celebrate it, even. And in doing so, they are also being taught to look away from the uncomfortable realities: rivers being polluted, aquatic life struggling to survive, and countless other children going to bed hungry, denied even a fraction of what is so casually discarded.

(‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,’ said Milan Kundera. It’s important to remember. I will write every week about something that I remember from the past. Join me in my journey down memory lane. Let’s crowd that road and bring back pebbles to share.)

The cloth that Bhumi had worn on her final day, had now become dust like the rest of her body and the rope that tied the stones around her ankle. The cloth was soiled, torn and bore stains of her dried blood. In her lifetime too, her clothes were soiled and often stained with the blood of the dead bodies from which they came. Puran Bhau, the village priest explained things diligently to them. Sometimes he quoted the Shastras. He explained why the black thread identifying their caste had to be worn, how the spittoon around the neck was indispensable because spit of a cursed body cannot touch the ground, and why the broom that the men had to wear could not be done away with either because it swept away their cursed dust. Puran Bhau said if they were obedient now, who knew, in the next life they could be born as a kunbi or even a Deshmukh.

Not everyone was that lucky. Bhumi had been stuck at the bottom of the well for many years. She wondered what happened to her mother, Prema Bai. Was she reborn as a beautiful Deshmukh lady? Did she finally live a dignified life?

Bhumi heard a sound of a dry scratching and looked up. Puran Bhau who stayed on the walls of the well, like a lizard, was crawling his way up, like he always did. His fat body was a shapeless shadow from all these years of crawling; especially his paunch, which had hilariously deflated. Bhumi laughed out loud, her usual shrieking cold laughter. Puran Bhau glared at her with contempt and disgust. ‘Mlechchh!’, he looked disdainfully down on Bhumi, quite literally, and angrily threw a fistful of dried moss from the wall of the well at her. Bhumi cackled and tossed a fistful of pebbles back at him. He crawled up and the stones rained back on Bhumi’s shadowy body. Puran Bhau, for probably the thousandth time, was aghast at the audacity of the Mlechchh and cursed the fate that got him stuck in the well forever with such a lowly creature.

Their own village, where Puran Bhau and Bhumi lived in two completely different worlds, had withered away a long while back and, in time, was filled by new villages and new people. But even they avoided the well. Not only was it completely dry by then, but on certain nights, shrieks and howls came out of it, which would chill the bones of even the most rational rationalists.Those were the nights when Bhumi rued her fate and relived the pain that her cursed body had to permanently bear. Those were the nights when she lamented going to shit in the morning, alone, in the outer field where Rajaji Deshmukh’s brothers and their sidekicks smoked opium. On some nights, Puran Bhau banged his head on the wall of the well and let out similar wails. Sometimes they synchronised their howling, and those were the most dreadful nights.

Since no one from their village survived to tell their stories, various folktales grew around the mystery of the well. Each carried a hidden message. One said Shivaji, while passing through the village with his cavalry, had tricked two Mughal warriors, who claimed to be there to negotiate something, but were really planning to assassinate him. He made them sit on a chatai that was cunningly placed on the mouth of the well. They fell in and died and Aurangzeb kept wondering where they had vanished. The story shored up legends about the intelligence of the Marathas that helped trump their Mughal adversary, even when the annals of history never recorded any such anecdote.

Another story claimed that a naive girl from a Bhonsale family was lured by a boy from a lowly Mang community, who used black magic to seduce her. They were eloping from the village one night, when the village deity, unable to allow such sacrilege, took the shape of a tigress and chased them. They jumped into the well to survive her wrath and have been stuck their ever since. This tale acted as a warning to all the upper caste girls to stay away from those lower caste boys.

The real stories of Bhumi and Puran Bhau got lost among these tales. The well, like their fates, remained abandoned for centuries.

One day, when they heard a noise near their well, after many years, they were curious. It sounded like someone was digging with unimaginable force. It was a digging machine, something beyond the imagination of these two phantoms.

When they heard human voices near the rim of the well, Bhoomi stretched her neck as much as she could and Puran Bhau climbed up as high as he could. ‘Saheb, everyone in the village knows this well is haunted. We have heard noises from here since we were little children. It is best if you let it be.’ ‘Nonsense,’ said another. This one, with its tone of authority, reminded Puran Bhau of Rajaji Deshmukh. ‘This land has been allotted for a chemical fertilizer factory and the well falls right in the middle. The factory is going to provide jobs, and once you start on the BT cotton, you will soon realise that ordinary fertilizers won’t work.’

‘Saheb, we are not against the factory, but this well…’

‘Shut up. We know these are stupid excuses for not letting us go ahead with the factory. Who believes in ghosts in the twenty-first century, anyway?’

Bhumi and Puran Bhau listened in amusement as the human voices echoed down their empty, abandoned, dry well.

*

Puran Bhau pressed his shadowy face to the damp walls of the well and wondered, what now. He had the misfortune of first, getting killed, and then being dumped in the well of the untouchables, of all places. That too with an untouchable chudail always looking and laughing at him with contempt and disrespect. He must have committed terrible sins in his past lives to be punished like this. In this last life, he had been such a pious Brahmin, diligently offered his prayers and studied the shastras from his guru, Gopalji Agarkar, a Chitpavan Brahmin. Puran Bhau, a mere Karhade Brahmin, was fortunate to get his blessings and his tutelage. The added bonus was the occasional glance that Puran Bhau was able to sneak at Gopalji’s beautiful daughter Sushila. Of course, he would never commit the sin of marrying or fornicating or impregnating a Chitpavan woman, who was also his Guruji’s daughter. He had been riddled enough with guilt when she entered his night-time fantasies.

