Protests Under Cover
It’s mid-March and I’m walking through Gandhi Park in south Delhi’s Hauz Rani, where a massive, ongoing sit-in has been organized by protestors of the Citizen Amendment Act (CAA). The CAA — passed last December by the Indian Parliament — threatens to erase the existence of Muslims in India. Most of the protestors today are Muslim women.
One good thing about the Coronavirus is that I now walk the streets wearing a surgical face mask. I’m hoping it will not only protect me from the virus, but will also conceal my face in case it isn’t brown and Hindu-looking enough. I have a noticeable yellow and a pale pinkish hue around the cheeks — like many Kashmiris or immigrants, Afghanis, middle easterners.
It’s Maghrib time as prayer chants can be heard from a nearby mosque. The scraps of polyester fabric and plastic sheets hanging from wooden poles make the tent that is crowded with women protestors. One wearing a black abaya and a headscarf is presiding over other similarly dressed women, and those in Salwar Kameez — long loose shirts and creased pants. They are seated on the floor in clusters around her while she recites Arabic prayers and translates in Hindi, Allah hum sab ko shehan sakhti de, Sab taraf aman-chain ho. “May Allah give us strength. May peace prevail.”
One elderly man is backing out of the entrance on a scooter. Two skull-capped men, three teenage children, and a woman in a saree are shopping at the neighborhood stores owned by both Hindus and Muslims. Everyone appears mindful of who’s entering the neighborhood. Not all are allies. From the park fence along the entrance, no one can miss the towering portraits hanging over the stage where protestors are gathered. These portraits are of our heroes: Mahatma Gandhi, Bhagat Singh, and Babasaheb Ambedkar. Gandhi, the leader of India's struggle for independence from the British, is admired for his dogged, non-violent methods; Singh was a folk hero executed in the pursuit of Indian independence; and Ambedkar inspired the Dalit Buddhist Movement, by peacefully resisting the dominance of upper class Hindus and calling for equal rights for the untouchables.
These portraits inspire the protestors, remind them that progress has been made on their soil before. They symbolize a united India — Sikhs, Christians, Parsies, liberal Hindus, and activists have joined Muslims in protesting the CAA — while the bill represents Modi’s divided one.
Without an abaya and a headscarf, I worry that someone might point at me and call me a traitor.
Done praying, the women avoid my presence. I sit on the willow mat with them while they chat amongst themselves. A woman protester comes up and asks me who I am. Her voice sounds confident but can’t conceal the fear in her eyes. She blinks nervously and keeps looking around. Other women tug at her Kameez, shaking their heads, signaling to her that she should not talk with me.
I tell her I’ve come to show my support for their cause, which is mine as well.
“It’s just that we are scared,” she says, blinking, continuing to survey the area for danger. “We can’t trust anyone. We want peace. We are all humans. This is a mixed neighborhood. We come and go into each other's houses, have always been eating together and participating in each other’s weddings. We are all one. Our Hindu neighbors stand with us in solidarity. But Modi is dividing us.”
I ask the woman about the recent attack on the marchers by the police.
“We had just finished marching and were coming back from the nearby neighborhoods — Malviya Nagar, Khirki Gaon (village) — when some strange person pushed a cop. The man was an outsider none of us knew. Three days before, another woman popped up in the tent and started calling us names. I asked the women to stay calm and took her outside. These are the people who are trying to break us.”
As I leave the park, police barricades block the two entrances. I squeeze my way through the entrance across from the Max Hospital, where police attacked anti-CAA protestors just days earlier, injuring many of them.
*
With the passing of the CAA, Modi effectively abolished religious autonomy in India’s only Muslim-majority region: Kashmir. The day before President Trump’s visit to India, the first protests broke out in northeastern Delhi. Over eighty people have died so far at the hands of police, while many others have been injured.
Recently, a legislator in Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, Kapil Mishra, condemned the anti-CAA protests in Shaheen Bagh in south Delhi, urging his followers to clear out the protestors or he would. Riots followed the statement. A Muslim woman in her early 80s was burned alive after her house was set on fire by a Hindu nationalist mob carrying saffron flags and chanting Jai shri Ram.
