Polarisation does not arrive suddenly. It does not even appear from afar like a procession. It comes quietly, like dampness seeping into the walls of an old house and going unnoticed for a long time. Gradually, it erodes the foundations of structures—yours and your neighbours’ too.

One day, that same neighbour at whose house you would walk in without knocking to drink tea pauses before opening the door. This pause is brief, but it is from here that society begins to change. Earlier, people knew one another’s names. They even addressed each other using terms like chacha, bhaiya, chachi, daadi. Earlier, children did not know which religion their friends belonged to. They only knew whose house had the sweetest guavas, whose grandmother told the best stories, and whose courtyard held the rainwater the longest.

Polarisation first steals away these small pieces of knowledge. Then a person no longer remains a person. They become a religion first, and their name comes later. The world remains the same, but the eyes that look at it change. The greatest victory of communalism is that it changes the way of seeing things before it burns any house.

When the gaze itself changes, the neighbour standing in front begins to feel like a distant person. Following this, a long distance is born within society—one that cannot be measured on any map. This fire, that breaks out in the eyes, sometimes takes an entire generation to extinguish.

A village or a market is not held together only by roads, bridges and government offices but by those small things for which no account is ever kept. Asking after someone’s well-being at the morning tea shop, exchanging views on some matter while returning from the fields, sewaiyan of Eid and thekuwa of Chhath reaching one another’s homes without invitation—these are the real capital of any society.

Before becoming a citizen, a human being becomes someone’s neighbour. The first classroom of social harmony is on a footpath, where children from different homes run together, where no one asks about religion in someone’s sorrow and no one counts caste in someone’s joy. Therefore, when the fire of communal tension breaks out, it does not burn only wood, tin and brick. It scorches those unspoken relationships that take years to form. The ash of the market can be swept the next day. But who will sweep the ash settled in the heart?

In Kaptanganj of the Eastern Tarai too, what likely burned first must have been that easy trust people once had—a trust so strong that for years they drank tea at one another’s shops without keeping accounts, remaining at ease knowing their children had gone to play at a neighbour’s house. But after the inferno settles, the same familiar path begins to feel a little strange. The same chowk, the same haat, the same temple, the same mosque—everything remains in its place, yet in the eyes of the people walking between them, a fine hesitation seems to settle. The breaking of society does not always happen with noise. Sometimes it happens so slowly that only the wise recognise it. They say, “The settlement is the same, but the talk is no longer as it was.” This is the greatest tragedy of any communal tension.

Nepal’s real strength has always been its diversity. Its geography comprises the Himalayas, the Hills and the Tarai. Society is made up of neighbourhoods, where relationships were formed less by religion and more by everyday life. Answers to questions were found not in religious books but in the memories of the neighbourhood. But the politics of polarisation does not like such memories. It does not want a person’s entire life. It wants only one identity. It does not see the farmers who ploughed the fields all their lives alongside people of many castes and religions. It overlooks the craftsmen whose hands built both the door of a temple and the threshold of a mosque. It only needs to know whether you are ‘us’ or ‘them’.

Those who carried many relationships within them are forced to stand in a single compartment. The identity that was once that of a neighbour—teacher, farmer, carpenter, shopkeeper, singer or friend—is reduced to a mere religious name. Our society was never as simple as politics would have us believe. There were quarrels, meetings, mixings, differences of opinion as well as partnerships. But the cart of life kept moving because shared needs, sorrows and hopes outweighed differences.

When politics draws the line of ‘us’ and ‘them’, the first thing that shrinks is that shared life. Conversations at the chaupal decrease, visits to festivals reduce, children’s games begin to divide. No announcement is made, yet the heart of society becomes a little smaller. Perhaps the greatest challenge of any plural society is that it continues to recognise its people not only by their identities but by their shared life. Because society is not made of religions, it is made of relationships. And relationships remain alive as long as someone can still call someone else a neighbour with ease.

A neighbour is not merely the one who lives next to your house. A neighbour is the one whose presence keeps alive the assurance that, even in your absence, your house is not completely alone. They are not part of the threshold of your door but are certainly part of your peace of mind.

There must have been some conditions of being a neighbour too—the sound of someone’s sorrow crosses the wall and reaches your ears. That in children’s play, the boundaries of houses are not visible. That when trouble is heard, the first knock on the door does not ask about religion. The history of civilisation is also the history of the neighbourhood. Walls separate houses, but neighbourliness keeps an invisible door open in those walls.

The fire of communalism first burns this invisible door. The paths remain, but trust in them does not. Even after the fire is extinguished, people continue to live in the same settlement, but it feels different. Nowadays, eyes look before doors open. Identity is checked before a greeting. Then one understands that the fire burned less wood and more of neighbourliness.

The hallmark of a civilised society is that, even in times of crisis, its neighbours can still reach one another’s doors. Temples, mosques or a strong constitution come after that. Perhaps being a neighbour is itself the first public proof of being human. The day we stop seeing someone as our neighbour and instead diminish them to just their identity, democracy will depart from both our constitution and neighbourhood.