In the village, Puran Bhau had done his duty, quelling any insubordinate tendencies of the untouchables or other lower castes, and kept Rajaji Deshmukh informed about everyone. His hut was by the outer field, just beside the village temple. Along with his wife Pavani, he kept an eye on everyone who entered, left or stayed in the village. He venerated Rajai Deshmukh, not for his caste, which was two rungs lower than Puran Bhau’s own, but for his power. The Maratha landlord’s wealth and power were growing by leaps and bounds. By the time Puran Bhau ended up in the well, Rajaji had usurped almost all the agricultural land of the village.

Puran Bhau accepted his authority with awe as well as fear. The fear was greater. He never questioned Rajaji Deshmukh even when the body of Kantaram Patil, the small peasant, who was mysteriously murdered and whose land was subsequently acquired by Rajaji, was brought to his doorstep. He did not intervene when the Mahar girl Bhumi was being ravaged by two of Rajaji Deshmukh’s brothers and three of their sidekicks, at the break of dawn, in the outer field. He kept quiet when her mutilated body with stones tied to the ankles was thrown into the well of the untouchables. He did not say anything when the untouchables could not understand the gradual change in the taste of the water nor, when after a few deaths and then an epidemic, they abandoned the well which they had so proudly dug.

Puran Bhau endured everything. At the most he would lament about the growing power of Marathas and their swelling audacity to his Guru Gopalji Agarkar. On such occasions, both Brahmins would sombrely discuss the perils of kaliyug. And then came that dreadful night.

It was a moonless night. Puran Bhau had gone to the outer field to look for his recently born male calf that often escaped by pulling off its rope. In the field, he saw two bodies, half naked and entangled in lust. Puran Bhau generally avoided scenes of such scandalous activity. Silently taking note of who the deviants were, he would usually walk away without revealing his presence. Inevitably, it was the Deshmukh boys at their night-time escapades with women from different castes.

That night, as he was moving away after scowling, he suddenly froze. Something about the lustful moan of the woman seemed familiar; Puran Bhau knew the voice of Sushila too well. A few times when she had asked him to take home extra rice, her honeydew voice had rung in his ear till late at night. He could not stand the thought of a Chitpavan girl’s body being sullied by a lower caste, lower touch. But more than that, he felt an acute stab of jealousy. Sushila to him was like a goddess, a deity, who commanded his patronage and also demanded his protection. She was the only unmarried daughter of his venerated guru Gopalji Agarkar, who in Puran Bhau’s opinion could even converse with Brahma himself. His daughter, a poor soul who had lost her mother in the childhood, had been lured into sinful ways by a bloody Deshmukh, drunk on pomp and power.

He growled and ran at the man and leapt on him, trying to throttle his neck from behind. Sushila shrieked and somehow hurriedly draping her sari ran towards her home. Puran Bhau felt relieved. At least she would not have to witness the sight of her fornicator being killed. That would leave a lasting impression on her fragile Chitpavan mind.

Sambhaji Deshmukh, the youngest brother of Rajaji Deshmukh was caught off guard. He could not have anticipated the attack, because he never imagined that anyone would ever dare to do such a thing. He fell on his face at first, but with a little effort, shook Puran Bhau off his back and kicked him down. ‘Paljaddya’, run fatso, he said, while spitting on the ground. Frustrated, he furiously started walking towards their haveli. He saw no reason to engage any more with the fat priest, who had interrupted his fornication. But Sambhaji Deshmukh was not aware of the depth of Puran Bhau’s feelings for his goddess, and could not imagine that the fat priest would, once again, attack him, this time the back of his head with a stone.

When Sambhaji realised Puran Bhau’s homicidal intention, he was left with no choice but to kill him. Sambhaji then dragged his fat body and dumped it in the well of the untouchables. Being contaminated with Bhumi’s corpse months ago, the well was, by that time, abandoned. The cluster of huts belonging to the untouchables were also almost empty. Most of them had died because of the epidemic that spread through the infected drinking water. The rest who survived could not withstand the water crisis and fled.

*

Puran Bhau was remembering Sushila and a feeling of warm fuzzy affection rose from his shadowy navel up his shadowy chest. Suddenly, the solid ground in front of him split open as huge chunks of soil were dug out by the machines. The wall of the well was demolished and suddenly, Puran Bhau, after almost two hundred and eight years, emerged from his dark, desolate abode along with clouds of dust into the flooding sunlight. None of the workers could see his fat, shapeless, shadowy body. They were wearing strange clothes and yellow crowns. Puran Bhau felt lost and scared. He squinted in the sunlight and looked around and recognised the one who had sounded like Rajai Deshmukh. He was moving around and talking to another human being. Puran Bhau took a close look and realised the other one could be female. He felt up her breasts, just to be sure. She was also wearing those weird clothes and the yellow crown. Which world is this, Puran Bhau wondered, where men and women wear same kind of clothes? And where are the untouchables, with their black threads and spittoons and brooms? How would he know if one of them accidentally tread his sacred path? This was definitely not their village, it had to be hell. Puran Bhau let out a desperate wail and floated away. His wail was suppressed by the noise and ruckus that the drilling machines made, and nobody even noticed him.