*
I turn down the main road, unaware that I’m walking in the wrong direction. My heart skips a beat when an auto rickshaw driver pulls over behind me. When he asks where I am headed and if I need a ride, I realize that I’m a mile away from the Saket Metro train that will take me home.
Though he’s not wearing his skullcap, the driver turns out to be Muslim. I ask him to take me to Saket, but instead of taking the most direct route, he embarks on a longer one. This route is safer. It will steer clear of the traffic caused by the sit-ins, avoid the dangers that passing through Gandhi Park might present. The cops at the park might ask for my driver’s identification and his Muslim name might get him in trouble, trouble I avoided because of my facemask and American ID.
The driver tells me he has two daughters and is from the Poonch district of Jammu and Kashmir. We’re neighbors, I tell him.
Suddenly, he pulls over: "Sorry, my tire punctured.” He can’t go on any further. He tells me he is scared for his two daughters. Many children have died during the anti-CAA riots. More have been arrested.
He refuses payment and waves down an oncoming auto to give me a ride. Before we say goodbye, he reaches into his breast pocket for his wallet to show me pictures of his daughters, six and twelve.
“Beautiful,” I say.
“Be careful,” he replies.
*
His advice is sound. There are plenty of reasons to be careful.
Born and raised in Kashmir, I learned caution early. My Grandmother and I were at a neighborhood grocery store, only a few hundred meters from my parents’ house in Srinagar, when a bomb went off. Suddenly, the weight of a mountain fell on my leg. As smoke slowly began to clear, I saw people running for safety, faces contorted, arms thrashing the air as though they were trying to fly. I closed my eyes. After the surgery, I was laid up with a broken leg for months. My father spent days sitting beside me, unable to go to the national Radio Station where he worked as a Program Executive in charge of the music department.
I was eleven years old.
A decade later, my father, a family friend, Jawahar, and I were traveling to New Delhi where I planned to enroll in school for journalism. It was an overnight train, and the three of us were set to move me into an apartment the next day. We all settled into our bunks for the evening. It was the last time I’d see my father.
When I got up to use the restroom that night, my father wasn’t in the bunk below mine. I woke up Jawahar. We looked around the berth, in and around the restrooms, and then through the other sections of the train. But my father was nowhere.
I asked the people sitting in the compartment if they had seen him. In their half-asleep daze, no one had an answer. I alerted the railway police, but they said he probably got off at the last station and we couldn’t do anything until we arrived in Delhi. Two days later, the police finally responded: they said that they “found” my father at Mukerian Village, in the state of Punjab, a hundred miles away from where our train had stopped.
When I asked the police how he ended up in Punjab, they said that he’d fallen from the train.
How?
“He probably had gone to the exit by the restrooms to pee or smoke.”
They also said they’d cremated him immediately, yet offered no reason or explanation. Their action violated a law that requires police to allow 72 hours for a body to be identified. I filed complaints in the Indian courts and with various human rights organizations. Three years of lawsuits did little to resolve the mystery of his death. But that is a story for another time.
*
The driver who picks me up is noticeably Hindu. He drives nonchalantly around Ghandi Park, past a popular Bikaner Sweets shop where he chats briefly with a passerby about wanting a tea break. He asks me about my day but I don’t respond. I pray my face mask won’t fall off. I make it to Saket Metro safely.
At the moment, a virus which doesn’t distinguish Muslims or Hindus has provided me with the cover I need.
Huma Sheikh was born and raised in the war-torn territory of Kashmir. She then came to the United States, where she received multiple degrees in Asia-Pacific Leadership, Creative Writing, English Literature, and Journalism and Communication Studies. She has taught writing and literature classes at Florida State University, University of South Dakota, Texas A&M University, and Long Island University (Brooklyn). Sheikh's currently pursuing her PhD at Florida State University. Her work has appeared in Consequence Magazine, Arrowsmith Journal, Solstice Literary Magazine, Commonline Journal, East West Center, Gravel, Cargo Literary Journal, The New Writers Series Anthology, Poetry from Texas, Downtown Brooklyn, and others.