COLUMN: Pain begets silence
I peered out through the narrow gap between the bars in my balcony window, wincing as the cold iron crossed my flesh. Outside, dark, behemoth clouds drifted somberly above the ground, painting my corner of Bombay in a gloomy shade of gray.
They brought no rain, but an eerie silence accompanied them – a sound so hushed it made even the rustling of leaves in the trees seem deafening.
Streets, which only days before had bustled with taxis, men on bicycles, women and children in shabby school uniforms, lay stock-still. Dead.
Then, suddenly, shrill screams tore the tranquility to shreds. In the distance, fires burned and buildings crumbled, churches filled with refugees as a city rumbled into the second day of a bloody riot. Hindus and Muslims fell to the ground, as politicians squabbled over the fate of a desecrated Islamic shrine.
My teenage mind couldn’t comprehend the hate that left mutilated corpses to rot in empty alleys, or the sort of loathing that spared not even expectant mothers from the wrath of kerosene and a match.
What I could grasp was that my home was burning. On a dark, inauspicious day in 1992, my city was burning.
We huddled close, my entire family, packed in the confines of our first-floor apartment, peering out through the same cold bars, waiting, hoping it would end.
There wasn’t much talk. Only brief expressions of horror.
The violence went on for weeks, abating every now and then, but flaring back up, as tempers teetered on a knife-edge between tolerance and odium.
Bombay hemorrhaged, grieved and mourned.
Meanwhile, politicians hemmed and hawed. Tensions had been brewing for a while, but the destruction of the Babri mosque had happened too quickly. Which faction of Hindu hardliners finally took ax to stone was a mystery.
But not one to give pause to the politics du jour. A few eccentric politicos seized the moment: “I hope it was one of mine,” one said on national TV.
The comment sent a troubled nation hurtling deeper into the bowels of hate. Muslims asked the nagging question that seemed to strike at the very heart of India’s fledgling secular democracy: “If this government failed even to save a building, can it save us?”
For that matter, were any of us non-Hindus safe in Hindustan?
The answer to that question worried me. We had to be safe. We had nowhere else to go. India was home, and would always be.
Yet, there was the possibility that the Muslim experience would soon befall the Christians, the Parsees, and every other minority, turning India into a veritable cauldron of warring religions. It was too much pain for a 13-year-old.
So, I devised a strategy to cope, as did most of my motley group of high school cronies. Until then, religion had been a subject for coffee-table conversation, driven as it was, by our mutual curiosity.
But starting in the months after December, talk of religion became taboo. We skirted the topic whenever it came up, reasoning that if we avoided the divisive issue, it would inevitably cease to be a factor.
“Beliefs are personal,” became the common credo. We wouldn’t speak of them, simply because they weren’t meant to be communal beliefs.
Our mothers and fathers all seemed to adopt the same stance. Gradually, religion was expunged from friendly conversation.
The social mutation was complete. We were better off this way. Matters of faith were still discussed within our respective safe harbors – mosques, temples, churches – but in the company of those not of our faith, we had taken an unstated oath of silence.
In hindsight, I can’t tell you if we did the right thing. The truth is, I don’t know. I don’t recall many of the horrific details of those nerve-wracking days, but I do recall the immense hurt they caused me.
Personally, the religious silence helped me tide over a very difficult time in my youth. It helped me see a much larger picture, as I allowed myself to step back from the source of our collective misery.
And when all was said and done, I hadn’t lost a single friend. That, to me, is what matters most.
Leon D’Souza is a senior majoring in journalism. Comments can be sent to leon@cc.usu.edu.