Bhumi climbed out of the well with much calm. She also squinted at the sunlight and took some time to get accustomed to it. She looked around in all directions with awe and surprise, taking in the huge machines, the workers who manned them, their clothes and yellow helmets and the concrete structures that stood beyond the construction site. This must be heaven, she thought.

It had been centuries since she had moved, so had first to crawl and only then, with some effort, could stand up and start taking baby steps. She could feel the wind on her shadowy hair and it felt liberating. She walked out of the construction site and looked around. She too could not recognise her village and looked with awe at the tarred road outside and the passing trucks and the concrete buildings in the distance. Everything has changed, she thought. In the ground before the construction site, a water tanker was parked, and a crowd gathered near it. There were some angry exchanges going on between a group of men and a young woman flanked by two other men. Bhumi was curious. She stood on the road and tried to see what was going on.

‘We will take the water first, you people, can take the water later, after we are done,’ said a man angrily, to the woman.

‘Nothing will be left after all you people have taken water. I reached the tanker first and I will take water before any of you,’ the young woman retorted. ‘Yesterday also the water got over. I have been waiting since morning and will not return without taking water.’

‘The mahars will get water after we are done,’ said the man with a tone of finality, raising both his hands. He was no longer talking to the woman but addressing the rest of the crowd, which instantly agreed with him. The crowd was preparing to form a line with their buckets and pots, and the angry woman, flanked by two other men, stood isolated at a corner. But she was not ready to give up.

‘Ehhh,’ she shouted in a shrill voice, ‘This is a sarkari tanker, how dare you bring in caste here? You want me to report you to the DM sahib?’ Even from a distance, Bhumi could see the veins of her neck swell as she shouted. Is this mahar girl Bhumi herself? She looks a lot like me, Bhumi thought, with faint memories of how she used to look. But no, she was wearing such clean clothes and even shoes. Moreover, she is so feisty and look how she is talking back at the upper castes, without fear. This could not be her. Everything has changed, Bhumi thought again, but unlike Puran Bhau felt good about it.

The men who were supervising and setting the rules of water distribution, now charged at the girl menacingly. ‘You bloody slut, don’t fly too high. If you want to take water then, wait here in silence. After everybody your turn will come. That is the rule.’

Something struck Bhumi. These were the same Deshmukh boys and their sidekicks. The ones who ravaged her and then threw her in the well and contaminated the only source of water for their community. She shrieked in desperation. Her voice was also drowned in the noise of the commotion and the sounds of the machines behind.

‘Leave it Priya,’ one of the two men, who flanked her pleaded. ‘Let us not create trouble with them.’ The man reminded Bhumi of her father. He looked as scared and docile. But Priya stood her ground.

‘You guys leave if you have to. I am not leaving without water. There is a rule of law in the country. These goons cannot be allowed to have it their way every time.’ She now turned to the Deshmukh boys and screamed, ‘There is a constitution in the country you know. You cannot stop me from taking water.’

‘Constitution! You slut, you will flaunt the constitution now? You got through the college with a quota and imagine yourself as Ambedkar, now? Come we will show you the constitution.’ The men charged at her, pushing and punching her. The two other men tried to put up a feeble resistance but realising that they were grossly outnumbered, they started running away. ‘Let us go and inform the villagers,’ the younger one huffed while running past Bhumi. ‘Let us go get some more people.’ Their voices faded as they ran. Bhumi looked after them in disgust and slowly turned towards the field again. Priya was running desperately, chased by at least ten men, who soon caught her and pinned her down. They showered blows and kicks on her frail body, dragged her by her hair and kept punching her on the face.

Two labourers from the construction site ran out in alarm. They were about to go to the field, when their supervisor came running from behind. ‘Hey, hey where are you two going?’ he demanded.

‘They are going to kill her, Saheb,’ one of them shouted in desperation.

‘So how does it matter to you? Is she your wife or what?’ the supervisor sneered. ‘Look, it is an internal matter of the village. We are outsiders. As such not all of them are happy with the factory, let us not complicate things by poking our noses in their conflict. Go back to work.’

One of the two workers went inside. The other one was still hesitant. ‘Oye, you will lose your job if you step out,’ the supervisor threatened and closed the temporary gate.

So, in the backdrop, around fifty workers with JCB machines and drills, wearing yellow helmets, kept working to build a chemical fertilizer factory, while Priya was being lynched on the grounds by a crowd that kept swelling.

Bhumi stood in the middle, on the metalled road.

So much has changed, she thought, and so much hasn’t. She watched as the men tore Priya’s clothes and clawed into her flesh. She was shrieking at the beginning, but then she fell silent. Bhumi felt Priya’s pain in her own body. Her memory of being mutilated like this came back afresh, but for the first time she did not wail in desperation. She was identifying each and every one who mangled Priya’s body.

Bhumi breathed deeply. She smelt their bones, blood, flesh, sweat and semen. She smelt their murderous avidity and their cowardice alike. She now believed she had been stuck in that well for so long to witness this very day.

Now her hunt would begin.

(This story was published in Out of Print Magazine, in 2018

)

The bell rang. Someone was at the door. Who, I wondered. No one is supposed to come. “Kaun?” I cautiously ask from my bed. “Kuda”, came the reply. I heaved a sigh of relief. It’s just the garbage collector. “Nahi hai”, I lied. He must be thinking how come there is no garbage for three days in a row now. Or maybe he didn’t care at all. In reality, my garbage bin is overflowing with trash cans of ordered meals from the past two days. I lied to him so that I didn’t have to get up from my bed.

