Secret Lives

AT 10 am, breakfast is still brisk business for Sufiyan, snipping away pieces of a truck wheel-size paratha with a pair of scissors. A spoonful of fragrant halwa comes from a kadhai and is slapped on the cutaway paratha, which Sufiyan then rolls expertly into a scrap of yesterday8217;s Inquilab.

Breakfast for Rs 2 outside a seedy gully in Rashid Compound, Mumbra, which leads to the grieving home of 19-year-old Ishrat Jahan, second year BSc student, tuition teacher to 20-odd kids and now slain suspected terrorist.

8216;8216;Sure, we knew her. The rest of the family too,8217;8217; says Sufiyan. The girls, always in simple salwar kameezes with black burqas, would smile quietly as they passed.

8216;8216;Not that they were regular customers or anything.8217;8217; Naturally. For in a household where the pursestrings had a stranglehold, home-cooked food always made more sense. For the family of eight 8212; five sisters, two brothers and their widowed mother 8212; the income from Ishrat8217;s tuition classes and 16-year-old Anwar Sheikh8217;s now-on, now-off catering business was meagre.

At noon, in the small one-room home in the C-wing of Hashmat Park, half-a-dozen pairs of eyes gaze at the mosaic floor, partly covered by a plastic chatai. The family migrated from Ghond in Bihar to Mumbra about two decades ago, but this rented first-floor flat has been their home for only the last three years.

8216;8216;Neither we nor my sister Ishrat knew Javed,8217;8217; Zeenat repeats. At 20, Zeenat is the eldest sibling, valiantly trying to take Ishrat8217;s place as sheet anchor.

But when a brain tumour killed their father Mohammad Shamin Sheikh two years ago, it was Ishrat who slipped into her father8217;s shoes. She began teaching local kids 8212; Urdu, math, social sciences, anything she knew 8212; with some help from Zeenat, a class XII dropout. The tuitions went on nearly all day.

8216;8216;Up-down karte hue dekhte the,8217;8217; says immediate neighbour Mohammed Arif, a credit card salesperson in his mid-30s. 8216;8216;The door was often open.8217;8217;

Arif8217;s rent is Rs 1,000 a month, besides Rs 300 as society maintenance charges. Ishrat8217;s home was smaller, but rent would have still swallowed a large part of the family8217;s modest income.

Certainly, Ishrat was the brightest of the lot. But it was perhaps her charm that won her the lead role at home. 8216;8216;She was jovial. But she could also cut you to size,8217;8217; says younger sister Mussarat 17, faking Ishrat8217;s penetrating glare.

Father Mohammad Sheikh, an unsuccessful builder, had been a disciplinarian who wanted his daughters to display the tehzeeb typical of well-bred Muslim girls.

8216;8216;You8217;ll never catch them addressing others as tu. Always aap and hum,8217;8217; says Shakeena 20, a resident of Rashid Compound and Ishrat8217;s classmate in the Urdu section of Abdullah Patel High School.

Aasma Qureshi agrees. Her four-year-old daughter Ayesha, one of Ishrat8217;s students, has been asking after her teacher. 8216;8216;Ishrat was a thoroughly devoted teacher, teaching some 20-30 kids for hours, especially during exams,8217;8217; she says.

Watching TV last week, Ayesha heard Ishrat8217;s name. 8216;8216;Ammi, meri teacher ko maar diya kya?8217;8217; she asked.

Qureshi remembers the last time she met Ishrat. She was jotting something in a notebook, perhaps accounts 8212;8216;8216;paise ki tangi kaafi thi they always had money problems8217;8217;8212; and was planning to resume tuitions after the summer break. 8216;8216;She asked me to bring Ayesha on June 21 or 22, after school reopened,8217;8217; Qureshi says. And then reminded her she still owed Rs 100, last month8217;s fees.

In college 8212; a gruelling journey by bus or a share-an-auto to the station, then an hour in a slow train to Matunga, followed by a 10-minute brisk walk 8212; she was mostly unremarkable.

When a newspaper report said she was a first year BCom student of Guru Nanak Khalsa College, authorities spent a half-a-day checking their records. 8216;8216;First we checked BCom, then BA. Finally we found she was a second year BSc student,8217;8217; says principal Dr Ajit Singh.

Ishrat was studying Physics, Maths, Statistics, among the toughest combinations. 8216;8216;Her attendance was good and performance average,8217;8217; says Dr Singh.

8216;8216;She was usually in the front row or second,8217;8217; says maths professor Gopaldas Arora. He remembers her only vaguely. 8216;8216;In a class of 150, you remember somebody only if she8217;s extraordinarily bright, mischievous, involved with sports or other college activities or if she is very beautiful.8217;8217; Ishrat was none of the above.

For one, there was little time to study 8212; all free time was spent in giving tuitions. Ishrat8217;s original ambition was to be a doctor, but her Std XII percentage was poor. 8216;8216;So she opted for science, she could be a professor,8217;8217; says Mussarat.

But Shakeena says Ishrat was keen to do well. 8216;8216;She8217;d even joined coaching classes where she bartered her services as teacher against her own fees,8217;8217; she recalls.

Back at home, Anwar is pondering his future. He gave up studies when their father fell ill. Now, without his school certificate, he is at a dead end. 8216;8216;I have to clear my fees,8217;8217; he says.

The house rent, too, is pending for seven months now. Ishrat8217;s diary records transactions worth Rs 9 lakh in a Pune bank, but this family, at least, hasn8217;t seen any of it.

8230; and Javed
Amorous boyfriend, polite neighbour, dubious dealer, budding terrorist?

