Zahid, on the terrace of his house. (Source: Express photo by Oinam Anand) Zahid, on the terrace of his house. (Source: Express photo by Oinam Anand)

In this season of alleged ‘love jihad’, a story of the lone Muslim student to have returned to his school in one of Muzaffarnagar’s worst riot-hit villages and his three Hindu classmates. Pritha Chaterjee on how the four are trying to rediscover lost friendships and childhood in a changed, aged world.

He is tall and lanky in his jeans; his cheeks showing the beginnings of a fuzz. A striped pink shirt that he hasn’t bothered to tuck in flaps behind as he wheels in on his bicycle, 10 minutes before the bell is scheduled to go off at Rajkiya High School in Kutbi village, around 30 km from Muzaffarnagar city. This is how Zahid Khan dresses up for class since his uniform got burnt in an incident with the iron.

His classmates aren’t surprised to see him enter quietly and sit at the back of the row for boys. The 110 boys and girls sit separately in the two corners of the room, arranged in rows on the floor. Even in that big class, his silence stands out. Over the last year, amidst this Jat-dominated village buffeted first by riots and now a strident anti-love jihad campaign, he has gotten quieter.

Zahid (left) taking a break with fellow students, including Mukesh (third from left), at his tuition class. (Source: Express photo by Oinam Anand) Zahid (left) taking a break with fellow students, including Mukesh (third from left), at his tuition class. (Source: Express photo by Oinam Anand)

By the third period, Zahid has moved right to the back. By the time the fourth period starts though, three other boys have joined him there.

Rajkiya High School, Kutbi

Till September 2013, this government school in Kutbi had 90 students, 36 of them Muslim, apart from children from Jat, Dhimar castes, and Scheduled Castes. Kutbi and neighbouring Kutba village were among the worst-affected in the riots that month, with eight people dying and 50 riot-related cases registered.

All the 200 Muslim homes in Kutbi were abandoned after the violence. Of the 36 Muslim students at Rajkiya High School who left after the riots, Zahid is the only one to have come back. He cycles to the school from Dhindawli village 2 km away. After the riots, he missed school for the remaining term, eventually failing to clear Class X boards in March. So now he is repeating Class X, among a new set of classmates.

Sachin and Zahid are the only ones to take this desolate route to school and back. (Source: Express photo by Oinam Anand) Sachin and Zahid are the only ones to take this desolate route to school and back. (Source: Express photo by Oinam Anand)

The 16-year-old doesn’t open up easily about why he stays quiet or sits at the back. After much prodding, he admits, rubbing his hands together nervously, “One of the boys keeps saying I look like a girl, as others giggle. Getting out of earshot was the only way I could control my anger.” After a moment’s pause, he adds that, had someone said this a year ago, he would have “taken the boy by his collar and shown him mard kya hota hai (what being a man is about)”.

The teacher, Umesh Singh, insists it is a “yuva phase”, no more than adolescent boys being adoloscent boys. He takes five subjects for the class of 110 — the school has a single permanent teacher — and this being Teachers’ Day, he is busy ordering children around to arrange flowers for the function. News that the Narendra Modi government might be watching makes him nervous.

Akshay Singh

Akshay used to be a year junior to Zahid. They were always friends though, often travelling to school together from Dhindawli village. After they became classmates this year, their friendship became deeper. But Akshay isn’t sure anymore about where they stand.

Zahid with Nargis, who is doing well in school. (Source: Express photo by Oinam Anand) Zahid with Nargis, who is doing well in school. (Source: Express photo by Oinam Anand)

They always made an odd pair, the 15-year-old acknowledges — Akshay three heads shorter than Zahid, always dressed primly in a well-ironed school uniform, his oiled hair neatly combed; Akshay the top-ranker in his class last year, and Zahid repeating Class X this term. As they walked or cycled to school together, stopping to grab sugarcane from the fields, or paired up for kabaddi at lunch break, Akshay never let that bother him.

