Asif was hired as a professor at Bombay University soon after he graduated. Some of his former professors had expressed unease at the thought of a Muslim professor of Hinduism, but Asif had so distinguished himself as a doctoral student, that there was no real argument against the hire. Also, Asif was no bearded, praying-five-times-a-day mullah type. He was a modern, secular man and could hold his liquor. He spoke disparagingly of Pakistan as a failed state and believed that Kashmir belonged to India. It was easy to forget his provenance.
By the time Zeenat was born, two years after Sameer, her father had made a name for himself as a scholar. She grew up in a happy, close-knit family, distinguishing herself at school with her strong writing skills （a fact of which Asif was inordinately proud）， popular with the neighborhood kids, protected from schoolyard bullies by Sameer, and secure in her parents’ love. On weekdays, she’d come home from school to the small snack her mother had prepared for her, finish her homework, and then go to play with the other neighborhood children until she was called up for dinner. In the summer, there were trips to Goa and Ooty and Dharamsala.
When Zeenat was eight, her grandmother was killed when a tree limb fell on her during the monsoons. Asif’s father was so brokenhearted that he sold his business, took to reading the Qur’an daily, and went to the masjid every evening. Asif and Zenobia tried getting him to move in with them, believing that their children might mend his broken heart, but he declined, politely at first, and then with increasing vehemence. “My place is here,” he insisted, “in this house where I lived with my beloved.”
A year later, he passed. The doctor wrote Natural Causes on the death certificate, but Asif knew the truth: his father had died of a broken heart.
Asif missed his parents terribly, when, six months later, his second book was published. In the past few years, his research had focused on Shivaji, the seventeenth-century Maratha warrior-king, who had fought so valiantly against the Mughals. Asif’s book, The Myth of Shivaji, posited that the king’s contemporary cultlike status among Hindus paralleled the rise of anti-Islamic sentiment in India. The book was published in 1994, the year after the Bombay riots, during which Hindus and Muslims had slaughtered one another following the demolition of the historic Babri Masjid by Hindus. Its publication proved to be timely. Asif Rizvi’s star was ascendant; a leftist magazine in India ran an excerpt from the book. A few months later, a small college in Ohio invited him to its conference on the global rise of religious fundamentalism.
Still, other than a few of his colleagues, no one in their circle paid much attention to what the professor-sahib wrote. Their upper-middle-class Hindu neighbors remained friendly with the Rizvis, the only Muslim family in the building. The men watched with approval as Asif downed pegs of Scotch with the best of them. Zenobia played bridge with the women in the building every Saturday and chaired their kitty parties. Her best friend, Pushpa Patel, who lived two floors below, was vice chair.
Bombay was convulsed by another riot in 1996, and this time, the flames spread to their affluent neighborhood. Asif and Zenobia watched in disbelief as Muslim-owned cars and shops were vandalized and burned by mobs wielding kerosene cans. Still, they kept quiet and laid low, putting their faith in their Hindu friends and the impermeability conferred by their wealth. “Arre,” Asif would say, “I know every bloody person up and down this lane. Nobody is going to hurt us.”
But one night, the family came home from a play and found a copy of a column that Asif had written for the Indian Express pinned to their front door, a large red X running through it. The column, already a year old, had mocked the improbable claims made by Shivaji’s most devout and fundamentalist followers. You Islamic bastard, a note read. Next time you won’t be so lucky. We are coming for you.
Asif’s face turned pale. “Take the children and go inside,” he whispered to his wife. “And pack a suitcase. I’ll be right back.”
“Where are you going?” Zenobia asked, but he was already taking the elevator back down.
He came home a half hour later, heavy-footed and shell-shocked. He made sure the children were in their rooms before motioning his wife to sit beside him on their bed. “I went to see Dilip,” he said. “Since he’s president of the building association and all. I told him about the threat and suggested that we hire more security for the building immediately.”
“And?”
Asif paused. “He phoned the other co-op members to come over. They came. And they said they didn’t want any problems with the thugs. They all blamed me for bringing trouble to their doorstep. And they said that . . . that the best thing would be for us to shift.”