Some unscrupulous soul whipped together a fictitious explanation for the Godhra atrocity, down to an abducted daughter of a tea-vendor, and sent it out over the wires. He was sick enough to put the names and numbers of two real journalists at the end, as "sources" for the story. I hate to think how many calls from the world over that hapless pair fielded (mine was one), how many times they had to explain that it was all a hoax.

But malicious kite-flying happened in the other direction too. Early reports from Godhra mentioned ten girls among the karsevaks on the train, "abducted by miscreants belonging to the minority community" and whisked to some unknown destination, some unknown fate. As with the tea-vendor story, this tale zipped round the world in seconds flat, helped along by outraged writers and email jockeys.

Until the Additional DGP of Gujarat, J Mahapatra, said: 'No woman passenger has been reported missing after the Godhra murders. We have accounted for each and every passenger. These are all rumours that have been doing the rounds with the intention of spreading violence.' [Rediff, March 6].

The bloody truth of hatred and murder is apparently not enough for some people on either side of this putrid and God-forsaken wrangle. Intent on whipping up even more hatred, they concoct and spread lies as well.

Two days ago, a woman we know slightly came to leave her little collection of jewellery with us: mangalsutra, another chain, a couple of anklets, some earrings. The next day, her 15-year-old daughter came to stay. "Please keep her for a few days around the 15th," the mother had asked us at the beginning of March, right after the Gujarat massacres. "There's talk of riots, isn't there?"

This Marathi-speaking Hindu family lives in a mostly Muslim neighbourhood near the station. Afraid that the VHP's Ayodhya plans for March 15 might lead to trouble, they think our seven-storey building with our geriatric watchman is safer than their home. Why should it be? In Ahmedabad two weeks ago, mobs were equipped with gas cylinders. They released gas into buildings like ours and, as the IAS officer Harsh Mander writes in a horrifying report, a 'trained member of the group then lit the flame which efficiently engulfed the building.' (Question: just what had he been trained in? By whom?).

So I'm not convinced that our home is particularly safer than our guest's. But she's here, with the family jewellery.

This too has its mirror-image. Sharat Pradhan reports for rediff from Ayodhya that the 'bulk of the [Muslim] families have temporarily shifted base' out of their largely Hindu surroundings. Given the 'mob frenzy that we witnessed in December 1992,' the ongoing 'build-up of karsevaks from outside" and the "recent violence in Gujarat,' they fear carnage around March 15. So they have sent their women and children away.

And the men who have led my country into this crazy mess? I see them on my front pages, on television, addressing press conferences, claiming their cause is above the law, that they are not subject to Supreme Court decisions. I see them surrounded always by alert commandos fingering triggers on some very long guns.

If we needed more perversity, surely this qualifies: that Indian lives are turned inside-out, too often snuffed out, by the hatreds these men encourage; but those same ordinary Indians must nevertheless pay to protect these men.

Mander's report, written after visiting riot survivors' camps in Ahmedabad, is not for queasy stomachs. 'The horrors that [the survivors] speak of are so macabre,' he writes, 'that my pen falters in the writing.'

Me? My eyes falter in the reading.

An eight-month pregnant woman's stomach was slit open and her foetus slaughtered in front of her. A family was killed by 'flooding their house with water and then electrocuting them.' Everywhere, women were raped and then burned or beaten to death, 'in one case with a screw-driver.' Enough.