NEW DELHI: Zara Chowdhary’s memoir The Lucky Ones, as one of its blurbs says, is “a story rescued from fire…. A warning thrown to the world.” It indeed is a warning for the future of India, for those who can read the signs on the wall.
The 2002 religious violence of Gujarat changed Chowdhary’s life forever, a Muslim girl living in Ahmedabad, preparing for her board exams. It also scarred a generation of Indian Muslims forever, left over 2,000 people dead, displaced many more, and eventually culminated by projecting Narendra Modi as the new Hindu Hriday Samrat. In essence, The Lucky Ones might be a memoir of surviving the horrific pogrom, but it also rises above those boundaries by transforming a potentially traumatic narrative into a nuanced investigation of human complexity. This approach becomes particularly crucial as mainstream media, including recent films, such as The Sabarmati Express, have predominantly peddled historically inaccurate, simplistic propaganda.
Chowdhary's book extends far beyond an examination of violence's human toll. It is an intimate recollection of her family's story and internal struggles, infusing personal depth that propelled the book to TIME Magazine's 100 must-read books of 2024. She meticulously explores her multigenerational family history, unpacking the burdens placed on daughters in middle-class families and illuminating humanity's capacity for forgiveness and grace, even when societal values appear to crumble.
Apart from her own experience, The Lucky Ones is also the story of her friends, her neighbours, her maid and working class Muslims who lived in ghettos around their apartment society, and at many points, protected their lives — especially when law enforcement agencies did not do their duties, or worse, became willing accomplices in the killings.
Explaining this alienation of people of her locality, Chowdhary writes, “Our city had splintered along two sides of a river, the Hindu side willing to leave us behind as it rushed westward into the new millennium.”
It was a difficult book for Chowdhary to write, but she manages to turn her personal history into a lens for understanding broader social fractures. In doing so, the book becomes an unflinching dive into the social and psychological mechanics that led to the conflict.
Another strength of her writing is the way she describes the experiences of other victims of the riots that she perhaps didn’t know personally—Bilkis Bano, Ehsan Jafri, the victims of Naroda Patiya and Best Bakery massacres, among others. It indicates how an author's empathy can travel to people she never met.
In this interview with Article 14, Chowdhary talks about her reasons for breaking her silence, the social disconnect of the privileged elite, the mental toll of the violence on her and people around her and the importance of forgiveness.
Your memoir ‘The Lucky Ones’ revisits the 2002 Gujarat riots after 22 years. What compelled you to break this decades-long silence?
I never planned on writing this memoir. I have several unfinished drafts of angry letters to myself on all my devices through the years, each trying to list and characterize the memories of that time in our lives, trying and very much failing to illustrate why someone like me — who walked away mostly unscathed from the events of 2002 — felt looted, silenced, and numb. But I never saw myself dedicating years of my life to something like this, because the story of the pogrom never felt like a full story in the traditional sense. There wasn’t an inciting incident, or climax or denouement. One day there was a city, a family, a country, and then there wasn’t. The throughline wasn’t a linear, singular one, but several jagged, ill-fitting shards of memory. The writer in me, in fact, denied this story any oxygen because in telling it, I knew the story and I would both fight for breath on the page. Then in 2019, the CAA/NRC protests happened, Shaheen Bagh happened, and people started to talk about Gujarat once again in this forgotten, distant way, as if it was decades ago, as if no one who’d lived through it was alive. And something shifted in me. This sort of rage I hadn’t felt in years, or perhaps had denied myself.
A primary character in the book is Jasmine Apartments, your building that the rioters tried to destroy many times, but which contained many worlds within itself: that of your Dadi, your parents, you and your sister. In what ways do you think Jasmine Apartment represents the pre-2002 social reality of Muslim existence in Gujarat?
I can’t speak for all Muslims, but for a family like ours, where each of my grandparents came from a different part of India, from different social classes and castes, spoke a different tongue, where we’d served in government and public service roles or the army for generations, Jasmine was built out of those utopic Amar-Akbar-Anthony-esque dreams in the 1970s, of a certain kind of Indian Muslim.
I remember standing in 1992, as a five-year-old, on my tiptoes and watching motorbikes being set on fire downstairs from our eighth-floor balcony during the post-Babri riots. But for the most part there was a certain distance from these traumas, as if our education and service backgrounds somehow shielded us from what was happening on the streets. It’s when we looked inward, at what was going on within this crumbling apartment—the daily drinking, the depression of the men who had been discriminated against and broken down by hostile, biased workplaces, the complicity of the women caught in everyday misogyny towards each other, the ceiling placed on the grandchildren’s dreams in an India that was already transforming into a whole new beast, that’s when we’d confront the reality of what our place on the totem pole was, how irrelevant in value our lives and stories had become to this republic.
