When I met Shabanam, the last time, she was about to quit her job as a Quality Control Analyst with a prestigious call centre in NOIDA. She had come to Delhi last year to do a BBA course. She studied during the day and worked by night in the call centre and lived in a Working Womens’ hostel in Okhla. Her family was settled in Kanpur but she had always studied away from home. Her schooling was from a convent in Nainital and then she want on to do a BBA from a private college in Ahmedabad.

I was helping her find a house and one evening after looking at about a dozen or so houses and facing a similar number of refusals by owners to rent her their place, she asked me is it’s her name that’s creating a problem. On some prodding from me she disclosed that when she and her younger brother, Adil, moved to Ahmedabad, they had trouble finding a suitable house and so their property dealer after many weeks of failed attempts at finding them a house taht was close to college, introduced Shabnam as Anju Ben and a deal was struck for a second story house in Paldi. I told her that here it was probably not her name but that she was a single woman working at a night job that could be the issue. But I was curious about the ‘Anju Ben’ dimension of Shabnam's life and I urged her to continue.

She kept silent for some time then she said, a year of living in Paldi passed peacefully. The pseudonym held. Things were going on fine till the riots broke out in March of 2002.

Shabnam and her brother were probably the only Muslims in their Society. A close friend Rajan came to stay with them a couple of days before, when trouble started brewing. As she was preparing tea on the morning of second of March, she heard some commotion, looking down from the kitchen window she saw a large mob, of more than five hundred men going down the lane – banging doors of every house and asking families to send out all men between the ages of 17 and 35. Fearing for the safety of Adil and Rajan, Shabnam switched off the TV, lights and fan and asked the boys to be quiet.

Shabnam looked down from her window and saw men wielding swords, batons, Molotov cocktails and some of them were even carrying guns. The men leading the mob had bunches of papers in their hands. They would encircle a building and wait for the command. The men with papers would read something from it and give orders.

The whole operation looked very systematic. The men leading the horde were, she said, carrying voter lists, ration card lists, license lists, attendance rolls from schools and college and tenant lists. Every flat in the locality was marked, and identified according to the list. The crowd had meanwhile approached their house now and a few men started banging at the front door.

From behind the curtain in the window, Shabnam saw her landlord come out of the main door. A brief conversation took place and the men left. 15 minutes later the landlord came upstairs and said that it would be safer if ‘Anju Ben would go home till things calmed down’.

Shabnam and her brother and friend went to Udaipur on the 4^th of March by a friends car. The five-hour journey was completed in tense silence and private invocations to Gods for safety.

Months later she went back to Ahemdabad to collect her belongings and mark sheets from college. It was here she learnt that her college principal had torn away pages bearing the names of the few Muslim students of the college, from attendance registers and had burned all records of Muslims studying in his institute .

To all intents and purposes no Shabnam and Adil had ever studied there.