Between Fear and Courage

How to keep one’s humanity and sanity in the face of unforgiving violence. An extract

Zeyad Masroor Khan

I kept looking out of the window. Every sound felt like a mob was assembling outside. Is the man who had once warned me not to live here assembling a mob to burn us to death right now? I kept thinking. It wasn’t an unrealistic thought. A few hours earlier, an eighty-five-old woman, Akbari Begum, eagerly waiting for a grandchild to be born, died when her house in Delhi’s Bhajanpura was set on fire by a Hindu mob.

I, on the other hand, was a young Muslim man—the perfect enemy.

I pushed these thoughts out of my head and went back to posting alerts on Twitter and sending my hastily written story to my editor. Before I could think of a plan to escape my ‘home’, I got a call from my friend, Rafiul Alom Rehman, an activist and academic I had once interviewed. He was crying. ‘Zeyad, please save my friend. He will burn to death!’ he said, his voice choking.

‘Calm down, tell me what happened?’

His friend Mursalin lived in Ashok Nagar, a mixed-population locality in northeast Delhi. An armed mob of over 100 had surrounded his home, chanted religious slogans and set his house on fire with him inside. ‘He has been texting me frantically. If help doesn’t reach him, he will suffocate to death,’ he said, now weeping profusely.

‘I don’t know what to do, Rafiul, but let me try my best.’

I reached out to a few local activists in the area, shared Mursalin’s contact and one of them reached Ashok Nagar to help him.

‘His phone is now unreachable,’ the activist told me.

This guy is dead, I thought. I had failed to save him.

For the next hour, I doom-scrolled through my Twitter feed and kept glancing at our balcony at every little sound: a child crying, a mother screaming at her son and a man calling out for his friend.

The sun was going to set soon. The day is when the spontaneous attacks happen. The ni