The destruction of Wali Gujarati's tomb represents a key moment in your narrative. How does this act represent broader patterns of historical erasure of Muslim heritage in modern India, considering that many Muslim monuments have come under attack since then?
Very few people in India, or in fact in the world, know that Wali or Shamsuddin Waliullah is considered the father of the modern Urdu ghazal form by many poets. Until the seventeenth century, ghazals were mostly written and performed in heavily-Persian inflected language. Its practitioners were mostly from the north and central parts of the subcontinent. But Wali (like me!) was this incredible mix of the vernacular of the Deccan as well as madly in love with the musicality of Hindi/Urdu which he encountered as he wandered north and finally settled in the western provinces of what was then still the Gujarat sultanate.
He was revolutionary because he wrote in more accessible ways. And that, as we know for an audience as vast and varied as Indians, made for an enduring poetic voice. In that sense he was the same as Kabir, or Ravidas, or modern day bards like Shailendra and Majrooh. He was the voice of this land’s spiritual conscience. If mobs were running around demolishing havelis, kothis, and mansions or ransacking thrones and treasuries of erstwhile maharajas and feudal lords who sold us off to the British, that would still be a destruction of history, but perhaps understandable.
The fact that we sing that verse about bringing down the taj (crown) and takht (throne) from Faiz’s Hum Dekhenge with such gusto to me feels amusingly telling: we are as a people more socialist and anti-caste on a cellular level than we’ve been made to believe. But the fact that we’ve been turned on each other to such a degree where vandalizing community places of worship, or destroying the history of revered community heroes evokes this almost terrifying glee, that in attacking a monument one feels empowered to erase a whole community’s sense of intertwined history, that people actually take pleasure in carving out this black hole from our shared sense of historical time, it feels like utter madness to me and a sign that a deep fascination for cruelty has overcome us.
In a chapter, you talk of Ayesha, a Hindu friend, who was completely unaware of the violence going on in your life. What does this social disconnect tell us about how privilege operates during times of crisis?
It is both privilege and basic urban geography, because cities are built to mirror our desires, to show what we covet and whom we value. Ahmedabad always felt haunted to me the way it was constructed—haunted by its past, by its own desires, and this feels important to name, by its greed. The city had separated along the lines of class and caste almost a decade before 2002. Greed is one of those primal impulses, which especially during times of agitation, can leave people in a state of utter moral crisis. To loot or not to loot? To bear witness or to look away?
When everyone was looting local Muslim businesses, my sister’s classmate boasted to her that her own brother had gone for it. These were well-off, middle-class children. Why wouldn’t they? If looking away from a person’s dehumanization or a dismembered body can offer more than a good night’s sleep, a sense that a population is being culled, and now scarcity will be replaced by abundance, why say no? I am not suggesting my 16-year-old friend was directly responding from a conscious greed. But the more I’ve sat with those memories, the more I’ve asked what would make young people this willfully blind or selfish, when that is supposed to be the age of hopeful rebellion, I’m left with the sense that it is an inherited greed. A sort of morally lazy, convenient denial by those who pretend they didn’t see what was happening across the river. If nothing else, it was the greed for an assuaged conscience.
Another character from your book is Gulshan, your maid, who lived in a Muslim ghetto which kind of protected your locality from rioters. What role did class play in the 2002 violence?
I mean, we’re seeing this in Gaza today. The families that have managed to flee are those who have people on the outside, relatives in western countries, access to English, the internet, the wherewithal to make GoFundMe campaigns raising money to escape. The rest are being left behind to either fight or die. I think going back in memory to remember the morning after the first time we were attacked and how Gulshan’s slum basically fought off the mob, and saved us all from slaughter, it reminded me how much guilt I felt for how cowardly we were in comparison. How we were still holding onto our social privileges, our “connections” with police officers or Hindu friends across the river, whereas here were people who knew they only had each other, and were willing to go down fighting. It also didn’t surprise me, therefore, that soon after 2002, when the river banks were “redeveloped”, this slum and most of its inhabitants, including perhaps Gulshan, were bulldozed out. That sort of resistance had to be punished.
You talk beautifully about the complicated relationship between you and your father. He wanted you to be his “son”. There are also instances of domestic violence at home. How does one forgive parents who are no more in the world?
I’m not sure why, but I’ve always believed that once people cross that threshold of death, nothing remains unknown to them. They become part of this larger universal knowing. Maybe it’s my trauma speaking, but in the years after my father’s death, I’d often tell my sister that we can forgive him as he has forgiven us. So much of human life is spent holding onto these gaps of what we cannot know, holding onto voids: grudges, assumptions, suspicions, arrogances, broken teacups we have no way of fixing. This is an entirely human failing, a way for people to hold onto some meaning in life to persist in the face of their inadequacies. Anger offers the same sense of purpose as there is in holding onto dreams.
