As we briskly walked past the numerous metal karkhaanas, butcher shops, and hamams (public baths), I asked my guide what I was afraid to ask: what had happened in these lanes during the 1992-93 riots? With a heartbreaking simplicity, he told me that the entire street we walked in was up in flames. Raging policemen had torn into Madanpura firing indiscriminately. A four-year-old girl was hit in the head.

As he turned away from me, sternly trying to hide his tears, he asked, what had she done? I had no answer for him, so I covered up my inadequacy with mundane questions about crowd control during the shooting. His boys would take care of that, he assured me. I liked himimmensely: he was warm, generous and helpful. But none of that could hide the bitterness and rage that flowed in him. Some memories do not fade away with time. ``We will never forget what happened to us, and next time we will not be caught unawares...'' he warned as I drove away from this island of poverty towards my secure and separate affluence.

It had become evident to me that peace is the condition that exists when violence simmers beneath the surface. Madanpura is like a keg of gunpowder waiting only for a spark to ignite it. I got a taste of this when I returned there with Preity Zinta for the first day of my shooting. No film had ever been shot there and the scream of my ``Action!'' was drowned in the din of the crowds that had rushed out of their homes to watch us.

A filmstar had never walked through their meat market or sat in one of their carem rooms. This was the closest they would ever come to their fantasies, and not forty of my friends' most tough boys could control the surge of people. Theyall wanted to be in my movie! A harrowed police inspector waved his arms about in panic asking us to leave. This was Madanpura and anything would happen here, he shrieked.

Finally, when the local MLA arrived on the scene my guide-friend packed us off in desperation. As he steered our car through the excited crowd and waved us goodbye, I came away from Madanpura with not just five minutes of screen images but questions incessantly ringing in my head: What was the future of this place? What was the future of these boys? What was the future of the rest of us who lived separately from them, but could hardly afford to be indifferent to them?

In the tiniest way, I had tried to narrow this separation by my shooting. Briefly they had come close to touching their dreams. But what about that dream that the architects of free India had seen for this country?Madanpura seemed to be situated on the outskirts of that dream. I had seen a fierce vitality in that place but without a direction, it could only get destructiveor get dissipated. It seemed to me that in this, the 50th year of independence, we had defaulted in honouring our obligation to a great many people.

By rejecting the Srikrishna Commis-sion report, we had done what Martin Luther King said: ``America has given its people a bad cheque; a cheque which has come back marked `insufficient funds.''' Like the blacks, the boys of Madanpura may easily believe that the Bank of Justice is bankrupt. They may believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity in this nation. They have hardly any hope that they will form anintegral part of India's future. We have nobody but ourselves to blame for it.

We also have no one but ourselves to salvage it. If we really want charge it can't be by the shoddy steps of gradualism; it has to be with the breathless urgency of commitment. And this would be for our own security and not for them as we would idiotically tell ourselves.

Even though our celebration of our national greatness may seem like swellingvanity and our shouts of liberty and equality hollow mockery to them, we would begin to exhume the carcass of their dead hopes.

Tanuja Chandra is a Mumbai-based filmmaker. Her last film was Dushman.