The idea of a hometown — I was presented the idea during campus placements in my engineering college in Jaipur. I had cleared the aptitude test for one of those mass-recruiting IT firms, and the interviews were to take place in a large hall, where a dozen or more desks were set up at discrete intervals, so that several interviews could run in parallel. My assigned desk was manned by a decent looking chap. He studied my CV for a minute and asked: “So, Tanuj, how was it growing up in Muzaffarnagar?”

I had prepared for questions regarding Dijkstra’s algorithm, or polymorphism in object-oriented languages, and other such topics, but I hadn’t formed anything intelligent to say about Muzaffarnagar. “What do you mean?” I asked him.

“Oh, just that Muzaffarnagar has a reputation, right?” he said; “Crime capital of the country and all. So how was it growing up in such a place?”

“I never faced any crime,” I said. It came out before I could think of it as a good or bad reply.

The interviewer then moved on to other questions, the kind that I had prepared for. In the evening, when the results were announced, my name was not on the list. Somehow, I blamed the Muzaffarnagar question for the rejection.

Later, and gradually, I came to terms with the fact that the town where I had spent the first 16 years of my life, the town which was my hometown, had a bad-ass reputation elsewhere in the country. It was a town of murders and kidnappings and communal riots, the last topping all. And I was lucky to have no basis to form such a lasting impression of the town.

Muzaffarnagar is a district headquarters in western Uttar Pradesh, midpoint between Delhi and Haridwar on NH 58. It is situated in the upper Ganga-Yamuna doab region, a region that my father, who was an agricultural scientist and knew a thing or two about soil fertility, claimed to be one of the most fertile in the world.

My father’s employment was in the Sugar Cane Research Station, a State government-run institute aimed at providing scientific knowhow to sugarcane farmers of the area. The facility was huge — composed of acres of farms where experimental varieties were grown, some squat office compounds, and a residential colony for the families of the employees. The ganna farm — as it was called — was situated 3 km off the centre of the town. Three kilometres was a big distance when I was growing up.

Perhaps it was my living in this sanctuary of sorts, away from the hustle-bustle of the town proper, that helped me form an image of Muzaffarnagar as a place where things were alright. Perhaps it was my guarded upbringing, in which safety was ingrained as a habit.

It would be untrue to say that I had no interface with the town. Going to school, for example, meant cycling on the old GT Road. The odd traffic of buffalo-carts and dinosaur-shaped tempos had to be negotiated. Muslim and Hindu neighbourhoods abutted each other, Rampuram followed by Rehmat Nagar, for example. In Std XI and XII, attending a physics tuition class required that I cross the biggest Muslim-dominated area named Khalapaar and get to the Jain neighbourhood, named Prem Puri. It was never a big deal, never given much thought, and both Hindu and Muslim children had to make such journeys throughout the city.

Only much later did I realise the impact of such interlacing of neighbourhoods — during riots, everyone felt surrounded by the enemy.

There had been a small riot when I was a kid. But I don’t remember anything from the time. Growing up, crime was something we encountered in the local newspaper, Muzaffarnagar Bulletin . It happened to others, and mostly in the larger district.

When the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots happened, I was a grown man, living and working far away in Mumbai. Apart from the national media, information came to me from my parents.

The violence in the town proper was less than that in the larger district. But this time the disparity was huge, the death tolls were “heavily underreported”, and stories of gruesome violence were coming from villages. My father had taken out his twin-barrel rifle from the storage beneath the double bed and oiled it. “Next time you come, I will teach you how to fire it,” he told me over the phone.

He also told me how an unidentified person had taken to firing hourly shots into the air from his rooftop, as a warning to possible miscreants. The shot would reverberate through the night sky, setting others on edge. Someone else would respond with another shot, then a third would go off, and so on. The shooting would go on all night.

Police had no clue which gunshots to chase. Some people just burst crackers to participate.

When I went back to Muzaflfarnagar later on holiday, I heard our neighbours say hostile things I cannot reproduce here. The ‘othering’ was total, you couldn’t argue against it. I realised, for the first time, that the ganna farm didn’t have a single Muslim family; I wondered what that meant. In the town, muhallas were gated, with religious markings atop the gates.

I wondered if those physics classes were continuing.

(In this monthly column, authors chronicle the places they call home)

Tanuj Solankiis the author of the novel Neon Noon

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