I got up after they seemed to have gone, but they were around. There were many more. While some had stopped with the stone pelting, 15 other Muslims continued to pelt stones. I was begging them to leave my father alone but they still kept screaming Allahu Akbar," Nitin recalls, adding how two men helped him drag his father away from the fire and the mob.

People stared at Nitin, bleeding profusely from his head, walking around in need of help. "I begged everyone for help, to take my father to the doctor, but no one came forward. Then out of nowhere a man came on a bike and asked me to sit on the bike. He was a Hindu."

Nitin picked up his father's limping body, which felt lifeless and heavy, and put it on the bike between himself and the stranger who had decided to help him. Holding onto his father tightly, he remembers how he could still feel his father breathing. From Gali no 1, where his bike continued to burn, they went straight to Shahdara's Jag Pravesh Chandra Hospital, a few kilometers away.