Free India by V. S. Naipaul

can’t kill cows in public here – there’s an abbattoir you have to take your cows to. But you can pay a policeman, and kill a cow in public. When goats have to be sacrificed at the festival of Id, most Muslims take their goats to the abbattoir to have them slaughtered. But there are some local hoods who insist on killing the goats in public. It’s a macho act, to challenge the police. When the police come, the hoods say, “If you interfere, you won’t leave here alive.” ’
    He had slid away from the subject of the riots of 1984; he had gone back to the subject of the toughs.
    I said, These fights with the police excite you?’
    He said, with some solemnity, ‘It is exciting. I like it. It happens because the police discriminate against the Muslims, and the Muslims have contempt for the police.’
    ‘But what’s the point of the game?’
    He didn’t answer directly. He said, ‘There are very few sensible people among the Muslims.’ He spelt out the Urdu word he had in mind for ‘sensible’:
samajdar
. ‘There are few educated Muslims here. People who are educated will never get involved in that kind of fighting.’ He semed slightly to have changed his attitude to the fighters.
    ‘So it will just go on?’
    He said, with his curious mixture of melancholy and acceptance, ‘I see no end to it. I don’t see how it can end.’
    ‘How did the riots end that time?’
    ‘Mrs Gandhi came and asked people to try to settle things. But things get settled and then – they burst out again.’
    I thought of the narrow lanes and the low wire-netting dwellings, with sleeping lofts below the fragile asbestos roofs. ‘What was life like during the riots? Did people sleep?’
    ‘When there are riots, you don’t know the meaning of sleep. You can’t sleep. It’s a big sin if someone of your faith is assaulted and you do nothing about it.’
    ‘Don’t you think that someone like you should be trying to live somewhere else?’
    ‘I can’t take such a step.’ It was what I thought he would say. ‘There are so many family ties. It is mandatory for a Muslim to honour those ties.’ Family, faith, community: they made a whole.
    ‘What advice would you give a younger brother, or someone coming up?’
    The advice wasn’t about going away or breaking out. It was more immediate. It was about surviving, here. ‘I would tell him that he should think of retaliating and fighting back only if the person in front of him has made a mistake.’
    ‘Mistake?’
    ‘If someone abuses you, for instance.’
    Abuse, quarrels, fights within and without: that was the world he lived in, and, physically, was so little equipped for.
    I mentioned the slogan I had seen: LIBERATE HUMANITY THROUGH ISLAM.
    He said, ‘I agree with it totally.’
    ‘When did you learn about Islam?’ How, living where he did, would he have had the time, the privacy, the calm?
    ‘I learned from my parents. And I’ve also read the Koran.’
    ‘There are so many people in Bombay who feel they know the way to liberate humanity.’
    He appeared to change his point of view. ‘It’s the nature of the world. When people gather in groups, each one will say that his is better than the others.’
    I thought again of the family with the big colour television set near his house. I asked about them.
    ‘They have a business, making ready-made clothes. They make a little money.’
    People in business, making money, and yet living here: it was proof again of what people said, that all you required in Bombay was accommodation. Once you had a place to sleep, anywhere, on a pavement, in a hut, in a corner of a room, you could get a job and make money. But – did the people with the television set show off a little?
    The people with the TV and the tailoring business didn’t show off, Anwar said. But my question had touched something. He said, ‘They know that TV is forbidden in their religion.’ Then, as often, Anwar softened what he said. ‘But they don’t want