This time, I have prepared myself well. I told my house-help I am going out of Delhi for three to four days. I told my friends I am going to be swamped with office work for the next few days. I told my office that I was attending my sister’s wedding. I carefully constructed this web of lies, and now, like a fly caught in my own web, I am lying on my bed, under my blanket, for third day in a row. The dark demons are very pleased. They are climbing down from the top corner of the roof, popping out from beneath my bed, slithering out of my pile of dirty clothes, oozing out of my empty water-bottle to enter my dehydrated body, to jab my soul and comfort me to sleep. They are cold and comforting. They make me cover myself head to toe with blankets even while summer is looming in the corner. Under the darkness of my blanket, their eyes shine like wild animals about to prowl. They keep watching me, even in the dark.

I had to pee. I sat up. The demons were not pleased. “Can’t you hold it”? one asked in the most comforting voice. “Yes, sleep now, pee later. Pee more, pee better”, another giggled. The buggers were trying poetry to amuse me. I almost got amused and was about to go back under my blanket, when the recent memory of UTI popped up in my head. The high fever and intravenous medicines. Damn, I don’t want that again. And my doctor warned me against holding urine. Demons were not pleased, but relented. “Quickly go pee and come back”, they hissed, ‘don’t take too much time”. “I won’t,” I promised.

I relieved myself and was sleepwalking back to my bed, when suddenly my eyes fell on the….doorway. The door. The way outside. It was tightly locked. With all the bolts fixed and a lock. When did I put a lock on my door? Or did the demons put this? Can they handle objects now? “Bullshit!” I scolded myself. “Get a grip, buddy. Those demons are not exactly creatures. You have put the lock yourself”. But when? I never put a lock on my main door from the inside. I am really trying not to go out.

Well, that got me thinking. The demons hate me when I think too much. “Don’t think. You will invariably overthink.” They hissed impatiently from the bed. “Come back to bed. See…” one of them pointed at my phone. “Some notification on Instagram. Come check Insta, check Facebook. Doomscroll to that rabbit hole and fall asleep”. That’s exactly what I have been doing for the past two days. Doomscroll-sleep-order food-eat on bed-doom scroll-sleep-repeat. It’s strangely comforting, and devastating. There is a strange comfort in devastation that I have tasted lately. And getting hooked slowly to that metallic taste.

But right now, I am standing in front of the doorway. If I open and step outside, it’s a different world out there. The demons can hear me think, and they laughed out loud. A cold mocking laugh. Really, you want to go out like this? With your disheveled hair, wearing nothing but an oversized t-shirt, with enormous dark circles under blood red eyes and a puffy face? You want to walk on the streets outside like that? Well, go ahead. Be our guest. They smirked.

I did feel exhausted. Going back to bed was indeed a good idea. But the demons have now pricked my ego a little with that annoying, sarcastic hoot. I opened at least the lock on the door. Really! A lock? What was I thinking?

I came and sat on my bed, but I avoided eye contact with the demons. Possibly, they also realised they had crossed a line, and remained apologetically quiet. One lovingly stroked my hair while I checked my phone. Cunning, conniving bastards these demons are.

I remembered, it’s un dia de partit (the day of the match). There is an important match where Barcelona plays at night. And before this darkness had struck, I promised myself I would go to the screening, only IF I wrote a chapter of my pending writing project. I could already hear the demons’ suppressed giggling. “That’s too much, even you know it”, one of them whispered. I know, I sighed. That’s too much to even think. But I really did want to watch this match. My club carried me through in really bad days, you know. And now, on an important match day, I, as a loyal fan of more than two decades, should cheer for them. It’s OK, the demons said in honeydew voice. Nothing will happen if you don’t watch. And if you really, really want to watch it, you can always watch it on your laptop. The match is at night, right? It’s only afternoon now. “No, but I had promised myself I would only reward myself with watching the match at the big screens of our fan club, only when I have written something,” I remembered. I argued. They laughed that cold, nasty chuckle again. Promised. Reward. Watch match on the big screen. Big words you know! Tall promises. Exhausting. Go back to sleep, they hissed.

To their great disdain, I stood up instead and wobbled my way to the kitchen. I first drank water, lots of it. I felt a little stronger. I popped my head out of the kitchen and looked at the Door again. Less fortified now. There’s no lock. But the demons were right. I could not go out with my disheveled hair, wearing just a T-shirt. What if…I took a bath?

I first splashed water on my face as a starter. The touch of lukewarm early summer water on my skin felt good. The rest of my body yearned for it too. I quickly showered and wore a pretty dress. When I entered my bedroom again, the demons had almost disintegrated and scattered. Some looked up to me with looks of betrayal in their sulking eyes. By the time I had put on my sunscreen and kajal, they had more or less disappeared. I packed my laptop and stood before the doorway, and took a long breath. I opened the door and looked at the sunshine outside my staircase window.

I went out on the road with a spring in my step. The days were still liminal between winter and summer. The sunlight kissed my neck and cheeks softly, while a cold breeze caressed my hair. I will go and have a cup of coffee first. Then sit and write. Then have my lunch. Will catch up with a few friends in the evening, maybe have a drink, and then go watch the match at night.

My phone dinged. It was a message for me in my FC Barcelona Fan Club WhatsApp group. “Didiiiiii, DO-or-DIE match tonight! You coming to screening na?”

I looked back at my balcony on the second floor from the road. The demons stood dejected. They have not gone. I have to come back to them. Maybe I will fight them one day. Maybe they will disappear someday. Maybe they will consume me.

