Rahul Dholakia’s award-winning film Parzania tells the story of Rupa and Dara Mody, a Parsi couple whose son Azhar went missing after a mob attacked and burnt down former Congress MP Ehsan Jaffri’s home in Ahmedabad’s Gulbarga Society in 2002.

Muzaffer, too, went missing that day, from the same home.

His is a story that could put Parzania in the shade. A Muslim child torn away from his parents during the 2002 communal massacres was weaned by a Hindu family who brought him up as their own after a kind policeman found him wandering in the debris. Now at age nine, he cannot recall his biological parents who were searching for him all these years, and does not want to leave his Hindu parents.

It goes back to those horrific six hours of February 28, 2002 when the post-Godhra knives were out at the Gulbarga Society, a lower middle-class Muslim neighbourhood of Vatva.

When the din and screams had died down, and the dust settled on 38 scattered dead bodies, there was no sign of some 31 more — missing, unaccounted. Among them, a two-and-a half year old boy, Muzaffer, son of Mohammed Salim Shaikh, whose mother and sister were butchered that day by the mob that killed Jaffri, the former MP who gave them refuge.

Muzaffer and Shaikh’s sister Firoza had vanished in the mayhem and the despairing Shaikhs had almost lost all hope until last week, when the Special Investigation Team deputed by the Supreme Court told them Muzaffer was alive, as Vivek Vikram Patni, in Saraspur.

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