But their classmates wouldn’t let them be, particularly because of another factor separating them. “They always jeer at Zahid’s religion, saying I am getting close to him and so must be a ninny,” Akshay says.

The two first bonded over maths equations, as the teacher asked him to help Zahid. Later, at kabaddi, Akshay smiles, Zahid convinced him it was okay to get one’s uniform dirty once in a while. When Zahid represented his school at an inter-school volleyball match in nearby Nangla, Akshay bunked a class to cheer his friend on.

Prodded on by Akshay, Zahid joined a maths tuition class at their village recently. “He showed me I really was too far behind in the subject. Maths is not my thing anyway,” Zahid says.

Since a few days though, Akshay has taken to leaving for home with a different group. He calls out for Zahid still, but doesn’t wait around for him to follow. One such afternoon, seeing Akshay leave, Zahid remarks, loudly enough to catch his friend’s attention: “The problem with toppers is they think everyone else is stupid. I don’t know how many here know that in Class IX, when I studied properly, I stood second.”

A good kabaddi player, Zahid doesn’t participate in games at school anymore. (Source: Express photo by Oinam Anand) A good kabaddi player, Zahid doesn’t participate in games at school anymore. (Source: Express photo by Oinam Anand)

Akshay has stopped dropping in for the evening volleyball matches at Dhindawli too to watch Zahid play. But it’s Zahid who has changed, Akshay says. “He has grown suspicious. If I talk to other Jat boys, he is cold. I don’t know why he is so quiet either. The other boys ask him to play with us, but he avoids it… He only comes to me when he needs help with studies,” he complains.

Zahid came to meet Akshay once at home, and his father saw him. But Akshay is sure that’s not the reason for this aloofness. Still, he wonders, especially when his father tells him “those people are different”. When his marks started getting affected, Akshay says, he decided too to keep his distance.

The hurt shows though. “Just because other people talk to him now, he feels he can toss me around because I am the studious, good boy,” he says.

Another boy hints at something else — a girl from Dhindawli. She cycles to school at the same time as Zahid and Akshay are returning. They both noticed her everyday, ringing their cycle bells to get her attention. Often, they did it at the same time, getting embarrassed. She never responded though, till one day she looked up and smiled at Akshay.

Kumar Sachin

Sachin too is from Dhindawli, but from the other end of the village. He is a Dhimar, a lower-caste Hindu. Zahid and he have become “best friends” over the last month over a common interest in volleyball.

This is Zahid’s first friend from that side of the village. Till last year, he was only friends with Jats, who stay in his neighbourhood and are well known to the family. Zahid’s father does not know about Sachin, though the rest of the family has seen him around the house.

Sachin’s father sells clothes from a small shop and their house has a kuchcha roof. His father would never approve of their friendship, Zahid admits.

It was because Sachin cycles to school that Zahid first started taking his brother’s cycle. They often take a shortcut that the other boys avoid because it passes through a jungle. Zahid understands what may have drawn them together. “Jat boys like Akshay don’t like talking to Sachin. In our school it was always like that, friendships were determined by caste. Muslims inevitably gravitated towards the Jats because they lived near us.”

Sachin admires how quick Zahid is on the volleyball court, but they also share an interest in football and kabaddi. Zahid never plays in school these days, Sachin observes, but they are always on the same team in the village evening games.

Their growing friendship has invited comment, but Sachin isn’t worried. “The boys are rowdy and blunt and poke fun. But Jats are like that, I don’t think they mean harm,” he says.

Just last week, he had a fight with one such boy. “He said I was a traitor to Hindus,” the 14-year-old recalls. While he understands that not everyone has a “keeda dimag (rotten mind)”, Sachin knows better than to disturb the “peace”. “It’s not like no Jat boy talks or plays with us Dhimars. But I understand Zahid is scared of the Jats, so I don’t press. When he wants to take the shortcut, I go with him.”

