Rohan and I set out after Vijay put us on the road to Mangalore, our next stop. Secure with the money I had borrowed from Vijay, we set out towards Hassan. The road to Mangalore would take us through Hassan, the district whose fame to national claim was the first farmer prime minister of India from the south of the country. Deve Gowda, a local politician whose star held firm to emerge as the consensus candidate of a rag-tag coalition in 1995.

Deve Gowda’s own achievement in his few months of power was to amuse a nation with a personal achievement; learning Hindi in three weeks, in time to address the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort in Delhi on Republic Day. And the most abiding image of his tenure was a fast asleep prime minister in the midst of a public function he was required to attend as his ex officio duty. Since then, he has frayed his temper once too often and embarrassingly sentimentally, about being a humble farmer.

From the front pages he soon melted into the silliness of single column inside page mentions. It amused people to read reports citing “former prime minister,” though it was correct. He remained a provincial politician whose sincerity was soon worn out, and he became a minor irritant fly that flitted into public consciousness once in a while. Either he was addressing a conference in Norway on farm sector policies in India, or he was involved in settling disputes in this place, Hassan.

But to Rohan and me, Hassan, if we did indeed cut through the district, was merely a blur. At the constant speed of 60 kilometres per hour there was nothing more arresting than a gathering storm of green pixels as we battled the heat and baldness of the earth towards Mangalore. There were occasional sets of shops on either side of the National Highway 48 like the abandoned attempts of some installation artist at creating a set of teeth in the midst of the uninhabited. Typically, if we were approaching a settlement from the West we saw a broken down ramshackle half-thatched structure, which edged a more sturdy neighbour, and peaked with a proper cement structure with three or four shops with iron shutters. These structures soon petered out again towards more unseemly, less confident commercial real estate.

We slowed down, and Rohan guided the bike towards a ramshackle hut serving tea. It was away from the settlement, and a little isolated. It was built next to a huge tree. We ordered tea, and decided to loll under the shade.

“Do you know how long since we left Bombay?”

“Not really,” I lied. He was already punching into his cell to find out
the exact date. And it did not matter whether I knew or not. He would
presently announce his findings.

“We left Bombay on March 2. Today is March twentieth. We have been
travelling for eighteen days,” he said.

“Yes. And this evening when we reach Mangalore, we will have hit
the western coast again. Then onwards, we climb along the coast back to
Bombay.”

“Who is there in Mangalore?”

“Rashmi, Krishna and their two children Shameeka and Dalai Lama,” I said.

“Dalai Lama?”

“Well, not the Nobel winner, but Rashmi and Krishna’s youngest used
to have the serene looks of a Buddhist monk. And we used to call him
Dalai Lama. Rashmi is Rajani’s sister,” I hurriedly pushed in the
material information before Rohan lost his own question.

Dalai Lama must have grown. Shameeka was probably eight, maybe nine. Dalai Lama should himself be about five.

By the time tea came, supine on the grass under the canopy of that huge tree, we had fallen silent. I was wondering how many children we had met during our road trip. The first we met were Taraz’s children, almost a week after we set out. Till then it had been a world of grown-ups, friends and acquaintances, or usually friends of friends who later became our aquaintances. We had stayed in hotels, and chatted in restaurants.

And come to think of it, we met children in the first home we entered. In Sambhalpur. Taraz’s daughter Mona, and son Sina. There, I had observed how the teacher couple had kept the children as close to their culture as possible. Both the children spoke Persian at home. A language they shared only among themselves, within the confines of the family home.

The children also spoke the local language, and Hindi better than their parents. I did not see any parental anxiety, about whether their children would remain faithful to their parents’ way of life. And there was a solid cause for such an anxiety to exist; because both Mona and Sina were twice removed potted plants. Their parents, Taraz and Sima, had had a life in their native Iran. They were the first generation settlers in India. They had rebuilt their life on the negative certainty that they would never be back in their motherland. Their children learnt Persian entirely away from their land and culture, inside the hothouse of their family home in a far flung tribal town in Orissa.

How long before the children strained at the leash? How long before Taraz and Sima ran out of cultural nourishment for their children, or the children outgrew their parents? Then the immediate environment outside their home would invade, and both of them would be forced to differentiate, and even exaggerate the worth of their uniqueness, of faith, of nationality, to convince their children. In the process they’d inevitably weaken and even reduce the meaning of the Indian society that threatened to take over their children from them. The world outside would sooner or later mongrelize their children. Sooner than later, the potted plants, nourished on their parents’ fanciful nostalgia and romantic family rituals, would choose to move out of the nursery.

