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Families suffer distress and isolation as they try to raise their children in a situation where their own identity is being questioned.
By Mujib Mashal and Hari Kumar
Information from Noida and Chennai, India
It’s a feeling of loneliness to know that your country’s leaders don’t need you. Being vilified for being a Muslim in what is now largely a Hindu India.
Color everything. Friends, dear for decades, change. The neighbors make a chorus with gestures of good neighborliness: they no longer sign up for the celebrations or play to ask questions in moments of pain.
“It’s a lifeless life,” said Ziya Us Salam, who lives in the suburbs of Delhi with his wife, Uzma Ausaf, and their four daughters.
When he was a film critic for one of India’s leading newspapers, Mr. Salam, 53, devoted his time to film, art and music. Workdays ended with an older friend’s motorcycle ride to his favorite food stand for long discussions. His wife, a fellow journalist, wrote about life, food, and fashion.
Now, Salam’s regime is reduced to the workplace and the home, with his mind occupied with heavier concerns. The constant ethnic profiling because he’s “visibly Muslim” — through the bank teller, through the parking lot guard, through the other passengers in the exercise — is boring, he said. Family conversations are darker, as both parents focus on raising their daughters in a country that is questioning, or even trying to erase, markers of Muslim identity: the way they dress, what they eat, and even their Indian character. .
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