A Strand of Gold

That night, all night long, we heard the shouts of a slogan, "Naraye taqbir, allah ho aqbar" (Raise the slogan soldiers, God is great).  This apparently reassuring slogan that God is great, coming out of a mob of thousands shouting in unison, however, was spine-chillingly menacing to us, as there were only six  Hindu families living in the area among about 60,000 Muslims with a scattering of Anglo-Indians here and there.  Of the six Hindu families, four were single women living on their own in the flats opposite us.   we only knew one of these four, Neehar Gupta who lived with her daughter in the top flat almost opposite our house.  By about 7 p.m. the atmosphere abruptly and dramatically changed, when the flat of one of our neighbours was raided ny a small group.  We could hear the excited exchange of voices between the raiders and a woman, followed by a shrill frantic scream from her and then a sudden complete silence. After about two hours, the same sequence of events happened to another neighbour and then for the third time to another at about the same interval of time.  The sudden silence on each occasion was indicative enough of the fact that the women concerned were raped and probably murdered thereafter. It was more agonising, not only because of the fear for our own safety (and we surely had much to fear for with two beautiful young women in the house, my wife and her sister who came to visit us the previous week - my mother having furtunately been away at the time by chance at my sister's place in a Hindu area of the city), but also because we could do nothing to help the hapless victims.  The situation was so unnerving and dishonour and death seemed so inevitable that Rani suggested we better saved the life of our baby daughter by giving her away to any of our Muslim neighbours.  There no means of escape.  Neehar, however, did escape because she had a