‘The Lucky Ones’ by Zara Chowdhary is a survivor’s account of a dehumanising tragedy
In 1950, Saadat Hasan Manto, the man who gave voice to the traumatic realities of Partition, wrote thus: “The partition of the country and the changes that followed left feelings of revolt in me... when I sat down to write, I found my thoughts scattered. Though I tried hard, I could not separate India from Pakistan and Pakistan from India... my mind could not resolve the question: what country did we belong to now, India or Pakistan?”
In 2002, a young Zara Chowdhary likewise wonders about the two Ahmedabads, the two Gujarats and the two Indias that she confronts as everyday realities. She is 16, living with her family in a Muslim enclave in Ahmedabad and waiting to give her board exams when life takes a shocking turn. As communal riots rage across Gujarat, Zara, her family and other residents of their apartment complex live under the shadow of fear. ‘The Lucky Ones’ is a survivor’s account of those three months under siege as a paralysing terror grips the ghettoised community at Jasmine Apartments. The divide was always there, as 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.” And when that divide finally alchemises into one of the worst-ever pogroms witnessed in Independent India, the author realises that something has been eviscerated in the land of Gandhi: “A new land and a new people reborn in fire.”
The narrative, which is part memoir, part reportage and part history, gives a visceral insight into the build-up of mobs and bestial violence that follows, the tacit understandings and cover-ups and the irreducible fact that the cycle of hate and unbelonging will continue to play out. She writes: “We know the voice of the mob now. We heard it rise from the riverbed just last week. Those wave-like shouts, not very different from how a cricket stadium erupts when India beats Pakistan. Except that our riverbed was shouting for our blood.”
Chowdhary skilfully weaves a personal history of being Muslim along with a rather turbulent national history, where the embers of a bloody Partition are yet to die and where majoritarianism has become an in-your-face accepted reality. The memoir also reveals the social pressures of growing up as a Muslim and doubly the patriarchal conservatism that one must encounter, growing up as a woman. She writes about the mythical miyas, those Muslim tropes reduced from bad Bollywood films and hate-fuelling WhatsApp groups — the exotic old-world nawabs, the barbaric Pathans, the qawwali-singing fakirs and the ultimate trope, the butcher. She writes about the emboldening of pre-existing biases and the humiliation and taunts her father faces in his government workplace. She writes brilliantly about the festivals, Uttarayan and Navratri, where the Chowdhary household wholeheartedly partakes in the fun and revelry. And when, much later in life, she is asked about her Hindu-sounding surname, of having to tirelessly explain that “we didn’t all arrive yesterday on camelback” and how Indian Muslims have assimilated “regionally and socially over millennia and are as diverse linguistically, aurally, culturally as Indian Hinduism”.
‘The Lucky Ones’ is the story of the ones who bore witness to a dehumanising tragedy and managed to transcend that. It is a story of resilience and reaffirmation of one’s identity and the faith that love will eventually triumph, as will justice. Chowdhary’s idea of India and being an Indian Muslim is handed down through “blood, land and spirit ancestors, through teachers who taught us and strangers who saved us, gave us a code to live by: the pursuit of justice at all costs”. Her uprising, she asserts in the epilogue, “is to keep this story writ into history, no matter how much erasure stamps over it”.
— The writer is a contributor based in Bengaluru
