It was a few minutes past 11 pm, 1 March 2002, when I landed in Ahmedabad. As I drove out of the airport, women in nighties and their menfolk in pyjamas and singlets sat on the pavements. A few others strolled casually. We were still a few kilometres from the city centre. I was to join Vinod Sharma, bureau chief at Hindustan Times (Delhi), who had reached Ahmedabad a day before in the midst of planned violence, arson, looting and rioting sparked by the death of 57 kar sevaks, returning from Ayodhya to Godhra in eastern Gujarat.

On reaching Hotel Narmada in the heart of Ahmedabad, I quickly passed a bottle of Diplomat whiskey – which I had carried into dry Gujarat in my checked-in baggage – to Sharma, who briefed me about the latest developments on mainly two fronts; the political and the murderous mob. In the morning, driving across Ahmedabad, Sharma and I watched, awe- and horror-struck, the tell-tale signs of the Hindu mob at work.

Hotel Tulsi (I don’t now remember the street it was located on) had been set on fire, its outer and inner walls charred. The hotel (a small restaurant, really) belonged to a Muslim and was perhaps given a “Hindu” name as a cover, for Ahmedabad’s residents were no strangers to communal riots. Several other buildings in which Muslims lived or ran businesses had been torched.