Calcutta, December 8, 1992

The air had needles. My stomach was behaving like a moody trapeze artist. Something was going to happen that day. In my experience, this sense of dread had usually been followed by the declaration of examination results. But examinations, thankfully, were a thing of the past. It was September 30, 2010, and, along with millions of others across the country, I was waiting for the verdict on the Ayodhya land dispute. All afternoon I had kept running searches for news of developments, somewhat unreasonably clicking on the ‘refresh’ button every two minutes. The internet did not share my enthusiasm. Then shortly after four, someone announced that the verdict had been delivered. My stomach took a graceful dive. The results were out.

Babri Masjid had been demolished years ago and Ayodhya, which I have never seen, was hundreds of miles away. Buying churan from the the Bagbazar Durga Puja was the most religious I ever got. The story of the mosque — of how Hindus and Muslims had worshipped there since the 19th century, how the British had divided the premises between the two faiths and how idols of Lord Ram had made an appearance there in 1949 — was about as real as a historical novel to me. But before it was anything else, my response to the Ayodhya verdict was purely instinctual. Some secret unease had been activated once more.

In 1992, the destruction of the mosque had unleashed violence across the country. For me this meant a reprieve from school. We could not go out but there were enough supplies at home to last us for a few days. Meals consisted mostly of khichuri. It might have been a quiet, almost peaceful time. But this calm had a metal glint. We were cut off from the outside world, and the grown-ups wanted to watch the news even more than usual. Something terrible had happened, I was told.

I also added to my vocabulary. I learnt the word “curfew” — it meant you were not free to move about and go where you liked. Even school seemed inviting after a point. The days after the demolition remain my only experience of a curfew. I learnt the word “riot”: when groups of people — ordinary people you might meet at the market or on a bus — were driven to hack and kill. I learnt that people could kill for religion. My knowledge of such notions began with the destruction of the 500-year-old mosque.

Older generations might recall the Direct Action of 1946, the horror of Partition or the violence of 1950 and 1964. For many of my generation, the riots of 1992, which happened during our lifetime, became a reference point. Kar sevaks swarming the dome of the Babri Masjid almost became an archetypal image for communal hatred and violence. When 50 kar sevaks were burnt to death near Godhra a decade later, it seemed to be a grim allusion to that image. Incidentally, for a while it also seemed that Godhra might put an end to the board examinations that year. Later, in college, we would watch documentaries on the Gujarat riots in messy rooms and bristle righteously.

The memory of Babri was never far away. It was entwined with exams and the everyday. We grew up locked in an intensely personal struggle to make sense of, and to come to terms with, it. Beneath the rationalizations, beneath the secular ideals acquired in the course of one’s education, there was a deep and intimate unease about what had happened. It was the seat of our first associations with religious conflict and bloodshed. And 18 years after the mosque had been reduced to rubble, when the Ayodhya verdict was to be announced, the events of 1992 and 2002 felt frighteningly immediate once again. We were to be tested, the army of beliefs we had built up over the years was to be tested. Who knew how we would fare.