24 Years Of Godhra: How Communal Riots Scarred A Neighbourhood In Ahmedabad Permanently

Cities contain spaces that always remain unacknowledged and invisible, because its these spaces that become known, they would open the city to its historical and inherent wounds.

This place sits on the edge of Ahmedabad, a prosperous, disciplined, well-advertised city that prides itself on order and friendliness. The place appears on municipal maps, but the municipalities conveniently forget about it. It also does not complain about that. Anonymity here is not neglect. It is defence. People have learned the difference.

The buildings still carry damage that never learned how to heal or to get plastered into modernity. Walls are punctured in ways paint cannot hide. Stairwells hold a smell that is not quite smoke but not quite gone either. I noticed it first near the stairs and then everywhere else. Some houses lean a little, as if still unsure whether the ground beneath them is reliable. Others have doors that do not close fully, even when locked. From an architectural point, nothing seems permanent, all the scaffolding, unfinished stairways remain in limbo. The concrete contours scared away to imperfect permanence.

It is damage that settled in and was allowed to stay.

People elsewhere in Ahmedabad talk about violence like it happened once and then moved on. They attach years and others to it, a break that happened after a gruesome carnage. They say things like “after that” or “since then.” They speak as if time itself were corrective. Here, violence did not end. It rearranged itself. It learned how to live quietly inside architecture, habit and on the fringes of the welfare state.

Many men are gone. Some were killed. Some were taken and never fully returned. Some became cases that never reached an end. Their absence is not narrated loudly. It lives in cupboards that stay half-empty, in photographs taken down, in the way children learn very early what not to ask. I might be wrong about the photographs, but the cupboards are unmistakable.

What remains is a neighbourhood held together largely by women. They keep documents folded into plastic covers, hidden in steel trunks, taken out only when absolutely necessary. They negotiate with officials who arrive without warning and leave without explanation. They run shops from living rooms. They extend credit from memory. They raise children who know how to stay alert without looking afraid.

Their feminism is not inspirational. It is exhausting. It does not use big words. It runs on deadlines and school fees and waiting rooms.

Authority arrives often and without purpose. Patrols circle the edges of the neighbourhood like caretakers of a quarantine zone. Protection exists mostly as an idea. Surveillance does not. A scene replicated from any zombie movie, normalcy is outside, and the people outside need protection, except on nights the men of the city decide to move though these check posts, willfully ignored, because the men are here to enjoy.

Once, during a routine check, an officer asked a woman why she was standing outside her own house. She answered, “Because it is hot inside.” He wrote something down anyway. Later she told me this story and laughed, but not because it was funny. Laughing was cheaper than carrying it.

One afternoon, I sat with a woman who ran a tailoring business from her bedroom. The sewing machine had replaced the bed. She measured cloth while keeping one eye on the window. When I asked why she did not expand, she laughed quickly, almost sharply. “Expand to where?” she said. “Into trouble?” Then she stitched faster, as if embarrassed by the question. I was embarrassed too, and I still do not know why.

And yet, there is laughter here.
This is the detail Ahmedabad cannot deal with.

At dusk, people gather on rooftops patched together with whatever was available. Tar sheets. Broken tiles. Rusted railings. Old banners from celebrations somewhere else. Plastic chairs that wobble. One of the chairs always wobbled more than the others. They drink quietly.

Officially, this should not happen.
Practically, it happens every evening. Micro-festivals feasting on the wounds of history.

Bottles appear with apologies. The quality is bad. The prices are worse. The relief is exact.

Once a man apologised to me for the liquor like he was hosting a wedding. “This is not good,” he said, pouring carefully. “But this is what they let us have.” He laughed immediately after saying it, like the sentence might have ears.

Children are sent away gently. Not because drinking is shameful, but because attention is dangerous. Someone plays old songs from a phone with a cracked screen. Someone argues about cricket. Someone remembers a shop that used to exist. No one finishes the story.

I enter this neighbourhood with an ambiguous identity of an almost outsider. I am married into the city. I have eaten at tables where discipline, order, and morality are spoken about slowly and proudly, as if they are ancestral traits rather than political arrangements. Here, my name does not perform power. It does not condemn me either. It is repeated simply to place me.

