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

... contd.