"Return of the Memons- A Pyrrhic Victory" continues...

Yaqub spent hours with me sitting across my office-table and talking openly about his life and the cataclysmic changes it had undergone in the wake of the blasts. He was a qualified Chartered Accountant and a member of a large and happy joint family, which originally hailed from Jamnagar district in Gujarat. His father Abdul Razaq Memon ran a workshop named ‘Famous Engineering and Welding’ in Mustafa Bazar, Byculla, Bombay, which supplied machinery parts to Tata Oil Mills. Mother Hanifa was a simple homemaker. He had five brothers— Suleiman, Ibrahim, Ayub, Essa and Yusuf, all reasonably well educated and engaged in different occupations befitting their academic qualifications. Three of them were married with children and so was Yaqub. Rahin, his twenty-year-old wife, was a charming young girl but the couple was till then childless.

Ibrahim Abdul Razaq Memon, aka Tiger Memon, had studied up to the first year of college in Bombay and started his career as a bank clerk in 1978. He slowly drifted into smuggling of silver and gold with a large gang of committed members. Meanwhile, Yaqub had become a qualified Chartered Accountant and was making good money. In 1990, the family bought three flats numbered 22, 25 and 26 and a garage in Al Hussaini Building at Mahim, a colony in the heart of Mumbai, largely inhabited by the Muslim community.

The Memons were least affected by the December 1992 communal riots in Bombay following the demolition of Babri Masjid in Faizabad, Uttar Pradesh, which sparked off bitter Hindu-Muslim clashes in different parts of the country. However, the riots that followed in January, 1993 left the Memon family, much like the Muslim community of Bombay at large, devastated. Yaqub Memon’s office was completely burnt down and he had to recreate the Income Tax and Sales Tax files of his clients, piece by piece. He started operating from his residence. He and his
family lived under constant fear, not knowing what lay ahead for them.

To be continued...