Naturally, Barry’s stories also described the corrupt police and politicians who allowed such barbarity to flourish. Things we take for granted, such as women working outside the home, were considered transgressions punishable in ways that recalled the Dark Ages. Barry’s description of the punishment meted out to those who strayed from tradition made my hair stand up.
Then, a few years ago, I came across a series of stories written by Ellen Barry in the New York Times about the oppressive conditions of women in parts of rural India. But I certainly wasn’t thinking of it as literary material, just a personal story that made me worry about my father even as it made me more proud of him. The whole experience stayed with me, even though I heard and read about it secondhand, even though I was no longer in the city of my birth. “When you return,” he said, “please come and use the key to remove your belongings.” My dad, on the other hand, had made our neighbors put their jewelry in his locker themselves and then given them the key to it. There were many sad stories of families returning home after the riots ended and finding that those whom they’d trusted with their assets had swindled them.
What I learned much later from the Muslim family who lived next door to us was that they had earlier brought all their jewelry to Dad for safekeeping before they fled the neighborhood for a few weeks. We were Parsis, a small, prosperous, and educated religious minority in India the joke was that there were so few of us, nobody saw us as any kind of threat. I immediately worried about my family’s well-being, but he brushed aside my fretting. But I can still hear the bewilderment in my father’s voice as he later recounted the incident during our weekly phone chat. It had been set on fire by a mob of angry Hindus who had heard that a Muslim family lived on the ground floor.īy this time, I was living in faraway America, safe from the paroxysm of insanity and violence that gripped Bombay-the erstwhile most tolerant and cosmopolitan of Indian cities-during that terrible period. In 1993, my middle-aged father stood on our balcony and watched helplessly as the apartment building across the street burned.
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