But not today.

Today, I am out of the doorway. I am out of their reach.

“yessss, see you all tonight”, I wrote back in my group. How could I miss it? It’s a Do or Die match after all.

Water hyacinth covered half of the Yamuna. Mass of silt, debris and mud poked its nose, pushing back the water into a thinner stream. Can this be called water – this toxic semi-solid mix of industrial waste and garbage that the city discarded every day? Hussain Miyan sat on the banks of the river, staring blankly at the dark mass. He often threw a twig at it and with a worldly-wise look chaperoned the children who played in the shrubby land that lined the stream. “See, it neither flows, nor floats. It is just stuck. It is captured in that dark mess, like a curse. It will slowly sink.” The children always made fun of Hussain Miyan. Nearly everybody did.

On the other side of the river stood the cybercity Noida, with giant buildings in different shapes and sizes. The blinking lights in those structures reminded Hussain Miyan of stars that twinkled in the skies of the Delhi of his younger years. When the sky was not as grey, his mind was less clouded and his judgments sharper. When his libido was kicking and he was not lost all the time. Then he dreamt more and daydreamed less.

Hussain Miyan reared two horses. He initially had three. Like Shoaib, his only son, the horses, Chunu, Munnu and Gajju, were like his children. He treated all his human and non-human wards equally, till compulsion pinioned him four years back. Shoaib had to go to the Gulf for work, and Hussain Miyan needed to pay 25,000 rupees to an agent named Abdul Lateef. Hussain Miyan had to sell off Chunnu, his best horse. Could he have done the opposite? Could he sell Shoaib to meet some imminent crisis in Chunnu’s life? He often toyed with such philosophical conundrums while sitting by the Yamuna and waiting for the ships to arrive at midnight.

Hussain Miyan’s wife Madina sold roasted corn cobs on the pavements of Okhla Head. She sat on the corner of a bridge that went over the Yamuna Canal. Hussain Miyan sometimes left the riverside and climbed the ret ka tilla, a sandhill, to sneak a look at her. He hid behind a neem tree and watched her from a distance. Her face glowed in the darkness from the orange flames of the fire she roasted the bhutta in. She started in the afternoon and continued till night. The colour of her face changed as day melted into night. Labourers gathered on the bridge from the morning, as it was also the biggest labour chowk in Okhla. The ones who could not find work hung around and flirted with Madina. She flirted back.

Madina was 16 when she married him, and now, 25 years later, she still looked young and vibrant. She was his second wife, and he married her after his first wife Tahmina died of tuberculosis when Shoaib was only ten. Madina was a young orphan, whose parents were killed in the riots in Meerut after the Babri Masjid was razed to the ground by a livid mob. She migrated to Delhi to stay with her aunt and was eventually married off to Hussain Miyan. Although scarred and exhausted, her mind is not clouded as Hussain Miyan’s and her libido is still kicking. Hussain Miyan smiled every time he saw her flirting with a labourer. It meant she would not come home that night. It meant they would have better meals the next day. It also meant he would be able to wait for the ships in peace, without a distant pang of guilt, which he often did not recognise with his clouded mind, but felt uncomfortable about nonetheless.

As the sky turned ink blue with a distant haze of the Noida lights, a strange mist grew over the toxic, semi-solid Yamuna. As the clock struck midnight, Hussain Miyan prepared himself by the riverside. Munnu and Gajju grazed around him in the bushes and Hussain Miyan looked to the horizon. It was time for the ships to arrive.

Hussain Miyan has been seeing the ships since he was a teenager. Back then he was convinced that they were figments of imagination of a very creative mind. One that could visualise stories that his grandfather told him. But over the last two years, since his mind became completely clouded, he is not so sure anymore. In fact, now that the ships arrive almost every night, it’s getting harder and harder to dismiss them as mere fantasy. The ships are now more real to Hussain Miyan than anything else.

He knows the ships come from distant lands and different times. A few weeks back, a medium-sized ship passed by. It was a beautiful ship. Hussain Miyan heard an enchanting music that slowly held everything around it in a warm embrace. The music touched Hussain Miyan’s cold soul. It was a song sung by an elderly man on board, in a language that he did not know but yet understood. It was a ballad for a benevolent ruler, who sought harmony among different faiths and brotherhoods. Hussain Miyan also knew that the man sitting on a throne at the centre of the ship’s deck was a beloved of the King. He also knew that the ship was sailing from a port called Illahabad and heading towards Agra. The people on the ship all looked at Hussain Miyan, and he felt a strong bond with them.

Now, that rarely happened. He stretched out his hands and spoke in garbled words, that the passengers had his blessings. And he sought theirs. He needed them to pray for Munnu, Gajju and Shoaib. Also, Chunnu and Madina. And his father and grandfather who sleep in the Batla House cemetery. And his mother, who was slaughtered in front of him near Ferozepur while crossing the border during Partition, and was never given a proper burial.

Hussain Miyan could not have fathomed that the man sitting at the centre of the ship, painted on the canvas of time with his imagination and very distant realities alike, is a tareekh nawees, a historian. He would document his great travails across the Subcontinent, but never noticed Hussain Miyan sitting on the banks of Yamuna with his hands outstretched. If Hussain Miyan’s mind was less foggy, and if there indeed was a chance of communication between him and the ship, maybe he could have shouted or whispered to them a fact. It would have delighted the man sitting at the centre of the ship. Hussain Miyan could have told him, that even four centuries later, Abul Fazal is immortalised in the name of the colony that has grown behind Hussain Miyan, with rickety crowded buildings and entangled electric wires, with furniture markets and e-rickshaws. But he couldn’t, and the ship sailed by, like they always did.

