The slight young woman pulls a dust-covered suitcase from under her bed and rummages through it. She smiles briefly as she takes a photograph out of the clear plastic cover that has protected it for the past five years.
'That's him, that's Saleembhai,' says Firoza Banu Memon. 'That's my husband before they killed him.' The 25-year-old widow pauses for a moment, flanked by two of her three children. Her youngest, Muskan Banu, 6, squints at the picture, a father she does not remember.
Mrs Memon's husband had acid thrown in his face, before being stabbed and beaten to death in Baroda, in India's western state of Gujarat, five years ago. The reason: he was Muslim.
Today, the 27-year-old auto-rickshaw driver is little more than a precious memory, one among thousands of victims of some of the worst communal rioting to ravage post-partition India.
The carnage was in retaliation for 58 people being killed when a train carrying Hindu pilgrims was set alight in Godhra, eastern Gujarat, on February 27, 2002. Three months of widespread, systematic violence - murder, rape, looting and arson - aimed primarily at Muslims followed as the state, the birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi, descended into a bloodbath.
More than 200,000 people were displaced and about 2,000 people murdered in a series of pogroms, the precision and organisation of which led many, including India's then president Kocheril Raman Narayanan, to accuse the state government of complicity.
Mrs Memon recalls vividly the day she became a widow. As mobs began to loot and burn shops and homes near their home in Tarsali, in Baroda, Saleembhai packed his wife, children and parents into his auto-rickshaw and told his older brother Yaseenbhai to drive them to an emergency camp a few kilometres away. He would follow later as there was not enough room in the auto-rickshaw. It was the last time Mrs Memon saw him.
