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He sells fish and has often made me buy extra mackerel or king fish apart from the prawns and pomfret I’m generally there for. When the gnarled 50-year-old Farid Dalavi stopped me to ask for a favour and gestured to come closer, I wondered whether he wanted me buy the shark as well... Not one to cross paths with any fishmonger, let alone the one who supervises my fish-shopping with regular fatherly admonishings, I went closer.

“Do you know any top policewallahs?”Surprised, I raised my eyebrows to ask why and he explained, dabbing his moist eyes.

“They have taken my younger one, Rashid, after he got into a scrap with some boys outside his college. The other party are big shots so the police have detained him since yesterday.”

He said he’d come to the market and not gone to the police station since the catch would rot otherwise. “My elder son, Niyaz, has gone to meet the police, but I don’t feel they’ll listen,” he told me.

When I suggested it’ll all blow away, perhaps unwittingly, he added, “How will it? We’re Muslims. You know that inspector has so many gods. He spent 10 minutes doing a puja while we waited for him to finish. You think he will help us? He kept asking me whether I distil hooch and had been ever arrested before and shooed us off.”

I tried telling him this was paranoia and his thinking was clouded by fatherly feelings but found myself unconvinced with what I was saying. On the auto-rickshaw ride back home, as I held the plastic bag upright to prevent the fishy water from leaking out, Dalavi’s words kept coming back with the memories of how others in places like Mominpura, Mumbra, Bhiwandi, Padgha and Malegaon who had been picked up, detained illegally and tortured (often times wrongfully) only to be released by the courts, absolved of charges had said.

An agitated clergyman who refused a sound byte after the Malegaon blasts said, “Dafa ho jao. Tum unke kaum se ho. Hamara dard nahi samjhoge.” (Get lost. You are from their community. You will never understand what we go through).

This is not only about the ubiquitous Hindu temples and shrines outside most police stations. It is as much about over six decades of policy. It is repeatedly reinforced in more than subtle ways that Muslims in these areas are merely ‘residents of areas which have a certain reputation’; a purgatory which the system has played a major role in sustaining through innumerable decisions that have legalised and institutionalised detention, torture and sometimes (like Khwaja Yunus) false encounters which strip people on both sides of the ghetto of human rights and dignity.

Rashid has since been let off. But the Salman fan who worshipped little else other than his biceps and bike has gone into a shell and has begun sporting a skull cap. Power over human rights or more power to human rights? We should decide…