This could be just any Mumbai real-estate story.

But the reality is that property built here is linked to life and property destroyed somewhere else. So there you have it: this vast sprawl, more potholes than road, more power-cuts than power. Credit-card providers and home-loan bank lists call it a “grey zone.” Means, institutionally, it’s off the economic radar in the country’s financial heart.

If the isolation of Muslims in a city needed one physical symbol, it’s here in Mumbra, about 40 km off Mumbai in Thane. Ghetto or safe haven? Depends on whom you ask.

Just like in any unplanned Mumbai neighbourhood, it has an endless list of civic problems but talk to residents and you can sense despair rather than hope. For, they seem resigned to the fact that Mumbra will stay the way it is because it’s home to The Victim. Of riots and murder, for over 13 years now. Gujarat was the latest.

Says Ashraf: “In my Jhansi Palace building, there are at least eight families who have shifted base here after the Gujarat riots in 2002.” He, with his son and partner Khalid Ashraf, organizes the Milaad-un-Nabi (Prophet’s birthday) annual procession. Says Khalid Ashraf: “It’s very safe here, even in 1992-3, nothing happened. That’s why all these people flocked here with all they had left. On our Prophet’s birthday celebrations, Hindus on stage receive the procession and arrange the qawwali. The only problem now is that police stations call this sensitive.”

Hindus welcoming the Milaad-un-Nabi procession may seem like a picture postcard of communal harmony in the city but that’s just the surface. It is here that Ishrat Jehan lived. Young Ishrat was shot dead in a police encounter in 2003, accused of plotting to kill Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. The Lashkar-e-Toiba website claimed she was a martyr. While the police are non-committal when you ask if Mumbra is “sensitive” and a place for potential trouble-makers, people here don’t want to discuss Ishrat Jehan.

The only thing they say is that she is buried in the Kausa qabrastan in Mumbra. Her family has moved out since, to escape the scrutiny, and word has it that they may be in Parbani. In the neighbourhood where Ishrat lived, people are angry when you bring her name up.

Says Shaukat Ansari, living in the Simla Hills building nearby: “She is buried, it is over, so go back and look up your press clippings.”

The owners of the ration shop her family used to frequent are edgy when you even mention her name. In Mumbra, Ishrat Jehan has become a symbol of the sense of unease they experience about living here. In Kausa, where Ishrat lies buried, nearly all the shops are run by people who have come in after the 1993 riots. Al Noor Stationery and Store is run by 25-year-old Wasim who came here in 1993 from Santa Cruz. His effortless English betrays his education at St Anthony’s in Mumbai. So why this low skill job? Why not one of the newer options in a rapidly growing Mumbai?

He smiles as he doles out toffees to a young customer: “I tried at a call centre, and a firm in 2002 and 2003. Then I realized I wasn’t getting a response at all, so I decided on my own little business.”

Mohammed Haroon runs a kirana store very close to him, he has studied only till Class 8, but boasts of a wife educated till Class 12. They spend a lot sending their two girls to a convent in the hope of a better life. He is not forthcoming on why he came here from Sion in 1993. His only explanation: “The mahaul (atmosphere) here is much better than there.”

Obviously, though residents here say there is little government attention, a fact borne out by no government hospital in the area and no government schools for children beyond Class 8, the township’s streets are dotted with boards like Talent Tutorials, Oxford Tutorials and Onyx Coaching Classes suggestive of aspirations higher than otherwise betrayed on the surface.

The chorus here: Yes, we can educate ourselves but now, especially after the train blasts, who will give us jobs with Mumbra in our address column.

Mumbra has no government hospital, and so much garbage strewn around, that you almost believe the locals when they say that all the kachra from nearby Thane, Damboli and Diva gets dumped here. An NGO Khoj, working in education, has presented a detailed memo listing local woes to the state government. But the local corporator, Yasin Qureshi, is ready to rubbish the pessimistic prognosis of Mumbra-ites when he says “Rs 15 crore from the Thane Municipal Corporation has just been okayed for the Mumbra city road and work is to start early next month. The garbage is a problem as one resident has gone and got a stay on the place where the Mumbra garbage is dumped, we are fighting that in the High Court.”

Speaking about the branding of the place as “sensitive,” Qureshi blames the media: “This place has never seen a riot, on the contrary, it has given panaah (shelter) to those affected by riots, many Hindus live here too. When ex-CM Sushil Shinde was supposed to come here, a newspaper headlined the report as “CM to visit terrorists.” So could it be general anti-Muslim bias? Says Qureshi, “What to do, Madam, the journalist was also a Muslim.”

Tomorrow: (Back to the fundamentals — and fundamentalism)