A rather fierce debate has been raging at Kafila, the instigator is Zainab, a “Muslim” married to a “Telugu Brahmin” who discovered how deep is the hold of antediluvian ideas and practices in a city that has for sometime been touted as the hub of 21st century India.

She wrote a simple account of her experiences while searching for a house on rent in Bangalore. The piece also touched upon issues like communal profiling, stereotyping entire communities and such like. Some of those commentating on the piece have made ‘clever’ attempts at obfuscation by raising issues like loan quotas for Muslims and such other totally extraneous arguments. Never having studied economics, banking and/or commerce, never having had the resources to apply for a bank loan and not having my life enriched by the immensely educational experience of house hunting in Bombay and Bangalore, I will not try to take on Ipsita or comment on the secular practice of discrimination against all house hunters if they do not belong to the caste, religion, region, gender or economic status of the landlord.

I would talk about my experiences of house hunting in Delhi. I believe there are many lessons to be learnt there. I have learnt mine. A recounting of those “memorable” experiences may be of some help in understanding the contours of the 21st century “Urban India” that is rapidly rising all around us, even in the most non-urban of locations.

I began looking for a house on rent when I was 41, I had been married for a while, I had two young daughters, I had already lost most of my hair and had acquired a beard and a slight paunch. I looked fairly harmless and mildly respectable, no one had told me thus in so many words, but this was the general impression I gathered when I realised that even in the uncaring capital of this great nation I was being treated with a modicum of deference. While travelling in DTC buses I would occasionally be offered a seat, bus conductors, college going boys and girls and men and women twice their age would address me as unckalji and this I thought brought me within handshaking distance of senior citizen status.

So with a spring in my feet and an obsequious smile affixed permanently upon my visage I knocked on a door in Rajinder Nagar.  The landlord had advertised in a local daily, I had called him, fixed an appointment and had arrived at the appointed hour.  The conversation went something like this. Namasteji, I had called this morning about the house, “Yes yes, where do you work?”, PTI TV, “What is that ji?”, oh this is a TV company run by PTI, the well known News Agency, “You are a journalist ?” no I am a script writer, we produce a programme on Indian Culture for DD. “I see, we will need three month’s rent in advance, three month’s rent as security, a company lease for 11 months, renewable after a year at our discretion, 10% increase in rent annually, in case the lease is extended”.

I agreed and said I will have to check about company lease from the office and get back. “Sure take your time, call me whenever you have the information.” The entire conversation took place with me in the street and the landlord standing in his half open door. He did not offer to show me the accommodation that he was putting out on rent and I, being new to the game, did not demand to see the house.

Having checked from office and having prepared a draft for the lease I reached the house again in the evening. “What did you say your name was?”, Sohail Hashmi, “Where are you from?”, from Delhi, “No I mean originally”, yes originally from Delhi, “How come you don’t have a house if you are from Delhi”, no I used to stay with my mother, but she lives in Rohini and it is very far from the school where my kids study and also from mine and my wife’s office. “Oh, by the way, by caste what are you (sic)?” I don’t have a caste. “Are you a Christian?” No. “Then?”. I was not making it easy for him, I wasn’t telling him what he wanted to ask and felt ashamed of saying, finally he did, “Are you a Mohammedan?” and I said yes in name I am one.  “Sorry ji, I hope you understand, some of my best friends are Muslims but you see you will cook meat, I also eat out side, but my father you know what old people are like, he has told me no meat eating tenants”.

I trudged away, hoping that the next encounter will be different. Sometime ago the smile plastered on my face had departed and the spring in my feet had turned into a dead weight. And so began a five month long search. Five months of reading news paper ads, calling people fixing appointments, meeting them before and after office hours, following leads given by friends, spending hours hanging around shady property dealers’ offices, spending every single Sunday and other off days in this futile, tiring, frustrating and fruitless exercise. There are very few areas, with in my range, where I did not go, Scores of houses in New and old Rajinder Nagar, Pusa Road, Patel Nagar- east and west, Lajpat Nagar, Malviya Nagar, Amar Colony, Jangpura, Bhogal,  Kalkaji, DDA Colonies in Siddharth Enclave, Munirka, Kalkaji, Hauz Khas, even Government colonies in Sarojini Nagar, Lakshmi Bai Nagar, Netaji Nagar, Kidwai Nagar, Lodi Colony.

In government Colonies, I was told, you can get a house without any paperwork, they are not very demanding, most of them have no issues with the denominational or gastronomic preferences of their illegal tenants, you pay cash and that’s all they are interested in.  The landlord meets you once a month takes his money and goes. The only disadvantage was, if the illegality is reported by a jealous colleague of the landlord, you will have to vacate within 24 hours. But this rarely happens since people have been living like this for years. I was prepared to face even this eventuality but was spared the experience because no one rented his government allotted house to me.

