A thirty-year-old automobile engineer-turned garage owner, Salim was perfect for Rahat, Ali reckoned. He took good care of her and their two young daughters and ran the garage well. Despite having spent the first eighteen years of his life in a Patna-based orphanage run by a trust, which funded his education till the completion of his engineering course, Salim seemed well brought up. He was the son Ali never had.

‘Just look at Salim,’ Saeed would tell his relatives sometimes. ‘What a fine young man he turned out to be. He did not have a mother’s lap or a father’s hand on his head, which each child needs to grow up as a fine human being.’

A practical man, Salim kept a cool head and found a way out of the most trying times. He abjured emotion when dealing with an issue, except when it was about Rahat and his deen, his religion.

Rahat was his world, he would tell her. They had fallen in love after meeting a few times at a common acquaintance’s house. They got married after taking Ali’s approval. Their twin daughters, Chahat and Jannat, aged five, took after their mother in their appearance and easy-going nature and were sharp like their abba, Salim.

He could, on occasion, be as passionate as pragmatic. The atrocities perpetrated against the Muslim community in India was a topic that made Salim quiver with rage. He would grieve over reports of violence and killings during the 1992 Bombay riots. Some of the listeners would say his claims were exaggerated while Salim would manage to fill a few others with rage. Ali would see tears in Salim’s eyes at such times. Salim would then talk about ‘the duty of each able-bodied man to avenge the wrongs done to the community’.

Early on the morning of 13 July 1999, around 5.30 a.m., Ali’s family was up and about. The flock of roosters, which stayed in the mosque compound, had just given their second call of the dawn. Ali sahab, who would be turning seventy-five the next month, was pacing up and down the corridor between his bedroom and the drawing room. Till late into the previous night he had been attempting to finish writing an article titled ‘Duties of a Faithful’ for a conservative Urdu weekly, Paigham. When Ali got up in the morning, his spectacles were nowhere to be found. He had to be at the mosque for the morning prayer in thirty minutes, though he was hardly prepared to start his day.

‘Abba, I checked everywhere, where do you think you kept your glasses?’ Rahat asked him. ‘Salim is also looking for them but can’t find them.’

She was of a slender build, fair in complexion and, at five feet six inches, looked taller than she was. Salim soon joined them in the corridor.