Shoaib left Delhi four years back in search of fortune and a future. He called Hussain Miyan’s neighbour Rabiul intermittently on his cell phone, and told them he was working in Saudi Arabia. He even sent money thrice. He wired them to Rabiul’s bank account, and Rabiul handed Hussain Miyan the exact amount. Or so Hussain Miyan thought. Nine months after he left, however, Shoaib stopped calling or sending money. Madina made frantic calls to Abdul Lateef to inquire of her son’s whereabouts. Abdul assured them that Shoaib was fine. He was working at a place with very strict regulations on making phone calls and, therefore, was incommunicado. Shoaib would contact soon, he said. Hussain Miyan’s mind got more clouded in the meantime, and Madina had to increase her night outs to make ends meet. Ships have been passing by Hussain Miyan every night ever since.

***

One day Hussain Miyan woke up beside the river, as strong rays of the June
sun pierced his back. He rarely fell asleep beside the river. After the ships sailed past, he would usually return home in a daze. That day, however, he woke up and squinted at the sunlight. His hands and legs were sore from mosquito bites and his head felt heavy. He proceeded to get a cup of tea from a roadside stall in Abul Fazal market. On the road was Salim Hajam’s barber shop. Salim was no longer a barber, but a wealthy real estate don with a lot of political clout. The neighbourhood knew that it was Salim Hajam who decided who would be the MLA from their area. Political affiliation of the candidate notwithstanding, it was Salim Hajam’s blessing that invariably decided the winner. However, even after becoming a powerful builder, Salim retained his barber shop out of superstition, although he himself did not take up the scissors anymore. It was the shop that brought him his first lucky break, so the shop continued with other barbers working on his payroll. He visited the shop sometimes and joined his entourage for a morning tea. People came by to see him, asking for favours.

Salim had become very important, but he paid due respect to Hussain Miyan. He reminded Salim of a time when both of them struggled against poverty. Salim also felt sympathy towards Hussain Miyan ever since he lost touch with Shoaib and his mind got more and more clouded. Salim even tried using his own networks to track Shoaib down, but with no success.

Hussain Miyan had been observing Salim Hajam from a distance. He has witnessed the meteoric rise of this man with his own eyes. In 1984, Salim’s small barber shop in the isolated neighbourhood of Abul Fazal suddenly saw a flurry of customers who came in the dead of the night to get rid of their beard and hair. Delhi was going through a tumultuous time. Following the assassination of the prime minister, people from the Sikh community were being slaughtered like animals. They were ripped apart, burnt alive, cut into pieces in broad daylight on open streets by violent mobs, while the cops looked away. The terrified Sikhs, therefore, came to get rid of the markers of their religious identity in Salim Hajam’s shop. Circumspect of Hindu barbers, Sikh people from nearby Jungpura, Bhogal, Taimurnagar and Kalkaji flocked to Salim’s shop at night. After trimming their beard and hair the customers would often break down and cry with piercing shrills. They cried out the horrors that they had witnessed and rued the sacrilegious compromise that they were forced to make in order to safeguard their lives.

Initially Salim felt bad for his customers. He even cried with them and shared their trauma. But soon their distress meant overflowing profit for him and he started to like it. He amassed enough wealth to invest in the city’s fledgling real-estate business. As the population of Delhi swelled, the city spread its wings in the southeast direction and Salim’s business grew. He never let go of this shop, however.

Salim’s luck rocketed within half a decade as one more disaster struck the country. A chariot proclaiming the mythical birthplace of a deity rampaged across the country causing riots and pogroms. The poisonous snake of mistrust and hate raised its hood once again, vitiating communities that had cohabited for centuries. Especially Muslims, even the wealthy ones, felt uncomfortable living in Hindu-dominated areas and started moving towards Okhla, Old Delhi and other parts of the city, which were turned into Muslim ghettos with invisible walls separating them from Hindu neighbourhoods. The walls entered people’s minds, too, and grew there over ages, getting stronger and unscalable. But Salim welcomed the people struck by fear, desertion and mistrust. Like a vulture he feasted on their distress. The incessant flow of Muslims in Okhla meant his business boomed. He earned not only money, but absolute power by controlling land and property. Since then, any smell of mass distress arouses him.

So today when Salim Hajam sat in his shop surrounded by a group of people who looked grim and disturbed, Hussain Miyan knew that some new distress has struck, because Salim looked smug and happy. He had probably smelled the fresh influx of paranoid customers trying to buy a small apartment for a large family, or, at least, rent one. Since the time Hussain Miyan’s mind got clouded, he has not been following the news. He has been spending his time with his horses during the day and with the ships at night. Other than making the occasional inquiry about Shoaib – from Madina, Rabiul or, sometimes, random strangers on the street – he did not follow what was happening in the world, in the country, or in Okhla for that matter. But today he got curious and walked up to the crowd at Salim Hajam’s shop.