Prasannakumar Keskar and Aishwarya Mavinkurve

FOR 10 days, his body lay unclaimed in the morgue in Ahmedabad8217;s Civil Hospital.

To all appearances, that is the only discordant note in the life and death of Javed Gulam Mohammed Shaikh, earlier known as Pranesh Kumar Pillai. Something that doesn8217;t quite gel with his neighbours8217; and acquaintances8217; assessment of him as 8220;ordinary8221;, 8220;simple8221;, 8220;like one of us8221;.

For the quiet, lower middle-class Kalas Housing Society in Pune, Javed, 32, was a warm and friendly neighbour, a loving man who cared for his family and a softspoken friend. 8216;8216;The young couple and their three children came to stay here only two-three months ago. Javed did not go out of his way to mix with the neighbours but I would meet him sometimes on my morning walk. He would smile and exchange pleasantries,8217;8217; remembers society chairman P V Thomas.

Just as baffled are the Pune police who, for the last 12 days, have been trying to find out how a man who sacrificed name and religion for love could have turned into a terrorist. It doesn8217;t help that they have plenty of evidence of Javed8217;s dubious past 8212; and nothing at all to establish his links with the Lashkar-e-Toiba.

The Adithansh building in Kondhwa is still under construction, but that is where Javed8217;s widow Sajada has taken refuge with her father Hameed Inamdar and brother Javed Inamdar. The door remains firmly shut to persistent rings of the doorbell. The Inamdars, currently facing interrogation, have sought security cover and police constables shoo away unwanted visitors.

And all visitors are unwanted at this point. When a bleary-eyed Javed Inamdar finally emerges, it is to angrily say that the family is not interested in talking and should be left alone.

8220;Bhaisahab, hame kuch nahi kahena hain. Inquiry poori hone ke baad hame agar kuch kahena hoga to ham aapko contact karenge. Filhaal hame akela chod dijiye We don8217;t have anything to say. Let the inquiry end, if we have any comment to make, we8217;ll contact you. Just leave us alone for now,8221; Sajada tells reporters. The grief-wracked face and brimming eyes are a more effective deterrent.

For many who thought they knew him, Javed is a puzzle with several pieces missing. Investigations have so far revealed that Javed was born Pranesh Kumar in the family of Gopinath Pillai, a native of Kerala who came to Pune in search of a job some 25 years ago. Gopinath later brought his family to Pune, but Pranesh stayed back in Kerala to complete school. He reportedly trained as an electrician after coming to Pune. However, the police are yet to be confirmed.

For several years, say the police, Gopinath Pillai lived in middle-class, suburban Tingarenagar. Hameed Inamdar lived nearby, and sometime in 1990, Pranesh and the teenaged Sajada met and fell in love. The religious differences was a major stumbling block: Sajada8217;s family refused to allow her to marry a Hindu and finally, in 1991, Pranesh converted to Islam and became Javed Shaikh.

Interestingly though, they did not get married immediately. They tied the knot only in 1994, but the Inamdars continued to oppose their relationship.

The trail gets murky after the wedding, when the Shaikhs moved to Mumbra, say the police. For some time, the couple lived in the same building as Ishrat, his alleged co-conspirator in the Modi murder plot. In the six years they lived here, Javed did odd jobs for a living, but made his way into police records for carrying lethal weapons, criminal trespass, forcibly evicting tenants and leading mob attacks.

The police suspect he could have also come into contact with fundamentalists in Mumbra. His twin names became a tool in a tangled web of deceit. For instance, his passport, issued by the Mumbai passport office in 1994, is in his original name. The address is fake. Javed used this passport to go to Dubai to work as a 8216;8216;cable joinder8217;8217; in 1998.

By the time Javed returned to India in 2001, say the police, the Inamdars had accepted him as their son-in-law. But the little games continued: The driving licence issued this year from the Pune RTO is in his Hindu name. The address, again, is somewhere he never lived.

Shortly after his return from Dubai, the police say, Javed purchased a garment and perfume shop in Pune in the name of Sayyed Abdul Wahid. The ID came in handy again when he purchased his brother-in-law8217;s ground floor flat at the Kalas Cooperative Housing Society in April this year.

There8217;s more evidence of Javed8217;s shadow lives. In 2004, he procured a passport from Kochi in the name of of Javed Gulam Mohammed Shaikh. He used it to fly to Oman for a fortnight earlier this year.

Javed began living in his flat at Kalas along with Sajada, two sons and a daughter about two months ago. The flat housed, for one night, one of the Pakistani nationals killed in the Ahmedabad encounter. A post-June 15 police raid on the flat found a video cassette containing footage of the Gujarat riots.

The flat, in fact, is where Javed8217;s story begins to unravel. His shop was allegedly not doing well; his neighbours say he worked as an electrician. Neither fact is congruent with the purchase of the flat, the ownership of a Rs 50,000-motorbike8230; or, indeed, of the blue Indica in which the suspected LeT hitmen were travelling to Ahmedabad.

The car, interestingly, is registered in the Pune RTO in the name of Faiyyaz Khan, a pavement motor mechanic. Khan8217;s brother Firoze, though, told the police that Javed bought the car, and merely 8216;8216;borrowed8217;8217; Faiyyaz8217;s ID since he himself did not have a ration card or PAN number.

Javed used the car extensively, say the police. In the last week of May, he drove down to Kerala with his family and informed his relatives there that the car was his own. On June 9, he returned to Pune, only to drop off his wife and kids at a relative8217;s in Ahmednagar. On June 10, he had the car serviced. The next day, he left for Mumbai.

However, a few hours later, he reportedly turned up at a hotel in Malegaon with a burkha-clad woman in the same car. And a couple of days later, he would turn up in an Ahmedabad morgue in a body bag.