I am staying at friend's place in a high-rise by Juhu beach, Mumbai and as I get out of the train at the infamous Victoria station with its iconic clock I feel as though I've entered a film. I get into an iconic black cab with a yellow top, and the first scene begins. The taxi driver who rescues me from days of train travel has a classic Hindi tune playing, and the smile on my face slowly gets bigger. I'm in the mood to talk, because the taxi driver seems as shattered and euphoric as I.

He still had a little piece of tissue paper on his chin, to soak the blood of a morning razor cut – and thinking that he did not remember I pointed it out to him. He immediately rubs it away, telling me that he didn't expect to bleed when shaving.

Me: Why is this your first time?

Driver: Yes, exactly.

Me: Why did you shave now?

Driver: To hide.

Me: Hide?

Driver: I'm Muslim.

Me: So is half of India, why do you have to hide?

Driver: I've just come from Gujarat.

Silence.

What he then tells me I have never been able to forget, and made the Gujarat Genocide come alive for me. Mamood, my taxi driver, began work this very morning. It was his uncle's cab and this was his first shift. He arrived in Bombay the night before last with his brother-in-law, via a truck full of cattle. But let me begin from the beginning like Mamood did for me.

Mamood is not a taxi driver but a hard wear store shop keeper. Him and his brother-in-law have run this store in Gujarat for the past 11 years, and in this time Mamood has married and been blessed with two children with one on the way. Mamood's wife taught at the local school, and he had high hopes of educating his children well. His eldest was eight, a daughter named Jasmine. She was the first to be hurt by Gujarat's reaction to the burning trains.

Happily attending a secular city school one day, taunted by Hindu class peers the next, and not allowed in on the third. She has always been Muslim, but suddenly she did not belong. Mamood and his wide found this fact out in a very different way. When Jasmine returned home early from school on the third day, she walked to her dad's shop through smoke, walked over rubble, and ducked under items being thrown. One missed her own head as she entered her father's shop, but it hit the shop window. It was a petrol bomb and Mamood rushes to pick her up and runs home, leaving his shop to be looted, raided and burn.

Who was doing this? His neighbours. Mamood tells me about how truck loads of angry Hindu's were bought into Ahmdebad and were destroying any thing and any one associated with Islam. The big damage; the trains, homes, villages, cities that were destroyed, were destroyed by these crazied mobs, but what had hurt Mamood the most, was seeing his own life long Hindu friends turn their back on him and his family. It is one thing to be scared, and so not to offer a helping hand, not to offer their home as a refuge, not to call out to them in the street, when Muslims were fleeing for shelter. But it is a whole other feeling to see your neighbouring shop owner, wait until it's dark and then creep into your store to steal anything that survived the mob.

“We are all poor, but I did not expect people to be so willing to take advantage of another man's misfortune. That night I experienced a sharp stab in my back. I have lived, breathed, laughed and cried with these brothers, how can I now become nothing more than an insect – whose blood they suck out before stamping into the ground?” Mamood said this in Hindi, and my throat was too chocked to answer, not that I actually had an answer.

Two nights ago Mamood fled his home. Five nights ago, Mamood's shop had been raided. He ran home with his daughter in his arms, to hide in the back room of the house, with the rest of his family. His wife was covering her son with her body in the back store room – the one place of the house without windows, and as soon as he walked in his wife pleaded that he quickly run out and bring her brother – who worked in a shop near Mamood's own. He would otherwise be all alone. Mamood gave his daughter to his wife, did not say a single word and ran for his life. He found his brother – in – law shaking in the corner of the bathroom. As the shop was raided, the toilet door had not opened, so he survived but he heard his complete livelihood come down around his ears. It was hard work but Mamood eventually pulled his brother – in- law away from the corner, but to pick up his courage to run out in the streets was harder.

"I wish I had just pushed him out into the street. I wished I had slapped sense into him immediately. I wish I hadn't taken so long…"

When Mamood got back home, with his brother – in – law it was already all over. His unborn baby, ripped out of his wife's stomach was on the blood covered floor, next to his wife. His children must have seen this in their attempt to run away, because their throats had been slit on the stairs, and there was still commotion in the house. Mamood's brother in law grabbed Mamood as he stood in shock at the bottom of the stairs, pushed him over his children's body, ran on to the roof and jumped into the water tank at the top of the house, never letting go of Mamood. And there they stayed in the tall narrow tank, next to each other, submerged in water, with just the top of their neck in the dark, cold air, day and night for two whole days. They stood in that water, in their own excrement, in absolute shook, despair, misery and mourning. This is the only way that they managed to survive Gujarat, if you can call loosing your wife, children, livelihood and home, survival.

They pulled themselves out of the water tank on the fourth night, in silence, and were picked up before sunrise after making a call to Mamood's uncle in Bombay. He was able to get a family friend to get them from a deserted motorway hard shoulder.

All genocides are psychological experiments, built on paranoia, hysteria, and a misguided sense of power. The difference in the case of Gujarat is that I do not think it is over. It is just a matter of time before the gentle but pervasive breeding of hatred explodes again.

Mandeep Rai is a freelance journalist based in New York