When I read Misbah Quadri’s story in the Hindu today about not being allotted a flat in Mumbai because she is a Muslim, I felt like I was reading my own story from seven years ago, word to word. Moving to a cosmopolitan city from riot-handicapped Gujarat, I was expecting to finally get rid of my ‘Muslim’ tag and live the anonymous life that Mumbai promises to the world.
Arriving in Mumbai with my parents a week before my college began, we started house hunting the very same day. ‘Oh God are you a Muslim?’ were the first words my agent uttered. I remember my mother getting really angry, and him quickly adding, ‘Don’t worry I am a Muslim too but this is not a great religion to belong to when you want a house.’ I didn’t really believe him, but what followed next made me.
Naushaad, my agent and the three of us started off with a house in Bandra. A stone’s throw away from my college in the same suburb, I was pretty excited to get that house. We met with an old lady who sat us down as she gave me all the rules. ‘You have a really beautiful name,’ she told me when I introduced myself as Ainee. I was asked to come back the next day to fill in the papers.
Well, the next day was pure drama.
‘Nizami is your surname? You are a Muslim???’ is how the day started for me. This was the beginning of a very long ordeal. From hearing the standard ‘Sorry we don’t want meat eaters,’ from a Bengali household to ‘You are a Shia Muslim? Sorry we only rent out to Sunni Muslims,’ from a Muslim woman herself, I heard it all.
It was heartbreaking to say the least to be let down by Mumbai. Hailing from Baroda, I lived with the Muslim and Hindu divide way before the riots. Every year, in school, we would have a census where all Hindu, Muslim and Christian girls would be asked to stand up, and the teacher would note down the numbers. Standing up with the seven other Muslim girls in school, we always heard a whisper of ‘Oh, they are ‘M’s,’ from the classroom. Growing up we had nicknamed the toilets in our school as Pakistan (yes, we were lame that way). However, whenever I was around people, they would whisper the word rather than say it out loud. They probably felt that I would start beating them up because they were calling my supposed hometown a toilet.
The riots made it worse but thankfully by then I had grown up enough to ensure that I was friends with the best of people who left no stone unturned in protecting my family.
Nevertheless, Mumbai was an eye-opener. Expecting such boundaries from a city that is in fact the cosmopolitan capital of Indian sure was disappointing. Reading Misbah Quadri’s account just made me feel worse. Because clearly the discrimination, a good seven years later, is still ongoing and doesn’t seem to be ending anytime soon.
As for me, I finally found PG accommodation, sharing my home with a Gujarati roommate who gave me hope again. Her total disregard of knowing about my religion made me hope that, like I had expected, maybe my religion wouldn’t define me in the city of Mumbai after all.
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