Related Stories THREE MURDERS, A RAPE AND VIOLENCE FEEDING THE NEWS The story behind the storiesA radical change Remains of that day

Hazarabi Qureishi
then about 41, lost her husband and eldest son
Sitting in her one room tenement in a crowded, sprawling settlement near Kurla station, Hazarabi, 55, shivers at the mention of the 1993 riots.
On January 10, 1993, the Qureishis woke up to a mob attacking their Samman Nagar home adjoining the Hari Masjid in Wadala. Several men, whom they had not seen before, entered their house and beat Hazarabi’s husband Farooque to death and brutally cut off her eldest son Salim’s hands before her eyes. As she tried to intervene, she was thrown off the balcony. She hit a bar and lost consciousness. When she woke up, there was no trace of her husband or son, just walls splattered with blood.
“Sab taraf khoon hi khoon tha. Ab bhi jab sochte hain, to pura manzar aankhon ke samne aa jata hai (There was blood everywhere. I can see it even now),” says Hazarabi. “Till then, all Hindus and Muslims used to live together. Suddenly that morning, when we had not even woken up fully, they attacked,” she says.
Hazarabi’s two younger children Shabana and Rizwan were staying with a relative that day. Later, she was taken to Mahim where the children joined her. Shocked at what she had seen, Hazarabi continues to suffer from high blood pressure and a heart ailment.For days afterwards, the family and friends tried to trace the father and son. The police maintained a “missing” record despite the statements of the witnesses that they had seen the two being brutally killed. “They kept saying they must have gone to our native place, that they would return. Apne bacchon ko chodkar koi jata hai kya (Would anyone disappear leaving his children behind)? And we had seen everything, but for seven years they wouldn’t listen to us,” says Hazarabi.
The officials followed the rulebook, declaring a person dead after remaining missing for seven years. After losing the two earning members of her family—Farooque was a fruitseller in Byculla and Salim a tailor—Harazabi continued teaching the Holy Quran to support the family, ensured that her children got education and could support themselves. They also sold the property in Wadala. “Only we know how we survived. We try to forget what happened, we never went back there. What is the use? What was the use of the commissions and everything? Nothing came out of them,” says Shabana.
“For everything you need a father’s name, and my children never had it,” says Hazarabi.
— Swatee Kher

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

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