"Don't worry. If they push you out, they also pull you in."
Bombay (now officially Mumbai) is a city with an identity crisis; a city ex-periencing both a boom and a civic emergency. It's the biggest, fastest, richest city in India. It held 12 million people at the last count – more than Greece – and 38 percent of the nation's taxes are paid by its citizens. Yet half the population is homeless. In the Bayview Bar of the Oberoi Hotel you can order [a bottle of] Dom Perignon champagne for 20,250 rupees, more than one-and-a-half times the average annual income; this in a city where 40 percent of the houses are without safe drinking water. In a country where a number of people still die of starvation, Bombay boasts 150 diet clinics. Urbs prima in Indis, says the plaque outside the Gateway of India. By the year 2020, it is predicted, Bombay will be the largest city in the world.
Four years ago, this divided metropolis went to war with itself. On 6 December 1992 the Babri Masjid was destroyed by a fanatical Hindu mob. Ayodhya is many hundreds of miles away in Uttar Pradesh, but the rubble from its mosque swiftly provided the foundations for the walls that shot up between Hindus and Muslims in Bombay. A series of riots left 1400 people dead. Four years later, at the end of 1996, I was back in Bombay and was planning a trip with a group of slum women. When I suggested the following Friday, 6 December, there was a silence. The women laughed uneasily, looked at each other. Finally, one said, "No one will leave the house on that date."
The riots were a tragedy in three acts. First, there was a spontaneous upheaval involving the police and Muslims. This was followed, in January, by a second wave of more serious rioting, instigated by the Hindu political movement Shiv Sena, in which Muslims were systematically identified and massacred, their houses and shops burnt and looted. The third stage was the revenge of the Muslims: on 12 March, ten powerful bombs went off all over the city. One exploded in the Stock Exchange, another in the Air India building. There were bombs in cars and scooters. 317 people died, many of them Muslims.