Book Review | A Gujarat riot survivor’s sharp-eyed memoir

Weeks before The Lucky Ones: A Memoir by Zara Chowdhary was due to release in India, I downloaded its international edition in case the Indian edition was stalled.

The book, after all, is written by a survivor of the rabid violence against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, a woman who was then a teenager trapped with her family in a flat on the wrong side — the Muslim side — of the Sabarmati River in Ahmedabad. And documents and other media related to what happened there more than 22 years ago tend to vanish.

But the book is here now. And all that has been forgotten or erased about that time is presented to readers with sharp-eyed clarity.

At 16, Chowdhary believed she was prepared to face the fallout of the burning of the railway carriages at Godhra in February 2002. She had already been through several Hindu-Muslim riots in her short life, and she knew the drill. But no one was prepared in the least for the hellfire that rained on the Muslim community of Gujarat over the next few weeks, when it seemed not only to Indians all over the nation and abroad, but even to countries all over the world, that a genocide was in progress.

Stuck at home, expecting her building complex to be targeted at any time, Chowdhary spent her time trying to get a grip on her fear and anger and navigate the many fault lines within her family. So this book written years later could well have been depressing in the extreme.

Strangely though, it is not.

Instead, The Lucky Ones is heartbreaking, and compassionate, told in the voice of a survivor rather than a victim and moreover, a person who thinks hard and digs deep. While relating the stories of people and places whose names are embedded in our memories — Bilkis Bano, the Best Bakery, Ahsan Jafri, among others — Chowdhary also writes of Suresh, one of the many the foot soldiers of the violence, of why her father turned to drink, of how her mother was so easily suppressed, of what made the humans surrounding her so very human.

I had not expected this when I started The Lucky Ones. In fact, when I downloaded the book, I had already been filled with hatred for the human species, myself included, for having such tiny, closed minds despite being gifted by nature with physically large brains. By the time I finished the book however, my rage had dissipated. If Zara Chowdhary, who has lived through hell, can get through the rest of her life without carrying hatred, how can I do otherwise?

The Lucky Ones: A Memoir

By Zara Chowdhary

Context Westland

pp. 300; Rs 699