Ayub Namubhai Ghori, a banana seller and a father of five, was kneeling with the faithful when he heard the thump and the screams in the alley outside the mosque. Ayub had barely got on to his feet when a couple of men came in to tell him a bomb had caught his third child, 15-year-old Jainul Abdeen Ghori, on the chest. “They tell me it threw him and opened his chest. My boy got up and ran a few feet, then collapsed,” mumbles the father.

Jainul, Ayub’s sole help with the banana cart that he pushed around town, had left home to buy medicines for his arthritic aunt. His cousin Nazeemuddin, who was walking with him, is still in hospital.

Three days after, sombre men in festive white kurtas and skull caps point to where the boy fell bleeding—below a scrawled board that says, Bakranu thaju ane choku mutton (fresh and clean mutton), near a rusting yellow shutter of a closed phone booth, which the blast sliced through.

It’s Thursday, the day of Eid. In the ancient narrow alleys of broken concrete in this Muslim half of Modasa, men emerge from two-foot-wide metal sheet doors dividing many little shops. They hug and go into a droning huddle and move listlessly on like disoriented bee spirals, breathing attar, spices and the choked drains. Women in burqas throw furtive glances at strangers and hurry past, children scamper to keep up. In a corner, bored policemen on watch slump in borrowed chairs and dribble yellow jalebi juice below a dirt-flaked Hrithik Roshan sporting inner wear on a pigeon-defiled hoarding.

... contd.