Sachin is also at Zahid’s door every other morning, ensuring his friend is in time for school. “I keep ringing the bell. He comes out 10-15 minutes later and says he does not feel like going. So I have to push him to move,” Sachin says.

The boys also study together in the evening on the terrace of Zahid’s house before Zahid goes for his tuitions. Sachin cannot afford the classes, so he tells Zahid his doubts, and Zahid clears them with the tuition teacher. Zahid’s mother Zareena approves of the calm, smiling Sachin. Sachin, however, hasn’t told his mother about Zahid. “Are you mad? I can’t tell my parents I am friends with a Muslim. If my mother hears I have been to his house, she will take me for a dip in the Ganga, like the Bramhins,” he laughs.

Mukesh Bahniwal

At 5 on a rainy evening, Zahid is the last to reach his maths tuition. Six boys are already seated, all on one bench, and the class has been on for 15 minutes. Teacher Umesh Singh is discussing area and volume today, and pulls up Zahid. He had missed critical portions of the same chapter in school, Singh points out. During day, Singh teaches maths on an ad hoc basis at their school.

Zahid finds a place next to Mukesh, the class monitor at school. He makes sure to sit next to him everyday. All the boys in the tuition are Jats from Kutbi village, and since the riots, he is uneasy around them.

But Mukesh is different, says Zahid. “When someone pokes fun at me, he also jokes, but he is not particularly mean. Also, after I came back to school, Mukesh was one of the few who came up to me, thumped my back and asked how I had been. Most boys just acted like I was a stranger.”

Mukesh has another thing going for him — he can translate sentences into English faster than anyone in class. He can tell you the difference between a river, a canal and a sea, while solving maths problems on the side. Zahid calls him “a genius”, and “a bully”. “But a nice one,” he adds, to Mukesh’s face. Mukesh guffaws.

“We know each other since last year as we were in the school kabaddi team. But he was my senior then and I called him bhaiyya. Now this fool thinks he is different. He was acting all quiet and cold with me too. But he is always late for tuitions and the teacher asks me to help him. How can he avoid me?” Mukesh smiles.

Zahid retorts sharply that he is still his bhaiyaa, but a minute later, his eyes wary, adds, “I was joking Mukesh. You know that, right?”

Half an hour later, when the teacher shouts at Zahid for confusing the formulae for the volume of a cone and a sphere, 15-year-old Mukesh quickly says, “Sir, it was my fault. I told him the wrong formula.”

Singh says Zahid has not been concentrating on studies. “He was a good student. This year we expected him to do well, but he is so despondent, misses school, does not revise what I teach. I don’t know what is wrong, so I try to seat him with the cheerful boys.” This was a boy known to constantly crack jokes, he adds.

Mukesh worries about this too. “So many times we ask him to hang out with us, to play with us or just come, get an ice-cream, but it’s like he does not want to be seen with us. He takes all the jokes to heart. He wasn’t like this earlier, he would always crack the stupidest jokes himself.”

Zahid Khan

Zahid told his family about the incident over a month after it had transpired, after a lot of thought. He did not want to worry his already anxious mother. On September 7, 2013, the day of the Jat mahapanchayat in the district that eventually led to the riots, his father had rushed the young women and children of the house — Zahid’s three sisters, sisters-in-law and seven nephews and nieces — away to the city. “We had stayed, my mother, four brothers and I. We locked ourselves up inside and prayed.”

It was a week later that he had — what he calls — his first brush with “dharam ladai (religious conflict)”. On September 15, Zahid went to school, much against his mother’s wishes. He did not see any reason to be afraid, he says. “School and riots did not go together for me. At home, we had been holed up for two days. I had seen forces on the streets, smoke billowing from the direction of Kutbi, heard distant gunshots.”

