What began as an attack on a train carrying Hindu pilgrims home from a religious ceremony metastasized into retaliatory mob violence against the state’s large Muslim minority. In what are now known simply as the Gujarat Riots, hundreds if not thousands of families were targeted, hunted and killed by vigilante assailants. Months of lockdowns and curfews followed. There was widespread international condemnation, much of it against the leadership of the state’s then-chief minister, Modi. Journalists and human rights observers accused his Hindu-nationalist government of failing to intervene and condoning — and, some suggested, even colluding with — the attackers. Modi was cleared of all charges, but the stain of that moment has only grown with time, as new outbreaks of violence and hatred have accompanied the national ascent of the BJP.
“The Lucky Ones” is a new memoir by the Indian Muslim writer Zara Chowdhary, who was a teenager in hiding in Gujarat during those riots. Where the sterile language of news accounts falls short, Chowdhary’s memoir fills in the gaps with a visceral work of bearing witness, recounted with exacting and unapologetic subjectivity. Unlike those hunted, raped and murdered in those months, Chowdhary is among the “lucky ones,” and her Muslim memoir is her survivor’s song. As a writer, she’s a keen student of Anne Frank, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Marjane Satrapi — memoirists whose seminal works are also masterpieces of political and national history. Chowdhary skillfully weaves the ascent of right-wing politics with the rude awakenings and pain of entering womanhood alongside her beloved sister. Textile and fabric — an ode to the Muslim weavers and craft traditions she loves deeply — become a recurring motif; even the cover of the book is an illustration of two young women peering through a tear in a piece of patterned Indian fabric.
The story largely unfolds on an eighth-floor balcony overlooking the city of Ahmedabad, in the apartment where Zara is trapped for months with her family. In intentional echoes of Holocaust narratives, Chowdhary, cloistered in the feeble walls of her small home, is haunted by what is happening to those less fortunate than herself. The balcony at the complex, named Jasmine Apartments, becomes both a liminal architectural space between the interior and exterior of the home and a literary symbol from which the adult Chowdhary can assume a perch to revisit this past life. As she writes: “A thousand invisible fingers from every direction are pointing toward our balcony, a million eyes turning to where the Muslims sit huddled in their homes all over the state. It doesn’t matter this evening that this land we all stand on is the land of Gandhi. Something has been eviscerated. Something has changed. A new land and a new people reborn in fire.”
The writer now resides and teaches in Wisconsin, and the book is a fierce critique of Modi’s India, but also a requiem for and reclamation of her family’s secular India that contained — and can still contain — multitudes. That past life was interconnected across class, caste and religion, with Hindu deities dancing alongside Sufi songs, and with public servants dedicated to the national state denying the calls of tribalism. Chowdhary’s professional background in film and advertising is reflected in the powerful and flickering scenes that intersperse the narrative. There are brief and potent evocations of sense memory, and the melancholy of a home and country left behind. There is palpable love for the culture and language into which Chowdhary came of age, as she describes the nostalgia-tinged fragrance of neighborhood flowers and her mother’s cooking. But a seething and understandable political rage also courses through the memoir, searching for both catharsis and a kind of literary retribution. In writing into the void where erasure and degradation once reigned, Chowdhary resurrects her family’s lost Indian Muslim dignity to ensure they are accounted for as citizenry.
Like many contemporary memoirs disrupting the easy linearity or bow-tied, conclusive release of redemption narratives, “The Lucky Ones” is a book without easy answers or easy hope. The structure of its brief chapters is intentionally fragmentary and discursive, as unpredictable and unwieldy as memory itself. The reading experience can be disorienting, but throughout the book, I felt deeply assured I was in the hands of a writer in control of what she wished to express — holding firm to the idea that if journalism tells the reader what happened, it is literature that reveals how it feels. This debut is a testament to the power of literature to do what other forms of language and commentary cannot, rendering its readers among a fortunate tribe, of lucky ones.
Bilal Qureshi is a culture writer and radio journalist.
