The World We Found by Thrity Umrigar

looked at boys.” He chewed on his lower lip, still avoiding Adish’s eyes. “So a week after the riots are over, we’re back in our own flat. Mumtaz is coming home from school and she runs into the Sharmas’ son. He’s a grown man, in his thirties. I had known him for years. Used to play cricket with him when I was a kid. Anyway, he tells her that our mother has forgotten a piece of her jewelry she’d given the Sharmas for safekeeping during the riots. Could Mumtaz stop by and pick it up, please? Mumtaz, she’s like a child. She’s never seen a snake. She follows the bastard home. And he—he does—he makes her do things to him, Adish.” And now Iqbal rested his head on the table and cried softly, his thin arms shaking with his sobs.
    Adish stared transfixed at the man in front of him. “He—he raped her?” he whispered.
    Iqbal raised his head. His eyes were bloodshot. “He made her suck him down, Adish. Can you believe? My pure, beautiful sister. She had never even received a boy’s kiss, let alone . . .”
    “What did you do? How did you find out?”
    “She told me. Three months later. I knew something was wrong, Adish, but I didn’t realize at first. We were all so shaken up by the riots, you see. Everyone we knew had lost someone or something. And I—married to a Hindu girl—I had always been so proud of what Zoha and I had done. And now I felt like everything I had ever believed in—socialism, secularism—everything felt like a joke. I had spent years arguing with my father and brother when they talked about how Hindus wanted to massacre Muslims so that they’d have India all to themselves. Now I didn’t know what to believe. So I didn’t see that Mumtaz was suffering at first. But little by little, I see something is wrong. We’d always been close. So one day I took her to her favorite restaurant for kulfi and she pushed the kulfi away. Then I knew. I said, ‘Little sister, whatever is wrong, I will right.’ Finally she tells me.”
    “What did you do?”
    Iqbal’s eyes were bottomless wells of grief. “Nothing. Not a damn thing. I should’ve killed that chootia with my hands. But I did nothing. Who would believe us? The police had stood and watched when they were burning Muslims alive. I was afraid if I said anything the wrath of the mob would come down on all of us. So, I talked my abba—he was alive then—and ammi into vacating. We sold the flat quickly for little money. And then, the only thing we could afford was the falling-down building we live in now.”
    A million questions pricked at Adish’s mind. “You never told Nishta?” he asked. “And how is Mumtaz? Does she live with you?”
    Iqbal stared through him, as if he’d not heard the question. After a long minute he said, “I was right not to have confronted that pig-eater. Ten years later it all happened again, didn’t it? In Gujarat.” He swallowed hard and then continued. “They say over twenty-five hundred Muslims died in the Gujarat genocide, Adish. The real number was probably twice that. Did anyone refer to that as India’s 9/11? At least the Americans who died were killed by foreigners. But the Muslims in Gujarat were butchered by their own countrymen. Has anybody been brought to justice? Of course not. Because a Muslim death means nothing in this cursed country.”
    Adish nodded in agreement. “I know. Those bastard politicians should rot in hell for Gujarat.” He stopped, not knowing where Iqbal was going with this, his mind still reeling from what Iqbal had told him about his baby sister. “Is Mumtaz all right?” he asked. “Where is she now?”
    “I never told Zoha about Mumtaz,” Iqbal said. “But I made my wife convert and change her name when we moved.” He looked at Adish defiantly. “Forced her. Threatened her. I couldn’t risk a Hindu wife in the new neighborhood. And I didn’t want to be married to a Hindu by then. As for Mumtaz, I did the only thing I could. I married her off. I