“Saalam alaikum Hussain Miyan, what’s going on?” asked Salim. Others turned to Hussain Miyan with a tinge of jealousy. They never figured why Salim treated a crackpot with so much respect. “What happened?” asked Hussain Miyan, pointing at the smartphone that was being passed around. “Look at the video. Look how they slaughtered the kid,” a man said, handing the phone over to him. “This country is not meant for us anymore. I wish my father had gone to Pakistan.” “It was never meant for us.” “Look how the bastards surrounded and killed a kid.” “Ya Allah rahem.“ Salim looked content. Hussain Miyan, too, watched the video. It was a clip from a news channel where the anchor described how a 16-year-old boy named Junaid was fatally assaulted in a running train by a mob who detested his religion. They stabbed him till he fell, while a trainful of people looked away in willful disregard. The video on the phone showed Junaid gasping for his last breaths while blood oozed out of the multiple stab wounds on his body. Hussain Miyan froze for a moment and then suddenly collapsed.

Hussain Miyan had witnessed enough violence in his lifetime; he had heard even more gory stories. He saw his mother being ripped apart in front of his eyes, when he was only five-years old. A Sikh man had slashed her tiny, frail body with a shining sword while they were crossing the border in Ferozepur. In 1984, he saw an old Sikh man being set ablaze, a burning tire around his neck. He had heard Madina recount in absolute horror the tales of how their Hindu neighbour for thirty years set fire to her parents after injuring them. He had seen Salim Hajam shoot a rival at point blank, right in front of the lane of his slum. Even with all these wounds rotting in his clouded mind, he still could not bear the sight of the boy’s brutal slaughter.

This was because, on the screen, he did not see Junaid. He saw Shoaib. When Hussain Miyan last saw Shoaib in the airport, he was much older. But the face etched in his clouded mind is that of a much younger boy. When he saw the video, he remembered that his asthmatic son used to gasp for breath, too, when he had an attack and the family could not afford to replenish his inhaler. Thin, frail, helpless – that was how Shoaib looked as well. Where was he now? In what part of the world was he gasping for breath? Was he also killed like Junaid? Did his frail body also bear 49 stab wounds?

When Hussain Miyan came back to his senses it was almost dark outside. He saw a worried Madina sitting near his head and fanning him. “Don’t you have your night outs?” Hussain Miyan rudely taunted Madina. She looked at him with hurtful eyes, tears swelled up. “I have been sitting by you since morning,” she said. “That must have cost you a fortune. Or has your rate gone down?” he bickered. “Well it is you who will starve if my rates go down.” She threw the hand fan and stormed out of the house. That is exactly what Hussain Miyan wanted. Because tonight he must visit the ships.

***

That night it rained heavily. It seemed the sky had broken open over the city of Delhi after a long sultry summer. The toxic viscosity of the dark liquid rose over the river’s banks while Hussain Miyan waited impatiently for the ships. He was not sitting calmly, waiting for the ship to appear on the horizon, as he did every other night. He shivered and fidgeted as he strained his eyes searching for a mast. What if no ships come this way tonight because of the rains, he thought! He was drenched to the bones and felt feverish. His wet cotton kurta and pajama were both glued to his dark skin. His white hair and beard were dripping with water. He felt like he was losing his senses again, when he felt a tingling on the back of his neck. The ship had finally arrived. The rain had stopped and a faint moonbeam shone from a sad half-moon. The toxic water reflected silver.

The silhouette of the ship seemed huge against the night sky, bigger than anything Hussain Miyan had ever seen. He could tell this ship had been preparing for a long, uncertain journey. For the first time, Hussain Miyan flagged the ship with both hands up in the air. For the first time a ship stopped by him. A tall, lean, bearded man wearing long robes peeked down from the railing. “What do you want Hussain Miyan?” he asked. Hussain Miyan knew the man’s name was Amin Chand. He was a trusted tradesman of Emperor Jahangir. “Where are you going?”, he asked in response. Amin Chand told him that they had started from Agra to reach Bengal via Patna. They would carry cotton from Rajmahal in Bengal, and then, cutting through the Bay of Bengal and touching the Lingbalos Island through the Strait of Talek, north of Ceylon, they would float across the Arab seas to reach Baghdad. They would trade at every port on their way.

The route made no sense to Hussain Miyan. However, he had a feeling that this could be close to where Shoaib was. And he needed to go and find his son. He would have to protect his asthmatic boy before they stabbed him, if they had not done so already. In any case, it was time for Hussain Miyan to board the ship. “Tell me,” he asked Amin Chand, “is there a place for a Muslim on your ship?” Amin Chand laughed out loud. “We are sailors Miyan. There are Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews and what not on board. We sail the ship looking at the stars and measuring the wind. We find our way through the unknown waters to reach new lands. And when the sea gets furious, we stretch our hands up and pray to each of our gods. We roar together to tame the sea and we sail together to move forward. When we go down, we go down together.”

Hussain Miyan pleaded, “Please take me along.” He might never find Shoaib again, but this was a better world to go looking for him. The sailors lowered a wooden staircase for Hussain Miyan to climb up. Once in the ship, he saw Munnu and Gajju were grazing in the shrubby land by the river, which was flooded with moonlight. They looked up at him and, probably in their own ways, bid him goodbye in silence. Slowly, the ship merged into darkness.

The next day, the kids found Hussain Miyan’s body in the toxic water. It was not flowing, it was not floating. It was just stuck.

The match was barely fifteen minutes old when Salgaocar FC scored. That single goal was enough to ignite the fury of East Bengal supporters. How could a visiting team come into their fortress and snatch the Federation Cup from under their noses? Not here, not in front of more than one hundred thousand voices roaring for their team!

