When the no-school routine turned boring

Mention Bombay of 1992, and anyone who lived through the city’s worst communal riots has a story to tell. Someone has lost someone or someone they knew.

Living on Mohammed Ali Road at that time, the city’s Muslim heartland, I have some surprisingly good memories of the time. In my defence, I was only six.
No school, no homework. Prolonged lazy hours over countless board games, and to add to it all granny’s ghost stories!

A great respite from the grunt routine of school-homework-Quran lessons. Which six-year-old minds no school, all play? I was no different. I loved it.
But a few days later, it became all play, no school. And a new routine of carom-ludo-monopoly-sleep seeped in.

I hate routines, even as a kid I hated them.

I now began to miss my school and teachers, even those I wasn’t particularly fond of. I hadn’t stepped out of my building or been out on the road for over a week. Abba canned our weekend night drives, when he would buy me chocolates on the way.

One such weekend, I turned into a grumpy little wreck demanding my drive and Dairy Milk. Children are notorious to ask questions, often unsettling ones.
I had accumulated mine over the days. Why wasn’t I going to school? Why were certain neighbours-turned-muezzins calling out azaan? (Mother said they were praying for ‘peace’). Why were loaves of bread and milk packets being exchanged through backside windows of buildings?

Why were children asked to shut their eyes tightly each time someone screamed out tear gas? Most of all, I was fed up of our lives revolving around a certain goddamn curfew. What the hell was that supposed to mean anyway?
Stubborn as I was, I continued to sulk. Abba eventually gave in. I can’t recollect his exact words. Nevertheless, he made a frail attempt to explain the goriest riots in the city’s history using child-friendly terms. Tough job, I realised later.

So he went something like, “A mosque has been brought down. People are fighting over it. The police are trying to stop the fight. We need to remain indoors and step out only during certain hours of the day, because that’s safe.”
One day, mother frantically ran out, straight to the building’s common balcony. This was because a bullet had scraped through abba’s shoulder and hit a neighbour’s eye. I was glad he was safe. And I never insisted on a night drive after this incident.

Over the years I saw abba following every bit of news on Ayodhya and the Babri Masjid demolition. A Jamia Millia product, he would follow news closely. And each time he did, we’d exchange looks.

I knew why it was tough for him to explain it all back then. Not many fathers would be comfortable doing it, he wasn’t either, and I now understood.
Late last year, when the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad high court’s verdict on the Ayodhya dispute came out, this tucked away childhood memory instantly flashed across my mind.

I wondered how abba would have reacted to it, for now he resides in a peaceful world far away from riots and raucousness.