In the middle of August 2010, I witnessed two men being chased by a group of people through the narrow lanes of Ram Rahim Nagar, a slum neighbourhood in the heart of Gujarat's largest city, Ahmedabad. I looked towards Salman, my Muslim informant. ‘It's just a skirmish between two of our own people … a Hindu and a Muslim,’ he said. It was startling for a visitor like me that anything related to Hindu–Muslim violence should occur in Ram Rahim Nagar, a neighbourhood best recognized for its long history of peacefulness (Berenschot, 2011; Dhattiwala, 2006; Malekar, 2009; Times of India, 3 March 2002). When I expressed my concern, Salman laughed and said in Hindi: ‘H–M is a separate issue. These are scuffles, between drunks … H–M doesn't happen here.’ I grew up in Ahmedabad and was well-acquainted with the abbreviation H–M, two letters of the English alphabet that even the illiterate preferred to use over ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ when speaking of an ethnic riot. Standing next to Salman, Ruaab Khan, a Muslim from the neighbouring Santoshnagar, frowned and said, ‘Yes he's right, H–M never happens in Ram Rahim Nagar. Never did on our side too, you know … until that day. Those brutes came in hordes that day,’ he spoke of rioters who had looted his house in 2002.

The coterminous slums of Santoshnagar and Ram Rahim Nagar had seemed indistinguishable to me when I had first visited them as a researcher in 2010. It was hard to tell where the boundaries of one ended and the other began, as years of encroachments had blurred visual dividers between the two. Yet each neighbourhood was distinct to the people who lived in and around them. Pointing to a municipal water pumping station, Santoshnagar resident Arunbhai's observation was instructive, ‘Do you see this pumping station here? You could say that our boundaries end here and Ram Rahim Nagar's begin.’ Indeed, the 500 rioters who looted and burnt shanties in Santoshnagar twice, on 1 March and 14 April 2002, had clearly recognized this demarcation. Ram Rahim Nagar was not attacked. Violence had stopped near the pumping station.