The fingers here are still crossed, it’s been only 36 hours after the serial blasts that killed 30 people — police revised yesterday’s figure of 37 — too little a time for this town to forget its troubled past. And yet, as they buried their dead, Malegaon residents took their first shaky steps towards normalcy, trying to cross over the divide that cuts across this town.

“Please stop calling us a communally sensitive town,” says small-time businessman Satish Kalantri. “Not after we have demonstrated our secular credentials to the world in the last 24 hours.” Between the flurry of political visits, including Congress President Sonia Gandhi’s two-hour stopover, and in the presence of heavy security cover, residents looked around in astonishment. The curfew had been lifted, there was no war cry from either side of the communal divide.

In fact, scenes across this divide were united by tragedy. So while Muslims revisited the site of the blasts at Bara Kabristan to bury their dead and gather whatever belongings they could retrieve, around the same time, across the Mausam river on Tilak Road, in the Hindu part of town, vendors were picking up the remains of the day, from the hurriedly abandoned weekly Friday bazaar.

So Sonia Gandhi’s plea to maintain communal harmony in the wake of “acts aimed at creating a divide in society” is something Malegaon seems to have figured out quite early in the day.

Following the initial outburst against the police after the blasts — a mob went on the rampage, assaulted policemen and burnt vehicles — the city slept fitfully through Friday night’s drizzle. It woke up to a sunny, calm morning.

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