Zara Chowdhary’s powerful debut, The Lucky Ones, is pitched as a memoir, but it is much more than just a personal story. It is, rather, an exploration of the dark recesses of Indian society, a long perspective into the history of violence against minorities running across the subcontinent and, most poignantly, a shattering reminder of the bruised and battered world we live in.
While the focus of her narrative is on the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat following the burning of Sabarmati Express in Godhra, Chowdhary zooms in and out expertly to give us a telescopic view of the depredations of humanity. Fittingly, she begins with one fateful date on which her world, as a 16-year-old girl, turned upside down: 27 February 2002. That day, as it turns out, comes trailing a long history of upheavals, both cosmic and human.
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On this date in 837 CE, Haley’s comet is spotted by humans moving closest to Earth. In 1803, the Great Fire of Bombay burns down the city on the same day. A century later, in 1921, Fascists rise against communists in Italy, and in 1933, the Nazis and communists lock horns in Germany on 22 February.
These wounds of the past turned into scabs over time, picked at and prodded occasionally by disruptive forces, leaving their mark on the world at large. But the devastations of 2002 fester to this day, leaving deep gashes on the body politic of India from which the nation is far from recovered.
As trident-bearing mobs unleash unspeakable destruction on their Muslim neighbours, Chowdhary is months away from taking her board exams. Instead of revising hard for the first major trial of her life, her head is filled with names and events that have now become seared into our collective consciousness—Bilkis Bano, Best Bakery Case, Maya Kodnani, Haren Pandya, and Ahsan Jafri, among others.
Like the concentric circles of hell, described by the Italian poet Dante in The Divine Comedy, ever-widening layers of danger surrounded Chowdhary and her family in those days and weeks of February and March 2002. If the outermost fringe of these layers had rampaging fanatics baying for the blood of Muslims, abetted by key actors in the state government, closer home, Chowdhary experiences the slow and insidious alienation from her school friends, neighbours and, finally, from her own family.
Even as she relives the horrors relayed on television 24x7, Chowdhary weaves in a deeply intimate account of her growing up in a Muslim family, fractured by its own inner politics and prejudices. As Ahmedabad, the city of her birth, burns outside, Chowdhary, her sister Misba, and their Amma are, in a sense, the “lucky ones,” hiding away on the eight floor of their building, Jasmine, saved by the skin of their teeth from the marauding crowd by their quick-thinking neighbour, the 80-year-old Pant auntie.
“Secularism and pluralism weren’t distant constitutional values here,” Chowdhary writes, describing the ethos of the neighbourhood she grew up in, “here they constituted the very names on the Jasmine nameboard by the elevators.” For her part, Chowdhary opts to study Sanskrit in school with more fervour than she does her Arabic lessons with a lazy maulavi. The cultural markers of her identity remain heterogeneous—some may even say heterodox—and admiringly so. Yet, at the peak of the curfews, when her Hindu schoolfriends secure in their unchanged lives across the river forget her, Chowdhary must seek comfort from her neighbours, a feisty Yemeni girl and another Muslim family of three girls brought up by their single mother.
Inside the claustrophobic apartment, though, it’s another story. The girls are snubbed, their mother relentlessly taunted by the rest of the family for being an outsider from the south—forced to live like “second-class citizens.” The Chowdharys—Zaheer, the girls’ father, Dadi (their paternal grandmother), Phupu (aunt) and Apa (older cousin)—gang up against the trio at every opportunity.
Chowdhary’s grandfather, Dada, is long dead, a broken man passed over for promotions by the Gujarat government, which he had faithfully served for many decades. The origin of this discrimination went back to 1965, when Dada had the temerity to visit his extended family in Pakistan, an act that was deemed by “secular” independent India as being unforgivably partisan.
The embers of this rejection, inflamed by the targetted Islamophobia of decades to come, singes the family’s morale. It runs like a poison in the line, as Chowdhary’s father, in a fit of misguided arrogance, joins government service after ruining his chances in the US. He, too, spends his working life seething with fury against the injustices of the system, becomes an abusive alcoholic, and takes out his frustrations on his wife and daughters, before dying of cancer at the age of 53. It wouldn’t be unfair to read The Lucky Ones as Chowdhary’s own version of The Diary of a Young Girl, except, unlike Anne Frank, she never received the pure love of her kin.
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If the terror of being in lockdown with your own people, who never have a kind word for you, creates an air of cloying tension, Chowdhary’s story doesn’t lose sight of the bigger picture. For The Lucky Ones is as much a story of irreversible change wrought on Ahmedabad, the city where the author was born and had grown up in, but had never felt an uncomplicated sense of belonging. “In the last few years, Ahmedabad has parted along the banks of the Sabarmati like the Red Sea,” she writes. “Most of ‘them’ live on the west, and ‘we’ live on the east.”
This perception of being marked as the “other” is much more complex than simply being alienated from the mainstream. For it is inflected by class and privilege, a double-edged sword in the best of times. “To become aware of your minority status brings with it this understanding of the ghetto,” Chowdhary writes. “It is a place that constantly saves you, even as every day it threatens to kill you on the inside.”
Not everyone is as lucky. Even as Chowdhary and her family are ensconced in the cocoon that is Jasmine apartments, the slum where their household help Gulshan lives is riddled with threats. Chowdhary’s history teacher, wife of one of the leading Hindu police officers in the city, arranges to send her students supplies, when rations are perilously low. But no one has any idea how the likes of Gulshan manage to make it through each day, each meal.
And so, even as Chowdhury presents the events of 2002 from a wide angle, compelling the reader to reckon with the brutality of the past unsparingly, it never flattens the predicament of all Muslims as being one. In the end, there were, as the title gracefully acknowledges, the lucky ones, who lived to tell their tales, or found the language to do so with delicate craft.
As one among the latter, Chowdhary leaves a priceless gift in the form of her book, not only to the memories of those who no longer are, or cannot speak, but also for the rest of us, so that we may never forget, never repeat the mistakes of the past.