Abu Bakr, father of Abu Basher, at home in Saraimir. Behind him is village pradhan Mohammed Shahid. Picture by Sankarshan Thakur

Saraimir (Azamgarh), Sept. 25: The youngster at the mouth of the village was sardonic after a catching fashion in these parts.

“Master to hain,” he said, peeping from behind a newspaper, “lekin mastermind nahin hain (The master is here but not the mastermind).”

His way, probably, of mocking the bagful of terror masterminds that have tumbled out in police raids over the week.

“They get one every day now,” he mused, leaping off his shaded perch under the peepul and leading us in. “I think they’ve decided to bother only with masterminds, chhore-chhakare nahin (not any riffraff).”

The narrow mud track wove through a humdrum collage of pucca and mud housing animated by even more humdrum pastoral symphonies — a tethered goat bleating out of habit, a rooster stretched atop the hay heap in untimely cock-a-doodling, naked children chortling riotously after a rotten cycle tyre being rolled and spun.

Then, quite suddenly, we turned into a cul-de-sac whose façade was a rickety wooden door, only half shut. He beat the iron links hanging on it and an elderly man — bearded, skull-capped, his neck skewed (by paralysis, we later learnt), his eyes liquid with grievance — emerged.

“Master,” the youngster announced. Master is Abu Bakr, so called because he is a trained moulvi and once taught the Quran to local boys. Master is also father to one of our recently proclaimed masterminds — Abu Basher, 23, himself a moulvi but who now carries more significant appendages to his name — alleged Simi operative, alleged Lashkar-e-Toiba conduit, alleged plotter of mayhem across the country, alleged mastermind, the first one to be labelled with that dubious honorific.

“Zulm sirf yeh nahin ki hamare bete pe tohmat laga di, usse bada zulm hai ki hum sab par tohmat laga di, sara desh Muslamaanon ke khilaf ho raha hai, yeh ho kya raha hai samajh mein nahin aata.”

Facial paralysis has meant Master Abu Bakr can only lisp in whispers, but his mind isn’t infirm; he’s able to grasp the darker portents lurking behind the news of the day. “The tyranny isn’t only that my son has been defamed, the bigger tyranny is that the blot is on all of us. The whole country is turning against Muslims; what’s happening, I cannot understand what’s happening.”

Village boys gathered around the old man’s charpoy — among them two of Master Bakr’s own — and presently the pradhan, Mohammed Shahid, arrived too.

“Do you see this house?” he asked first of all. “Does this look like the house of a mastermind of anything?”

A sunken mud courtyard with an open shed for a bathing room and a rusty hand pump. Abutting the narrow yard, the broken brickwork of two bare rooms — the hearth is cold because it is Ramazan, a few pots and pans lie empty and forlorn in a corner.

Under prompting from the pradhan, one of the sons, Abu Faiz, pulls out a wrinkled card from under a rancid sheet on the floor — the red “antyoday” card, the ones the government gives to those that are lumped at the bottom of the poverty spiral, even below those designated below-poverty-line.

Master and “mastermind” are both listed on the card along with seven others that make the family — Abu Bakr, 70, Saira Bano, 60, Abul Basher, 28, Abu Basher, 23, Abu Zai, 20, Abu Zaid, 16, Abu Faiz, 14, Abu Kaish, 10, Saima Bano, five.

“Hum isi mitti ka namak khaate hain, isi se jude hain, kahan jaayenge, kisko ujadenge? Agar Quran terror ka samaan hai, to hamare paas terror ka samaan hai, aur kuchh nahin,” the Master said, his neck involuntarily flexing. “Tohmat to yeh hai ki master ko mastermind ka baap bana diya (We eat off this soil, we are attached to it. Where can we go, who can we devastate? If the Quran is material for terror, we have material for terror, we have nothing else. The infamy is that a master has been turned into the father of a mastermind).”

Abu Basher, the Master’s second-born, had left home a few years ago in search of work. He went to Hyderabad and then, according to the police, wove rings round the country — Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Delhi, Mumbai, Mangalore, where not? Couldn’t he have gone astray? Couldn’t he have met people and come under their influence? The Master’s avowed allegiance and poverty could, after all, be no real guarantee for his son’s good conduct.

“No,” the Master said, “no for sure, but we would have had some notion of the truth, he is my son, after all, and if he is guilty, hang him. But not without trial, not like this.”

Mohammed Shahid, the pradhan, butts in. “Prove wrongdoing first, then call him names, we will too. If the police have nothing to hide, why are they lying about Abu Basher’s arrest? They picked him up from here, right from this house, in front of our eyes, and they say they nabbed him at Charbagh in Lucknow. Why these lies? What case can stand on such lies? Give him a lawyer, let the truth be out, at the moment it is just what the police say versus what we believe to be the truth.”

Abu Bakr’s eyes have welled up again and the paralysis makes sure he can’t contain his tears. The Master would cry anyhow — for the love of a son if Abu Basher were innocent, for the guilt of fathering a malefactor were he proved to be a mastermind.