A woman once laughed at the way I held my glass. Too careful, she said: “You look like authority.” Everyone laughed. I loosened my grip without thinking. Fear teaches posture before it teaches language.

What Ahmedabad calls order is felt here as rehearsal. People rehearse answers before officials arrive. They rehearse routes home. They rehearse what to forget and what must never be forgotten. This rehearsal is mistaken elsewhere for obedience.

The city congratulates itself endlessly. Discipline. Cleanliness. Law. These words sound clean on television and at dinner tables. Here, they sound like warnings.

Law does not arrive as protection. It arrives as inspection. As interruption. It inventories problems instead of solving them. Justice remains technically possible and practically unreachable.

One woman showed me a stack of papers she had carried for years. Complaints. Identity proofs. Copies of copies. Stamps faded into the paper. “They say bring the original,” she said, smiling a little. “But the original was burned.” She laughed after saying this, like the sentence itself had made a procedural mistake.

This is what right-wing governance looks like from close up.
Not mobs. Not shouting. Administration. Delay. Exhaustion. Purgatory.

The city’s moral language collapses here, especially around prohibition. Abstinence is celebrated loudly. Indulgence circulates quietly elsewhere. Imported bottles move confidently through private homes, clubs, and gated spaces. Here, the same act becomes criminal. Morality does not eliminate desire. It redistributes risk.

A young man once told me he had been arrested twice for possession and once for nothing. “Nothing is also illegal,” he said. “It just takes longer.”

This region was never built on purity. Ahmedabad, for centuries, survived on trade, movement, negotiation. Goods moved through it long before ideology arrived. So did languages. So did habits that were not meant to be audited.

Trade is liminal and survives on ambiguity, compromise and knowing when not to ask questions.

There is an old account, half remembered in travel notes, of a coastal town not far from Ahmedabad where traders were asked about cargo before identity. Disputes were settled quickly because delay was expensive and righteousness bad for business. Law existed, but it bent around circulation. Moral certainty was inefficient.

That inheritance did not vanish. It moved inward when the coastline was fenced off by paperwork and ideology. It survived in back lanes, rooftops, informal exchanges. What is now called illegality once had another name. Livelihood.

The right wing calls this decay.
It is not. It is memory refusing to disappear politely.

This neighbourhood is punished not because it breaks the law, but because it remembers how to live without pretending the law is neutral.

Memory here is not commemorated. It is managed. In bolted doors. In shortened routes. In pauses that thicken when certain sounds drift in from outside.

One night, the electricity failed without warning. A child cried. Someone lit a candle. Someone joked that darkness at least made everyone equal. The power returned 20 minutes later. No one clapped.

During one inspection, a woman hid bottles beneath school uniforms while scolding her child for failing mathematics. The scolding was real. Education still mattered. Fear ran alongside domestic life without interrupting it.

Academic curiosity does not belong here. Documentation would expose without protecting. Visibility is not freedom. Often, it is just another form of control. The anthropological enquiry here might announce an impending incarceration.

Ahmedabad wants labour, not presence. Silence, not stories. It needs places like this to exist quietly so its narrative stays intact and undisturbed.

And yet, every evening, rooftops fill. Bottles pass. Arguments start and stop. Someone laughs too loudly, then checks themselves.

These acts are not heroic. They are maintenance.

We do not name this place because naming invites consumption. Tragedy without accountability. Sympathy without repair. Anonymity here is not erasure. It is control retained.

At dawn, Ahmedabad’s story falters. Children walk to school. Vendors set up carts. Radios crackle with old songs. A woman sweeps her doorstep slowly, like the day will arrive whether permission is granted or not.

The city will never claim this persistence. The people here already know that.

They live beyond rights, citizenship and ideas of a welfare nation-state.

And in that neighborhood, an old Latin phrase—in vino veritas—might seem apt, because enough blood has been spilled already.

Anirban Ghosh is an Assistant Professor at Centre for Writing, Shiv Nadar Institute of Eminence.