Inside Jamia Nagar

Further ahead, in Joga Bai—where musty structures with overhanging balconies crowd the lanes—a burqa-clad woman enquires about the price of a pair of imitation gold earrings inlaid with plastic pearls.

After their roza and namaaz at one of the many masjids dotting the area, the residents of Batla House, the residential area adjacent to the bazaar, set out to buy iftaar fare such as dates and dryfruit. At Ahmed Faini’s, two men fashion dough made of fine maida into sevaiya, piling up spirals of the deep-fried delicacy to be sold for Rs 60 a kilo. In the evenings, streetside thelas are laden with falooda, jalebi, pakoras and rabdi. Munching on guava chaat, policemen stand guard. Here, food is not an indulgence to be frowned upon.

Moonis Kada, a restaurant set up by S. Akhtar in 1985, whips up mutton nehari, chicken achari and other choicest dishes for 350-400 people every day. Not all the habitués are Muslims. “Hindus from East of Kailash and Nehru Place often come here in the evenings,” says Akhtar, who bid adieu to his ancestral home in Old Delhi and moved to Jamia Nagar over 25 years ago. “This area was peaceful then, that is why I made it my home. Things have changed now. I am not happy with the recent developments here,” says the 58-year-old. These “recent developments” have prompted Akhtar to direct his 26-year-old son Moonis not to venture out.

Fear does run deep here. In a season of festivities, the fabric of community life is visibly frayed. Despite all the activity, shopkeepers say it’s a lean Ramzan. In a good year, they make enough during the festive season to see them through several months. For two years in a row, however, the festivities have been marred by unpleasantness. “There was a mishap last year. Carts were overturned,” a grocer says.

Adeeb Ghori, a 20-year-old JMI student who runs a boutique near Khalilullah Masjid, at some remove from the market, says his Ramzan sales have dropped from Rs 45,000 a day in previous years to

Rs 25,000. Men’s clothes have taken a hit, he says, joking that nothing can deter women from shopping. But the seriousness of recent events escapes no one. “We don’t support people who do wrong,” says Ghori’s friend Imran Khan. “Jamia Nagar has always been a peaceful colony, yet it is known as chhota Pakistan,” says Ghori plaintively.

In the tangle of lanes and alleyways, the low drone of embroidery machines is lost in the clang of rickshaws on unpaved roads and modern tuition centres stand cheek by jowl with madrassas. Across the street from L-18, the site of the encounter, Zoya Hashmi runs a salon. “We are living in a cage. Young men cannot move about freely. The women don’t feel comfortable with the heavy police presence. It’s a curfew-like situation,” says the 27-year-old.

Azmi and Sahiba, the young women who work at the parlour, interpose their respective stories. “My cousin Sajjid shares his name with one of the alleged terrorists, and that’s reason enough to make our family fear harassment at the hands of the police,” says Azmi. Sahiba’s brother has been forbidden from stepping out.

Zoya’s business has suffered, but it is the uncertainty interrupting the lives of young Muslim men in the locality that vexes her. She fears for her two-and-a-half-year-old son Abir. “Who knows what will happen to him when he turns 18 or 19? No mother gives birth to a terrorist but I cannot protect him from the world’s accusing glances. No one will trust him,” she says, breaking down into tears.

Zoya was a Hindu, who embraced Islam after marrying a Muslim. She laments that faith has become the hinge on which all opportunities turn. “Our children are denied admission in good schools,” she says. The Hashmis have been house-hunting in New Friends Colony, but no one wants a Muslim for a tenant.

The call of aazaan breaks the eerie calm. A couple of young men haul suitcases up the narrow street. Aijaz, a passer-by, tells us that the boys are among the last to go home—Ballia, in Uttar Pradesh—for Eid. Muslims from Uttar Pradesh and Delhi’s Jama Masjid area moved to Jamia Nagar in the troubled early ’90s, turning it into an extension of Old Delhi, says a resident. “A majority of the people who live here are from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. After the police episode, everyone is packing up and leaving earlier than usual,” Aijaz says.

But in A Block, a few streets away, Javed Qadim appears unperturbed by the happenings that have suffused Batla House with a sense of dread, perhaps because he has seen worse. The 17-year-old is the oldest of 56 children at Happy Home, a shelter for orphans run by the Zakat Foundation. Qadim and 28 other children were brought here on June 26, 2002 from relief camps in riot-hit Gujarat. Qadim does not go out to play with his friends at the nearby Bhopal Grounds as often as he used to—their parents want them to stay indoors, he says. Yet, at Happy Home, the children, who emerge from the inner courtyard to look at the new shoes they will get to wear on Eid and shyly greet us with an assalam aleyqum, are largely untouched by the pathos of persecution.

On Sir Syed Road, where men strain boiled rice for biryani and a half-shuttered shop specialising in exotic breads bakes shirmaal, Afsana and her children are just as excited about Eid. As she admires a necklace on a thela, her youngest son Faizand is frantically rummaging among the toys and trinkets. Asked what the four-year-old is looking for, the vendor says, “He wants a police van, but I don’t have one.” It is an eloquent testimony to the mood of vigilance that has tempered the festive fanfare with caution.

There is more to Jamia Nagar, however, than the black of burqas, the white of skullcaps and the reticulated web of narrow lanes. The road to the cemetery leads to Tikona Park, a left turn from which transports us into a whole new world. It is a world of old bungalows reposing on either side of the road, children in football jerseys, evening joggers and trees where birds come to roost. Here, in Gulmohar Avenue, is Zakir Manzil, the grand old dwelling of Zakir Husain—former President of India and vice-chancellor of the Jamia Millia Islamia. In the 1940s, Zakir mian, as he was known, built his home on the banks of the Yamuna, in what was once a street lined with gulmohar trees. Generations of his family and Congress leader Salman Khurshid now occupy the bungalow and its annexes.

Next door, Samina Mishra, Husain’s great-granddaughter and a documentary filmmaker, says most residents of the avenue have been associated with the university for a long time. Professors at Jamia Millia Islamia and Jawaharlal Nehru University, writers and eminent bureaucrats have lived here for decades. Samina’s film, The House on Gulmohar Avenue, on the lives and identities of the area’s residents, show that Jamia Nagar is not just Batla House.

“There are Muslims as well as Hindus. The people who live here are all respectable,” says a resident of the colony, which leads to the Teachers Training College and the Law College of Jamia. Nearby, Noor Nagar, with the Academic Staff College and the Hall of Girls Residence, is home to students and young professionals.

Blacklisted as a Muslim ghetto of lost souls, the area is grappling with the desultory infamy that hangs like an albatross around its neck. Yet, Jamia Nagar, flanked by New Friends Colony and Taimoor Nagar, is no different from Delhi’s other locales. As Samina says in her film, the story of a life is often the story of a search to be at home. The collective story of Jamia Nagar, home to the hoi polloi and the elite, is one that straddles a patchwork of pockmarked lanes, bungalow belts and breezy neighbourhoods.
_V. Shoba