His Jat friends from Dhindawli seemed no different as they walked to school together. At school though, as he took his usual seat in the second row, Zahid felt the stares directed at him. At lunch break, two classmates who have since graduated from the school blocked his way, he says. “Go away,” they said. “When all your brothers have left, why have you returned?”

Zahid laughs now at what his first reaction was. “‘My brothers? My brothers work in the village, why would they come here?’, I told them. It was when they kept laughing and abusing me that I realised two things — first, that there were no other Muslims in school, and two, my religion was my identity now.”

The thing is, he says, he has never had any close Muslim friends. In Dhindawli, the Muslims stay a little distance from where Zahid’s family lives. Among the more affluent members of the community, the Khans live in a largely Jat locality.

He went up to the only teacher in the school that day to complain, Zahid says. “He advised me to take the shortcut back to the village immediately, to avoid the usual route for my safety.”

Zahid attended the rest of the classes that day though, “not because I am a hero but because my mother would have asked questions if I returned early”.

When he saw the same boys who had taunted him at the gate when school shut though, he panicked. Even though his friends were still with him, Zahid recalls, “I felt scared, that all of them would take me on”. “I backed away and took the shortcut. I remember running home.”

No one called him back, he notes. Now, at school, Zahid never volunteers an answer or goes up to the board in the front to write a reply. He is worried he will be humiliated. “And the jibes are always because I am a Muslim. I just avoid drawing any attention to myself.” He also reveals only now why he stays away from games at school. He is afraid of being manhandled, he says quietly.

Zahid’s family

Zahid’s elder sister Nargis had been in Class XI when she had to leave school after the riots. She moved to Muzaffarnagar city, but managed to not just clear the exams but also stand third in her class. She is now in Class XII in a school in Dhindawli.

Initially, the family thought of admitting Zahid to Islamia Madrasa. When that did not work out, they tried the Government Boys School in Muzaffarnagar city. “Who in their right minds would send their son to Kutbi? No other Muslim was returning there, we also tried everywhere,” says Zahid’s father Mohammad Iliyas.

However, he was told each time that school transfers could have been accepted till Class IX, but not in a board year. Zahid had to return to his old school.

Zareena says she is constantly scared. “I tell him if someone insults you, fights with you, swallow your anger. Even if someone hits you, come back quietly, never retort.”

Zahid was also the reason Iliyas, 58, who has a carpentry business, took up a job at the school. He is constructing a mid-day meal kitchen there, allowing him to be near Zahid. When Muslim labourers refused to work in Kutbi, he hired labour from Haridwar.

There is a lot riding on Zahid, Zareena admits. “Out of my four daughters, two have finished school and Nargis is also doing so well. But three of my four sons dropped out of school. Zahid is the youngest and my only hope.”

In a rare moment of levity, she adds, “Everybody jokes that I make my daughters study and sons work. Who will understand that my sons are stupid?”

Three generations of Iliyas’s family have lived where their two-floor house now stands, next to the post-office in Dhindawli, amidst Jats. “Iliyas sahab”, as everyone calls him, never worried about that earlier. “It’s people who marched in from other villages who caused all the trouble,” he says.

While their neighbours are nice and their children friends with Zahid, things have changed, Iliyas grimaces. “We are one of four-five Muslim households left in Dhindawli. If we stay here, we have to stay restrained. There is a lot of underlying tension.”

Once Zahid and Nargis end this school year, the family plans to move to Muzaffarnagar city, where Iliyas has purchased a 100-sq yard plot. His eldest daughter, 21, is doing B.Ed there and wants to become a teacher.

Zahid wonders if he can last in Kutbi. “My life is different,” he says firmly, “even if some friends are returning, and I am making new ones. I wish I had got admission in another school. Everything would be simpler.” Nargis isn’t having it easy either. Unlike Zahid, all her good friends used to be Muslims. “I have no friends left,” she says. “For the first time in my life, a teacher asked me why I don’t do purdah. How can they tell us to read Jane Austen and do purdah?”

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