Abdul Rehman
Kallan Shaikh
then 61, lost a 20-year-old son
He never went back to the spot except to collect what he believed were his son’s ashes. Fourteen years ago, for Abdul Rehman Kallan Shaikh, now 75, that was the last sign of his young son.
Abdul Mannan, 20 years old and with a slight limp due to polio, was killed by a mob in Pratiksha Nagar, Sion, a central Mumbai locality, as the riots spread across the city in 1993. Mannan was accompanying his sister Ghazala Bano out for some work when they saw their local mosque ablaze. Mannan ran towards the masjid to check on the imam, since the aazan call had already rung out. He managed to rescue the imam, trapped in the blazing room under a collapsed roof.
That brave act did not deter the mob. As they ran towards the two siblings, Mannan told Ghazala to run. “They won’t do anything to me. The three who are leading the mob are my friends, he assured Ghazala,” Shaikh remembers his daughter telling him.
The three did not spare Mannan, however. Instead they attacked him with swords and burnt him to death, before his sister. “For days after that we didn’t know where he was. I was not in Mumbai then. When I returned and started making enquires, she asked me not to do much. That’s when she really poured out about what had happened,” says Shaikh, sitting at his small home in MHADA colony in Goregaon (East).
Shaikh lost most of his property—the colony was destroyed in the rioting. Over the years, he lost four of his other sons too. A few months ago, a local court hearing his son’s case asked his daughter, now settled in the Middle East, to appear before it.
But Shaikh has no faith in the justice-dispensing mechanism. “Main akela hoon, kya kiya jaye? The least they could have done is punished the police officers who stood and watched. But instead, they were promoted. What can you expect in the form of justice then?” questions Shaikh.
After all these years of waiting for action to be taken on the Srikrishna Commission report, he has no hope that the current assurances will bear any fruit. “Humko unse wafah ki nahi hai ummeed joh jante nahi wafah kya hai (I have no expectations of loyalty from those who don’t even know what loyalty is),’’ he says bitterly.
— Swatee Kher

Amin and Azim Khan
then 14 and 11, lost their father
Even after 14 years, Fatima Begum (50) cannot forget that her neighbours deceived them. Her 60-year-old husband, Yaseen Khan, she says, was killed by neighbours who had promised them security. Naturally, her sons Amin (28) and Azim (25) have grown up with that distrust of people.
Living in Shankarwadi, a predominantly Hindu slum in Jogeshwari (East), the Khans had thought they had little reason to worry. “We had had meetings soon after December 6. We had decided that if Muslim mobs attacked, we would stall them and if Hindu mobs came, the Hindu leaders would stop them,” Fatima recalls.
On January 8, 1993, a day after a Muslim mob burned down Radhabai Chawl in the neighbourhood, all hell broke loose. “Some of our neighbours burned down our house. I took my two sons and ran away. But the mob caught my husband and killed him,” she said. Fatima and the two boys rebuilt their lives almost from scratch. Amin and Azim stopped going to school and started working. “Our neighbours would tell me they would kill me like they killed my father,” says Amin, now a rickshaw driver with two children.
They had lived comfortably earlier—their father drove a rickshaw for a living, but had made some money in Saudi Arabia. Suddenly they were homeless.
Twice after their breadwinner died, neighbours burnt down their house. Fatima found a friend in a nearby Muslim locality, Katubai Chawl, where Hindu residents had been targeted. She exchanged her larger home for a much smaller home owned by a Hindu.
Just last week, Fatima and Amin identified the people accused of killing Yaseen Khan. “I am ready to forgive them. But they don’t feel any remorse,” Fatima says. And as for Azim, a tailor now, he just descends into silence every time the subject of the riots comes up.
— Menaka Rao

Pratibha Ishwalkar
then 35, lost her husband
He had just stepped out of his house when a stray bullet fired by the police to control the mob hit him. Vishnu Ishwalkar, a resident of Francis Chawl in Jogeshwari (East), died on the spot.
Today, the chawl in which he lived hasn’t changed very much. The masjid right at its entrance and another across the road, the same one that the raging mob had tried to demolish, has been resurrected. The family moved on, but is yet to come to terms with what really happened that day.
Pratibha, nearly 50 years old now, remembers shouts and slogans waking them up late that night of January 8. As her husband went out to check what was happening, he asked Pratibha to stay indoor and keep their two young children company.
“He was going towards the entrance to the chawl, when the bullet hit him. He just died there. There was so much chaos that we had to flee the place. We stayed with relatives in another locality for over three months,” says Pratibha.
Over the years, Vishnu’s elder brother supported the family as Pratibha was a homemaker. “We got compensation from the government. But my brother-in-law Prabhakar has taken care of my family, ensuring my children were educated,” says Pratibha.
Pratibha is clueless about the police complaint or cases related to the incident. She was never called to give her statements.
And Prabhakar Ishwalkar is clearly an angry man, angry at what happened and at the government’s attempts to reopen the cases now. “My brother was not involved with any rioting. As happens in chawls, when there is some commotion, people step out to see what is happening. That is exactly what he was doing, and he was hit by a bullet,” says Prabhakar.
“The Government just wants to redig the graves. Are we pawns in the hands of the Government for them to play games with? What if something happens now because of what they are doing, will the Government take responsibility for it?” he questions.
— Swatee Kher

