AHMEDABAD: From the soul-crushing gloom of 69 funerals to the gaiety of a
pre-wedding celebration
, it has taken 22 years of healing and waiting for Ahmedabad's
Gulbarg Society
to embrace the catharsis of new beginnings.
Bride
Misbah Mansuri
wasn't born when the 2002 post-Godhra violence in Gujarat heaped tragedy on this residential block in Chamanpura. Her extended family lost 19 members, six of them children, in the massacre.
Over two decades later, the 19-year-old's father, among the few survivors of the communal violence, chose their still-desolate neighbourhood and their house at the society's entrance to organise a pre-wedding celebration before the nikah takes place in Madhya Pradesh's
Barwani
district.
On Monday, the sound and smell of an Indian wedding emanating from the Mansuri family's house appeared to lift the shroud enveloping the neighbourhood for so long.
The chatter of guests assembled for the haldi ceremony and a medley of Bollywood songs filled the air as girls and women in finery danced to the music. Misbah's father Rafiq Mansuri, who lost his wife and five-month-old son in the violence, relocated to MP and remarried there. "Misbah is the eldest among our three children. I decided to return to
Gulbarg
Society for our daughter's haldi rather than to mourn the past," he said.
For many of those who attended the celebration, it was almost a rite of passage. Until the Mansuris decided to hold the event at Gulbarg, former residents would visit it once a year to pay tribute to their dead. "The society had turned into a parking zone for people in the neighbourhood. There was no pomp in the pre-wedding events but it did change the mood," added a guest.
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