Do we look like terrorists to you?’’ chuckles Sufia Ansari, a pretty 18-year-old, in flawless English. She adjusts her blue dupatta as her toddler nieces and nephew scribble English alphabets on the floor with a bright yellow piece of chalk. Their home is a crumbling, grey chawl in Mominpura, which reverberates with the Friday sermon from the adjacent mosque. Dawood behind Mumbai blast: Chinmayanand KANCHEEPURAM: Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Swami Chinmayanand said underworld don Dawood Ibrahim was behind the recent bus blast in Mumbai. ‘‘We suspect the hand of Dawood Ibrahim in the July 28 bus blast in Mumbai which claimed two lives and injured several others,’’ he said yesterday after meeting senior pontiff of the Kanchi mutt Sri Jayendra Saraswathi and junior pontiff Sri Vijayendra Saraswathi. To queries, he said he has been coming to the mutt for the past 30 years. (Agencies) Sufia was eight when her father, former city doctor and master bomber Mohammed Jalees Ansari, was arrested. Since then, the Ahle Hadees follower — in jail after conviction for more than 31 bombings — has been frequently named the godfather of a new breed of vigilante terrorists. ‘‘Every time a blast occurs anywhere in the country, we have the police knocking on our door at two or three in the morning, asking us to give ‘statements’ and verifications of addresses,’’ says his indignant mother, Maqboolan (74). ‘‘What can he do sitting in Ajmer jail, where even the family needs a court affidavit to meet him, and what do we have to say to the police?’’ The Ansari family, natives of Mumbai, insists that their frank espousal of traditional religious beliefs has been twisted to imply terrorism. Yes, they admit, Jalees was the most conservative religious man in their family: his cascading beard and his austere living space where even a TV was considered blasphemous. He enforced head-to-toe purdah for his womenfolk. There is much that does not fit the stereotype. Jalees, his five brothers, his sisters, his children and their cousins are all well-educated. His sister Shagufta, also clad from head to toe in purdah, is a well-known gynaecologist practising at the Prince Aly Khan Hospital in Byculla. ‘‘Jalees did say he wanted jehad, but jehad is not necessarily talwars and violence. It is also to educate misguided brethren such as simply telling a man not to drink,’’ says the brother, who was also incarcerated after the 1993 blasts but was released after seven months after the court dismissed charges. Only one of Jalees’s five brothers escaped legal action. The family hopes Ansari will return to them in one piece. Jalees’s five brothers take care of his seven children and family. Their trials have only made them look more deeply inwards. The menfolk are growing longer beards and Jalees’s grandchild is named Osama, now two years old. ‘‘All we have,’’ says a tearful Zubeira, Jalees’s wife, ‘‘is God.’’