Taher Hasan Wagle
then 42, lost a teenaged son
From this window of her tiny apartment, Yasmeen saw her 16-year-old brother Shahnawaz alive for the last time. He had been pulled out of home despite their pleas and killed, allegedly by a policeman. Combing operation, the police had called it, as they entered their ramshackle building adjacent to Dockyard Road station along the city’s eastern coast. “We kept pleading that my son was just a college-going kid,” says Najma Wagle (54), “but they took him down anyway.”
Minutes later, as a row of Muslim men entered waiting police vans, Yasmeen saw a policeman repeatedly rifle-butt her brother in the small of his back. The boy fell. And then a bullet wound appeared.
“It was Shab-e-Baraat on August 28 night,” says Taher Hasan Wagle (56), a Kokani Muslim who was in his native village near the beach town of Ganpatipule in Ratnagiri district that day. “It is a day when we remember our dead. I saw Shanu’s friends, now all grown up, on motorbikes and dressed in white, the way we do when we pray. And I felt that if I saw my son’s killer, I would kill him then.”
Lots of things trigger off that undiminished rage in Wagle, who shut down his goods and passenger transport business in the years following the riots and now dabbles in real estate brokerage.
Shahnawaz, a Class XI student at Elphinstone College, had wanted to join the merchant navy, like his grandfather, a captain. “After XII Science, he would have joined a ship and in three years he’d have become first officer,” the grieving father says. Now, when Taher Hasan sees local lads—‘‘they went to the same school as Shanu, Rosary Church School”—drive past in their smart uniforms, he stops to ask them which ship they’re serving on. He knows the names of their training ships, the ones sailing to the Middle East, etc. “My son would have been one of them,” he says.
Like ship trivia, Wagle has a collection of police officers’ names he can rattle off at will—officers he met to discuss his son’s case, another who told him to go to Pakistan, an IPS officer who is not associated with the riots case but “is a true gentleman and officer” and each one of those indicted by the Srikrishna Commission, hence promoted or retired. “If justice must really be done,” he says, eyes moist, “tell the Government to suspend those named in the report. Then they’ll know what it means to lose a family member.” That it was not members of another community or mob fury that took away his son makes it more painful. “In a riot, people die,” he says. “But these were law enforcers, rakshaks. Yeh log Bhakshak kaise ban gaye (They are protectors, how did they become destroyers)?”
— Kavitha Iyer

Leena Shinde
then 23, lost her husband
On December 5, 1992, the night before the Babri Masjid was attacked in Ayodhya, Narendra Shinde (26) was ringing in his first wedding anniversary and pre-toasting the birth of his child with his pregnant wife in their Dharavi home. Just over a month later, 23-year-old Leena found herself registering a missing persons complaint for her husband and raising her newborn alone. On the night of January 3, 1993, Narendra—who was on his way back to Mahim from the western suburb of Kandivili—disappeared. Because of the tense atmosphere and the 9 pm curfew in Dharavi, Narendra was to stay the night at his in-laws’ place.
“He was returning alone after a family function at my sister’s place,” says Leena, now 37. “They dropped him till a rickshaw. And no one has seen him after that.”
At her parents’ residence having recently delivered a child, Leena looked forward to staying with her husband that night. But she didn’t know that was the last day she would see her husband: they had had a cheerful lunch and shopped a bit for their 14-day-old baby Tejas.
Bringing up Tejas without a father was tough. Her mother-in-law’s constant taunts did little to soothe Leena: “In some twisted way, she blames Tejas for what happened. She thinks his birth was inauspicious,” she says.
That’s the reason she moved out of her husband’s Dharavi home five years later. She admits she has a low tolerance threshold for thoughtlessness. After all, for Leena, Narendra’s memory is alive in their son. “Tejas looks exactly like him,” she smiles. Also, like his father, Tejas is an avid sketcher and like his father, her 15-year-old son is a lithe dancer. “He was part of an orchestra where he would dance to the tune of Mera Naam Joker,” she smiles, remembering the times Narendra would hit the club with his numerous friends. “I want Tejas to focus on his studies. Everything else will fall in place then,” she says. Because Leena is tired now: tired of the daily rigmarole, tired of being the breadwinner. “I hope he comes back. At least my mother-in-law will stop crying and blaming my child then.”
— Lekha Agarwal