Free Maximum City by Suketu Mehta

temple nor a mosque. . . .” His parents were there with Sunil’s two-year-olddaughter. He put her through her tricks, as parents and ringmasters do: “Do namaste,” and she brought her palms together in front of her face. “Shake hand.” And she shook my hand. One of the Sena boys carried her off to buy her a balloon.
    Later, Sunil and the other two Sena boys came to drink with me in Ashish’s apartment in Andheri. They looked around appreciatively. We were on the sixth floor, on a hill, and the agitated highway throbbed with traffic below us. Sunil looked out the window. “It’s a good place to shoot people from,” he noted, and made the rat-tat-tat motion of firing a submachine gun. I had not thought of the apartment this way. But then I was not accustomed, when I came into a new place, immediately to check out the strategic value of its location, its entrances and exits.
    What sat on Sunil’s mind was the thought that the handicapped girl was raped, repeatedly and in the open. There is no evidence of it; the police report makes no mention of it. Sixteen to twenty Hindu women were raped in Jogeshwari alone, said Sunil. Again, this is without foundation in the press and police reports. But that didn’t matter. It was a powerful image, a catalytic image: a handicapped Hindu girl on the ground with a line of leering Muslim men waiting their turn at her while her parents matched her screams with their own as their bodies caught the flames. Many wars begin with an act of rape, real or imagined. It is always the men who are disturbed enough by the rape to go to war.
    Sunil didn’t use the term “riot.” He used “war” instead, the English word. At J. J. Hospital, he saw scenes typical of wartime. Dead bodies all over, male and female, identified only by number tags. At Cooper Hospital, where both Hindu and Muslim rioters and victims were brought in and often lay next to one another in the same ward, fights would break out. Wounded men would rip bottles of saline out of their arms and hurl them at their enemies.
    One of the men with us worked for the municipality. “These people are not Muslim, they’re all Hindu!” he said. “Every one of them is a convert.” Then he said they should go to Pakistan, the lot of them. The standard complaints were trotted out: They always cheered Pakistan at India—Pakistan cricket matches, the Muslim personal law allowed them to marry four wives and so they always produced ten or twelve children when Hindus stopped at two or three. In Bombay, numbers of people are important;the sense of being crowded by the Other in an already overcrowded city is very strong. “In a few years they will be more than us,” the municipal employee predicted gloomily. Muslims engaged in underworld activities, he said, and they had no compunctions about killing people, while a Hindu would pause before killing and ask himself why he was doing it.
    While Sunil was taking Muslim lives, he also found time to save a Muslim life. He had a friend, a Muslim woman, whom he escorted safely to her neighborhood. There he was surrounded by a group of Muslim men. He prepared to die. The girl’s grandmother then came out, talked down the Muslim mob, and, hiding Sunil under her burka, spirited him out of the neighborhood. There is a peepal tree at Radhabai Chawl, said Sunil; half its leaves are black and the other half green. He knew because he took his daughter there when she was sick. She had been crying continuously, and the doctors hadn’t helped. Then someone told him that the Muslims could get the evil eye out. He took her to the Radhabai Chawl area, and the Muslim holy man circled his daughter’s face with the bottle of water three times. Sunil could see the water level in the bottle going down after each circle. She soon got better. “He didn’t ask for money,” said Sunil, of the exorcist. “Even if you go to their dargah”—shrine—“they won’t ask for money. They are unselfish that