That, however, was an anxiety I did not see in Sambhalpur. In Anupam’s house we met our next child, Anupam and Ruchi’s eldest child Adi, only four perhaps, was a far less burdened child. He was the only child, but that status was under threat because Ruchi was pregnant. Adi was a generally occupied busybody, distracted only when he wanted his father to give him something, if not chocolates then at the very least total attention. So much so that, when we had just met, Adi decided his father was not being attentive to him, and raised a racket. Within a few minutes of entering the Sah household, I saw Anupam excusing himself, picking up an irritating and irritated Adi, and moving into their bedroom. After about five minutes, Anupam emerged without Adi. The sounds had died down too.

“Now we are friends. He needed to be spanked,” said Anupam.

And lo behold, in another two minutes Adi was back on his tricycle wheeling away around us. He looked a little grumpy in the beginning, and a wee bit too pricey to Anupam’s offers of friendship. That grumpiness too, soon melted.
The next children we met were at Surekha’s house. They were special children, because of some important minuses in their childhood. They were living fatherless, with their single mother. They both were in the school where their mother was an imposing presence. They were also the oldest set of children we had met so far. Parinika and Zohrab.

There was a vital difference between Taraz’s children and Surekha’s. Taraz’s were part of a very close-knit family where an unambiguous religion and a faraway culture were being re-enacted.

On the other hand, Surekha’s house breathed a more liberal attitude. Though it was tough for a visitor to find symptoms of or identify the family religion, religion was an important factor. Surekha herself believed religion had a very important role in transmitting certain values to children, which is outside the purview of schools.

Surekha was raised Roman Catholic, and baptized as one by her Roman Catholic parents. She was a Roman Catholic till she entered college. Once in college, her irrepressible nature did not leave much time for Sunday church going.

She moved to Chandigarh and then Delhi. She met her husband Bomansha Gamat in Delhi. Bomansha was a Zorashtrian by faith. But like many urban Indians, was not too attached to religion. However, Surekha and her husband had decided that their children should be introduced to religion.

Both decided that the children should be introduced to both their faiths, Zorashtrianism and Roman Catholicism.

However, when their father died, Surekha tried to initiate the children to their father’s faith. But, the nature of the Parsi faith is such that only children of a Parsi man could be taken into the folds of the faith, keeping the mother, especially if she was not born Parsi as Surekha, outside the faith. This meant that were her children to be initiated or accepted into her husband’s and their father’s faith, she will still remain outside.

Surekha did not finally initiate the children to the Parsi faith because of her exclusion from their initiation ceremony, and the Fire Temple itself.

She baptised both Parnika and Zohrab as Roman Catholics when she moved to Whitefield after their father’s death about 10 years ago. In fact, the strictness of Parsi religious custom barring outsiders marrying into the community was why they did not have the ceremonies for her husband’s funeral at the Fire temple.

Surekha’s mother-in-law arranged for prayers that she was able to attend and a burial at the York cemetery in New Delhi which the children too visited. Parnika and Zohrab now attend catholic services when they can, and their mother sends them to Bible school during the summer holidays. They enjoy Bible classes and know passages from the Bible by heart.

I was struck by how loaded with ironies religion had come to the children in these families. On the one hand, the Baha’I children received their religion as a family ritual and part of a tradition being kept alive, under the duress of foreign soil and in the full glare of an alien culture. Religion there thus became a valued cultural legacy. In their life culture and religion became seamless. In Taraz’s mundane middle class world of cushioned conservatism, nothing more was asked of religion.

On the other hand, Surekha’s children were imbibing religion as an easily available route to certain values that she wanted her children to learn, and felt schools were insufficient to teach. Both Parinika and Zohrab have a legacy of two different religions. And yet, religiosity or culture was not what their mother wanted from religion for her children. She wanted religion to give them an ethical framework for their lives. Religion to Surekha was a tool in the upbringing of her children. She had no greater loyalty to either her own faith or her husband’s. Yet, she wanted a religion for her children, and took the path of least resistance.

It is in this context that Adi’s life seemed less burdened. He neither had to practice and carry a legacy to keep it from dying, nor did he have to seek any framework from his religion. The religion of the majority in India, in the urban middle class at least, both enjoyed and suffered from that basic lack of expectation.

And then, I remembered how little I thought about children. When in the beginning of our tour, after we left Vapi and entered Maharashtra, both Rohan and I were tense about the situation in Malegaon. Malegaon had always been notorious for Hindu Muslim riots. In the losing light of the day, as we moved towards Malegaon we had seen that sombre convoy of trucks with Gujarat number plates. The trucks which had the youth sitting atop them, masked against the wind. Those trucks were covered withtarpaulin. I had wondered about the fear of those masked men, I had wondered about whether there were a lot of women in the belly of those trucks. They were bound to be there. But I had no thought whether there would be children.

