Some Lucky Muslims in Modi’s Land

Book Review

Title: The Lucky Ones: A Memoir

Author: Zara Chowdhary

Publisher: Context – Westland Books, 2024

Pages: 309

At the beginning of Julian Barnes’s novel, The Sense of an Ending, history is described by a young student as “the lies of the victors.” His teacher reminds him that it could also be “the self-delusions of the defeated.” Later, as the young student grows up into a mature adult and sees more of life, he learns that history is “more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.”

Zara Chowdhary is a survivor – neither victor nor defeated – of the 2002 anti-Muslim Gujarat riots which she calls “genocide” many times in her book. She was a 16-year-old girl just about to complete her school when she and many others like her got trapped in the little worlds of their houses as murderous mobs went around entering the houses of Muslims, killing the men and raping the women, and perpetrating some most inhuman deeds such as ripping open the wombs of pregnant women…

The Gujarat riots of 2002 must be one of the darkest episodes in independent India’s history. It killed hundreds of Muslims, displaced thousands, and catapulted Narendra Modi as the Saviour of Hinduism. From the balcony of her eighth floor flat in Ahmedabad, Zara witnessed the depravity that her fellow humans were capable of hitting in the name of religion.

The book gives us Zara’s memories of what she witnessed and survived. The narrative is, in fact, a survivor’s song. If you are a 16-year-old girl caught in such a situation that could get you a knife in your belly any time after being raped by a whole mob of men, your memories can’t but be subjective. And that’s just what this memoir is: unapologetically subjective narrative.

It is not only the political system that turned against the writer and people like her. Right in the beginning of the book, we are told that “Our home believed in many things but not its daughters.” The writer’s family life wasn’t a happy one either. Her father, Zaheer, who was a clerk in the Gujarat Electricity Board, took voluntary retirement too early in life because he couldn’t put up with the discrimination he faced at his workplace on account of being a Muslim. He took to drinking and made life miserable at home for everyone.

Zaheer’s sister left her husband and came to live with her brother and family. She and her daughter contribute their share of wretchedness to the existing woes. Then there is Dadi (Zaheer’s mother) who bosses over everyone else. There is a cauldron of churning cultures too. Dadi came from an anglicised wealthy Gujarati family. Her husband was from a peasant family in Punjab. He died rather young, probably unable to endure his wife’s dominance. Zara’s mother was a Tamil, ten years younger to Zaheer. The Gujarati Dadi thought that the Tamil daughter-in-law was the cause of all problems at home, even that of the cancer that would eventually kill Zaheer.

Later, when Zara and her sister leave their apartment in Ahmadabad and go to live in Madras (Chennai today) with their mother who longed for some peace in life, life does turn pleasant. Madras’s “ocean and people embraced our broken hearts and made us whole again,” Chowdhary writes. It is a Hindu man named Rishi who helps them to start anew all over.

This book is an elegant poem, painful though it is. There is much violence and brutality in many of its pages. There are explicit references to Narendra Modi’s heartless rise in politics by making a whole community of people the quintessential ‘other’ in his state. Modi knows too well the importance of an inimical ‘other’ in the absence of which a people can turn inwards and create their own battles in the name of caste or rituals or “whose grandfather twirls prayer beads faster.”

However, Modi doesn’t dominate the book, mercifully. The book is not about the riots though they rage in the background almost all the while. The book is about human behaviour when a human-made catastrophe strikes a society. Catastrophes bring out not only the vultures in people but also the doves. We meet people of different types here thrown together on to a battleground by a political system whose head (the chief minister) asked a former MP (a Muslim) whether he was still alive, when he requested protection from the murderous mob that had assembled outside his house. (The MP was killed soon after that phone conversation.)

In the end, in spite of all the hatred and bloodshed, love survives and dominates the narrative. There are people who care. And they forge this country’s evolving greatness. They create the humour, the refuge, the magnanimity, humility, “ability to bend and absorb every shard of grief thrown its way, and from it to grow flowers, to make life.”

PS. Zara Chowdhary now teaches in the University of Wisconsin, USA.