The players were blamed for conceding early. Or rather, their mothers, their sisters, their wives were blamed in crude, violent language of either too much fornication or too little, as if that explained players’ poor performances on the field. Three days earlier, these very same players had defeated arch-rivals Mohun Bagan and were carried as heroes. Now, fifteen minutes into the final, they have already turned into villains.

Rather than focusing on the field, my eyes kept drifting around in hesitation. It was my first time watching a football match live in a stadium, something I had dreamed about for so long. But that dream was slowly turning into something ugly, almost nightmarish.

The abuses being hurled from every corner made me cringe. Worse still were the glances, heavy, lingering, lustful that kept landing on my thirteen-year-old body. In that gallery, I was the only girl. I don’t know about the rest of the stadium, but where I stood, I was alone.

And in that red and gold sea of passionate supporters of our beloved team, I felt less like a fan and more like a piece of flesh. Hiding behind my father’s towering frame, I craned my neck to catch a glimpse of what was happening on the field. I regretted coming. I could have watched this on TV, from the comfort of our couch, like every other match.

My mother had been extremely apprehensive about my coming here. But Dad had encouraged it. “Every football fan should experience a live match at least once in their lifetime,” he argued. “Why should she be deprived of that?”

It was he who had turned me into a football fan when I was still tiny. Patiently, he explained the rules, the technicalities, the positions on the field, the tactics, and strategies. He told me stories about the fierce rivalry between East Bengal and Mohun Bagan, their legacies, their legends. By the time I was ten, I had become a staunch football fan.

And today he had brought me to my first stadium, an experience every fan was supposed to have. Yet as he stood there, guarding me like a hawk from the prying eyes around us, I couldn’t help but feel that he, too, was quietly regretting the decision.

The half-time whistle blew, with Salgaocar still leading by a goal. I realized I had to pee. When I told my father, a flicker of anxiety crossed his face, but he nodded, and we went looking for a ladies’ toilet.

We found one. But because there were no ladies around, the men had claimed it too. Streams of urine pooled across the floor. Men stood there, careless, some even flashing their genitals as they relieved themselves.

My father looked at me, his face tightening. He knew he couldn’t take his daughter into a space like that.

“Can you hold it?” he asked nervously.

“Yes, of course,” I said quickly. I had no intention of stepping into those filthy toilets, overrun with men.

What I didn’t know then was that this moment would quietly mark the beginning of a lifelong habit of holding my pee in public spaces, simply because there are often no clean or safe places for women to go.

The match resumed, and to the growing anxiety of the East Bengal fans, the minutes kept slipping by with no goal in sight.

Suddenly, through the net that divided the galleries, I noticed another woman in the adjacent stand. Not a spectator, but a vendor. Logence Aunty. I had read about her in the Sunday newspapers. She sold red and yellow candies, the colors of the East Bengal jersey, in their gallery.

I watched her glide through that restless sea of anxious, angry, abusive men, calmly selling her candies as if she belonged there more than anyone else. For a moment, I wanted to climb over the barrier, cross to the other side, and stand beside her. It felt as though she could keep me safe, perhaps even more than my father could in that moment.

The way she glared at a man who accidentally pushed her only strengthened my faith in her. He stepped aside instantly. Others did the same, respectfully making way for her to pass through the crowd. What a confident woman. I had read that she, too, was an East Bengal fan. Somehow, just seeing her there made me feel more reassured.

Suddenly, the sky split open with a thunderous roar. Sammy Omolo, the Kenyan center-back of East Bengal, had surged forward from the back, dribbled past two midfielders, and curled the ball into the near post. The net rippled. Goal.

The crowd erupted. The entire stadium seemed to explode with joy. Men jumped, shouted, and danced wildly, my father among them. The same men who had been hurling filthy, racist abuses at Omolo just moments earlier now celebrated him like a hero. The match ended 1-1, taking it to extra time.

The excitement and exuberance, however, didn’t last long. Just two minutes into extra time, Salgaocar FC forward Bruno Coutinho struck. The ball went in, clean and decisive. Under FIFA’s golden goal rule, the match ended the very moment the ball hit the net in extra time. A stunned silence fell over the stadium. Bruno Coutinho lifted a finger to his lips, mocking the silence with that quieting gesture as he celebrated.

The frustration of the East Bengal fans erupted almost instantly, and angry shouts, furious gestures, and curses were flying through the air once again. The joy that had filled the stadium moments ago dissolved into rage.

My father grabbed my hand and tried to leave the stadium as quickly as he could. In the crush of the crowd, wandering hands and fingers groped my body. Outside the stadium, the anger had spilled into the streets. Some fans were smashing glass bottles and tearing down the huge match banners hanging outside. Dad and I almost jogged through that chaos, hand in hand, searching desperately for transport.

Luckily, a few black-and-yellow taxis were waiting outside. They demanded three times the usual fare, but my father didn’t hesitate. He just wanted to get us out of that place as fast as possible.

Once we were seated in the taxi, I looked back. The police had begun charging at the furious, vandalizing fans with their batons. Through the back window, the scene looked like a battlefield with batons swinging, and tear gas shells swirling in the air.

Football is a male monopoly. No matter how much women’s football has grown over the years, or how many female spectators love the game, it remains a testosterone-driven arena of male passion. I learned that the hard way, again and again, as I grew older. In many ways, I still do.

The only difference now is that I navigate those spaces on my own. Like Logence aunty, I move through the weight of male gaze alone, glaring at predators and reclaiming my space, without my father’s towering presence shielding me.

But I will never forget my first experience in a football stadium

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