Introduction

I was sitting in Suhanaben's living room near the Sonai Cinema border, not far from the plot where she and her brothers had organized the Sonai relief camp for Muslims displaced during and after Gujarat's 2002 riots. Suhanaben said, ‘dhamaal ke baad basti badi hai’ (after the riots the population has grown). All I could see from her living room were boards of various sizes advertising low-investment housing schemes (from one room-kitchen tenements to four bedroom row-houses) and housing loans on very low interest rates. Suhanaben was a Sunni Vohra from Charotar in Kheda district. A native Gujarati speaker, she nonetheless insisted on speaking to her children in a Gujarati version of Urdu. She had originally lived in Haleem-ki-Khadki in Shahpur, in the heart of Ahmedabad's walled city, but had moved to Juhapura after the 1985 anti-Muslim riots. Although, Suhanaben had a postgraduate degree in Hindi Literature from Gujarat University, she was also a qualified beauty-therapist, making a decent living by running a beauty parlour in the heart of Juhapura. But at the end of the 1990s, she gave away her business, concerned that she had been encouraging women to commit numaish (beautification and exposure of a woman's body), and hence that any money earned from such a business was haraam (money not earned by fair means).