I started to write this book from the inside of my father’s anger, a volatile vortex I was unlucky enough to be caught in from early childhood, because I wanted to see where this sort of life spent in holding onto anger leads. Writing from there outward, in this spiral shape, tracing violence, actually helped me understand the phenomenon of political strongmen from the inside, our need to worship them, obey them, revile them, when we all actually collectively create them. This is not to erase the choices they make. But if we don’t understand the violence that breaks a man in the first place, we have no business simply pointing to him as broken.
How does your family's eventual decision to leave Ahmedabad reflect broader patterns of displacement after communal violence?
I think in India we just haven’t developed a fuller, more nuanced understanding of what conflict migration does to people, to families, to children. It’s ironic because our land witnessed one of the most large-scale and traumatic migration events due to political and communal violence—the Partition. It’s still very much a remembered history as those survivors are amongst us. And we’re also still paying for it on both sides as relatively young “democratic” nations, unable to fully wrestle with what co-existence and secularism can look like, when those wounds remain so alive and urgent. I think what turned out to be a miracle for me personally, is that we fled this violence and went south. Our whole experience of being Indian and Muslim overnight transformed from something so terrifying to something soothing, something perhaps even beautiful. We were indeed lucky because we were offered the gift of escape and the ability to blossom elsewhere in soil that loved us, recognized us as its own. I think I retained some of that childlike hope because when I went south and grew up there, I met and was raised by people who started to represent my idea of India—this more generous, magnanimous place which absorbs and expands and makes home for everyone.
How has writing this memoir affected your relationship with trauma? Twenty-two years down the line, what still triggers you the most?
It’s the simple things. Slamming doors, the sounds of feet rushing in or out the door, the smell of incense, dying flowers. I’ve learned to bring grief as a friend along with me, instead of something that haunts or follows me. I’ve had the luxury to tend to my grief in ways that many who have had to live next door to the people who slaughtered their families will never have. And my privilege has been one of education, class, and caste. It allowed me an escape. So much of what I feel on a daily basis, as we continue to be traumatized with daily stories of lynchings or when I read about how Muslims live in squalid ghettos around Ahmedabad now, is survivor’s guilt. I still marvel at the difference the distance from that ground zero of our hate made to our upbringing. My sister and I also often marvel at how Indian humor is one of our defining graces. My mother says “Alhamdullilah, at least we still laugh!” All three of us have these loud, booming ways in which we laugh. It feels like a gift we keep giving ourselves.
As someone who now lives in the US, how do you view the parallels between Islamophobia in South Asia and the West?
I’ve been in the US now to see Donald Trump as its president twice. And both times, I’ve seen the most “liberal, progressive” Americans immediately rush to pin all of America’s anti-Islam biases on him and his followers, as if this country has not killed more than seven million Arabs and Muslims over 30 years now. I’ve also observed this country now in the past 14 months, watched liberal, progressive friends hand-wringing and then turning away from a genocide their own government is funding and abetting.
I’ve watched them spin themselves these elaborate webs of logic fallacies to deny that their peculiar brand of anti-Islamic bias comes from a deeper, much older colonial, supremacist European fear. You have to only watch Dune to see how much of a mystery Muslims and Islam still are for a majority of Americans. In India, it’s the opposite. The Islamophobia here is a more learned, force-fed bias. Because our understanding of Islam—and here I am trying to speak as a person of the same ethnicity as other Indians—is much more cellular. Not only does Islam have deep and rich roots in South Asia, we’re in many ways the birthplace of a very specific way of Islam, something that grew in conversation with everything else that pre-existed here. There’s nuance, complication, richness, violence too, but also so much beauty—and I see it as a shared legacy in the way that other theological histories of this land are part of mine. This is why I keep returning to this idea of generosity. We were not these people, who saw each other as subjects to colonize, and lands to annex into a bigger military project. Our Islamophobia is a weird mashup outcome of heavy-handed globalization and when the time comes, convenient forgetting.
Your book has got an overwhelming response across the world. It was recently listed by TIME as among 100 must read books of 2024. How do you and your family take in the recognition coming your way?
We thank whatever forces of good rescued us that first time, and whatever continues to watch over us. I wouldn’t be here without that greater light something out there is shining on me. This story exists because an inherent kindness continues to run through humanity despite our proven propensity towards genocide and nihilism. The small acts of mercy that line up to make a life like mine are all I can wish for everyone else facing much worse in the world today. I’m often told on tour that my story is a warning for the world. That its timing, the way it speaks to this moment across the globe is serendipitous. But I don’t think I’m saying anything new, there is no great revelation. My family and I are simply grateful that we’re able to join a larger chorus of voices urging those who are still silent to be braver, especially when times get darker. All our children are counting on it.
Zeyad Masroor Khan is a freelance journalist and author of City on Fire: A Boyhood in Aligarh.
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