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“At the cemetery, we told the child your parents are here”

Rahi Gaikwad

Muslim family loses six members in the CST massacre

MUMBAI: For days, five-year old Firoze kept asking for his mother. He finally sensed that something was wrong. Then relatives took the little boy to a cemetery. “Your mother and father are here,” they told him. “He was crying. It took us two days to pacify him,” says Sagir Ansari, 32, Firoze’s elder brother.

The Ansari family received a cruel blow in last week’s terror attacks here. It lost six family members in the massacre at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) on November 26. Rakhila Abbas Ansari, 40; her husband Abbas Razab Ansari, 40; her brother Mohammed Illias Ansari, 40; her nephews Sarfaraz Salauddin Ansari, 17, and Murtuza Ansari Salauddin, 17; and the couple’s son-in-law Mohammed Arif Mohammed Islam, 27, were struck down by the terrorists. The couple’s children, Afroj, 12, and Mehboob, 18, were injured.

At 9.30 p.m., the Ansaris were waiting near platform 13 for the late night Rajendra Nagar Express. Five of them were set to go to their village Mananpur in Navada district in Patna for Bakrid, which falls on December 9.

Sagir, who had accompanied his parents, was in the toilet when the terrorists struck. When he came out a few minutes later, his family was no more. He saw his brother Mehboob lying injured on the ground. He took him to hospital. Some people helped Afroj. Sagir learnt about the hospitalisation of Afroj only the next day.

Like Sagir, another kin was also in for a shock. Taxi driver Israil Ansari, another brother of Rakhila’s, who took the family members to the station, left them at the entrance and went to park his vehicle. That was the last he saw of his sister and other kin. “I reached the gate and heard the firing,” he says.

Afroj is just about reconciling himself to the loss of his parents. “I came to Mumbai a year ago from my village. In Mumbai, I took Urdu lessons. I will go back to my village and to my school,” he says. There was no time for the family to seek succour that night. “We had no time to run. My uncle was shot; he fell on me,” says Afroj.

Like Firoze, Afroj and Mehboob also learnt of their parents’ death only recently. “Afroj kept asking why mummy and daddy had not come to see him in the hospital,” says Sagir.

Like the Ansari children, four of Arif’s children aged below 10 are going through the pain of losing a parent at a tender age. They are with their mother in their village.

Poor family

The Ansari family lived in Mumbra, Thane, and earned a living by making bags and purses, doing zari work and selling perfumes.

“They are a poor family. They spent what they earned during the day,” says Pappuraj Nayeem Khan, president of the Nagina Masjid, where Israil lives.

Mr. Khan remembers Illias as a devout Muslim who always wore his cap and kurta pyjama and sported a beard. Unlike others, he was in the traditional attire even on the night of the attack. Mr. Khan says Illias was disturbed by the troubled times in Mumbai, especially after the attacks on north Indians. “He wanted to go back to his village.”

The CST attack baffles a resident of Nagina Masjid. “At the hotels foreigners were the target. However, I do not know what the CST firing was about,” he muses.

As per reports, if “maximum casualties” were what the attackers wanted, they did make the Ansari family their prime target.

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