And so it went, week after week, month after month. Everywhere it was the same story, you agreed to all the terms and conditions, but the moment they began reading the draft lease document and came to the phrase, ‘Whereas  Sohail Hashmi S/o late Shri Haneef Hashmi of the first party has agreed to..,’ they were overcome by a sudden metamorphosis in their entire demeanour,  their eyes became opaque, they began to fidget and shift uneasily.

Plain lies, thought on the spur of the moment, were bandied about. Unforeseen developments that had unfolded since our last meeting, had tied the hands of the landlord and the place was no longer available. One gentleman told me that his brother who had settled down in the US had decided to return with family and so ‘Very sorry the house is not available’, I began telling him “less than half an hour ago you asked me bring the lease papers…” but I already talking to his ample posterior retreating behind a rapidly closing door.

The cake however was taken by a gentleman who, initially at least, appeared to be rather slow on the uptake, because it took him more than four meetings to figure out that he was dealing with a Muslim. The moment, however, this realisation dawned upon him, he was transformed into an extremely sharp man who was capable of thinking on his feet and coming up with a fairly cogent argument in support of his decision to deny me the privilege of becoming his tenant.

He was very polite and very firm, he told me that the local residents association had resolved not to give houses to unknown people in view of the growing threat of terrorism. He informed me that the decision had been taken on the advice of the local police.  I tried to explain to him that a tenant was always someone who came from outside, if he was already known, he would already be a resident in the area and would not be looking for rented accommodation. Since he had no answer to this, he said, without police verification it was not possible.

I knew I could crack this one, I knew the local ACP, the then DCP of the area. Several other senior police IPS and IAS officers posted at Delhi during that time were either my batch mates or my juniors from JNU or their friends who I knew fairly well, the list included the DCP Crime and railways and the PS to the home minister, I was confident that they would give me a good conduct certificate if I asked them for it and so I said, name the police officer and he will give you a good conduct certificate for me. The gentleman said Sorry. The retreating back and the closing door once again.

The funny thing is that no one ever said to me that they will not give me the house because I am a Muslim. Those who had been approached through property agents told them to take me someplace else when they realised that I belonged to their favourite community. Those less fortunate had to tell me off themselves and came up with all kinds of excuses, eating onions and garlic or meat were the easiest and the commonest, not giving a house on rent to unknown entities, because of increasing threat of terrorism and police advice were the most ingenious and the story of unforeseen developments, like an NRI brother suddenly returning, among the most blatant of lies. The net result was the same, an extreme reluctance to say what they wanted to say and still conveying to me that I and those like me were not welcome.

All this happened to me before 6^th December 1992, in fact the first refusal must have been handed to me in Dec 2001 almost a year before that fateful date. Things were not very different in Delhi 15 or 20 years earlier. A young couple from JNU had faced all this in 1980, they were both Muslims and after house hunting for close to three months had to eventually settle for a hovel in Hauz Raani, an urban village in south Delhi, they got a house there because the village has a sizeable Muslim population and I think their Landlord was also a Muslim. I cite this instance to show that this has nothing to do with Islam and terrorism becoming synonymous from the late 80s as far as people of a certain political dispensation are concerned.

I bring up the case of the young Muslim couple to point to another aspect of my house hunting adventures. The news that Sohail Hashmi was looking for a house and not finding one had spread among my friends, one of these brave souls, came to meet me, he was very agitated and said Sohail Bhai, this can’t be true.

I told him it was. He said I’ll find you a house, within this week; I invited him to join the search party and asked him if has an area in mind and he said yes, I’ll find you a house in Okhla. I said I don’t even want to exercise that option, why  do all Muslims have to live in ‘designated Muslim Areas’. He said you will have to willy-nilly go there because they will not let you live anywhere else. I told him you can try; I don’t think you will succeed. In other parts I don’t get a house because I am a Muslim and in Okhla I’ll not get one because it is known that I am not one.

He won’t believe me and left promising instant results. He was to return a week later, some what subdued. Like a modern day marketing consultant he told me something that I already knew and the knowledge had not helped me. Among the Muslims I was a persona non grata because my father had preferred the electric crematorium to a grave, so had my brother, the same brother had married a Hindu, one sister had also done the same and another had married a Sikh. The impression that my friend gathered after his interactions with whoever he approached as my ambassador at large was that they were not very keen on my company.

We had by this time reached a stage that we rang up people, told them we were Muslims and looking for a house and finally we contacted a Jat Sub inspector in Delhi police, we put our cards on the table and he said are you Indians? We said yes and he said on the ground floor there is an Oriya boy he is a plumber, take the key from him, the rent is Rs 2300 per month you have to pay by the 7th or you vacate on the 7th. He met us for the first time when he came to collect the rent. We stayed in that house for 4 years. It had taken us 5 months to find one person who did not refuse us a house because of our religion. My subsequent expeditions for house hunting in 1995, 1999-2000 and 2004 were, if any thing, far more educative, not so much for me as for my daughters who were now in their teens and for a young Rajasthani Brahmin couple, my former colleagues, who had taken it upon themselves to help us find a house. “But”, as Jack Lemmon said in Irma La Douce “that my friend is another story.”