Was it not possible, in fact it sounds so impossible now, that there were no children in those trucks of fleeing Muslim families? How many of them would be in the same age group as Adi, Sina, Mona, Parnika and Zohrab.
The youngest, Adi, was probably about four, while Parinika, the eldest, was 14. These children that I have met are just growing up, and religion is variously an engaging ritual so far. Perhaps, some of them will find more succour in it than others, as time brings them more troubles than merely school, parents and child fights.

But in those tarpaulin shrouded trucks, the children would remember an event. An event when their parents bundled them into trucks, and abandoned all the familiarity of their lives till then. They would have asked questions of their parents. They could have been silenced then, in the beginning, in the middle of the desperation to get out. Children have this unerring instinct to be quiet when there is a general panic, they rarely disobey a parent in an emergency. Is it that they smell fear in their parents’ sweat? Or do they sense death? Or do they sense the ignition of the survival instinct in their flock?

Those children in those trucks. They would know what religion is, a lot more concretely than the children of my friends. My friends’ children have known their religion only through the sombreness and piety of rituals, and as they grow, they’ll distil their religious identities through the benign conflicts of everyday life.

But those truck children, they’ll remember their religion as something tied to the smell of fear. A fear so desperate that it will remain forever coalesced to an image; a flurry of stricken elders grabbing some everyday things from their small or big houses, and bundling them into a huge hooded vehicle.

Their religion, which was as benign a training as Adi’s, or Sina’s, will forever be embedded in their hearts as the cause and foundation of that fearful image of their childhood. Religion, in their lives, had kicked in more concretely, more menacingly, and, defined through a direct physical conflict, was already being made a far more potent and lethal a part of their identities to evolve over the years into adulthood.

Mentally, those children were already ghettoed into a far narrower and meaner part of human consciousness. From there they will eventually venture out to do business with the world, but will return to that first home. The mental ghetto of the religiously persecuted. Many will easily forget the persecution, but the ghetto will keep alive in the nooks and dark crannies, a miasma of loss. And that loss, like Orissa’s dead and mutilated statues, will always be kicked to lethal life in times of another communal crisis.

Though physically I had seen the isolation, and the security of alliances formed among the isolated, bulging the ranks of those who move into ghettoes in Bombay. During the riots of 1992-93, there were many instances when in the dark of the night, Muslim families would quietly tip toe down their apartment buildings and remove their name plates adorning the residents list. So that if a mob entered their building they would not know their Muslim identities. Eventually, others got together and removed all the name plates, so that the Muslims among them were not targeted. The fear-induced removal of name plates itself would have been a giveaway, a freshly removed name plate being a smoking gun to a blood-thirsty mob.

As the city returned to normal, stories bubbled up to the surface. Some of these Muslim families saved by a neighbourhood conscience, sold out their flats. They moved to buildings where all the name plates held Muslim names.
I had thought this was a sad turn of events in Bombay. The response of a traumatised minority to mayhem. But, several months down the line, when I went to Vapi on a visit, I realized the real impact of the communal riots in Bombay. In our small town, builders had started to refuse apartments to Muslim families. In certain cases, some Hindu or Jain family had raised apprehensions of non-vegetarian neighbours, in other cases it was adown right bellicose refusal to stay next to Muslim neighbours.

Eventually, similar tales rippled over to economics. Builders decided it was better to issue a blanket refusal to Muslim families, so that the majority Hindu customers did not have to screen their neighbours.

The situation had reached such alarming proportions that there are today apartment buildings in Vapi that are entirely populated by one community or the other. Entire buildings sold out to residents in the mid nineties were on communal lines. Muslim builders started to react by advertising, mostly by word of mouth, only Muslim colonies and soliciting only potential Muslim buyers. This is the small town phenomena that facilitated Narendra Modi’s ascension to power in Gujarat. What he did in the aftermath of the Godhra carnage was a perverse quickening of this polarization.

Many of the children from these families meet in classrooms of a school that is secular in Vapi. And yet, they go back to their insular neighbourhoods. Will the school triumph over the whispered prejudices of their neighbourhoods?

In faraway Whitefield Surekha had chosen religion for her children because it would teach the children a framework of values that schools cannot teach. But in Vapi, schools are probably trying to triumph over the insularity religion has imposed on the children. A single mother’s small nuclear family and its experiments with religion were reversed in a small town in Gujarat. Unless religion succeeds in Surekha’s case, and schools win in Vapi, religion will remain a threatening and lethal component of identity-building of communities that have anyways maintained armed neutrality in peace times.

But the children in the trucks. They were racing towards another ghetto. They’ll be part of violently uprooted families that have nothing but thehuman will to survive. Those children will not even have as many chances to go through secular schools to distil their identities.

The thought of some of them meeting Adi, Sina, Mona, Zohrab and Parinika as classmates in similar school uniforms seemed so wearily romantic. Like some oversized cut-out artificial halo carried by a child actor on a stage that marked him out for the guns of the more powerful hunters and arbiters of India’s destiny.