Review: The Lucky Ones, by Zara Choudhary

His father’s anger was further aggravated by his drinking. The superficial arrogance of his widowed grandmother, irritated by his weakening circumstances, had turned to bitter malice. His fiery aunt – a respected economics professor – and cousin had moved to the shiny new town across the river, but returned to the old town during the riots. Chowdhury writes, “Being aware of one’s minority status leads to an understanding of the ghetto. It is a place that constantly protects you, even as every day it threatens to kill you from the inside.” At first family feuds would often begin with her aunt scoffing “at the rest of us for not leaving the ghetto” – and somehow “always ended at Amma, the minority they could all unite with and blame for their misfortune.” As the daughters of an “outsider, a daughter-in-law”, Chaudhary and her sister felt like “second-class” citizens and “were supposed to stay where they were, in a small kitchen in the old city, with the window jammed and pigeons messing around outside.”

lucky people It is primarily an account of the Gujarat riots. It starts with the news of Godhra train burning. Ahmedabad has a long history of communal violence, but in February 2002 there was a feeling that “something has ended. Something has changed. A new land and a new people are reborn in the fire.” Gujarat burned for three months, and Chaudhary writes that her family, neighbors and acquaintances are living in fear, with reports of rising death tolls, hate speech and arson and attacks. She, a teenager preparing for her board exams, learned to differentiate herself. As she heard from the balcony the clanging of swords, the shouting, the angry mobs in the streets, she began practicing every night “to allow my mind to float upward and look away from my body, believing that if I could detach well enough, I wouldn’t feel anything. I wouldn’t even remember it.”

She writes about living in terror, about policemen coming to the gate, about grim news, about seeing news that seems too terrible to be true and about rumors that are credible because it is a time when the worst is happening. She writes that the food was running out and her mother was preparing a single potato for two meals for eight people. And the kindness of his Hindu school teacher, the wife of a senior police officer, who called to ask about him – and sent a police car loaded with fresh produce. She writes about wondering why her Hindu friends did not call to check on her – until at the end of three months, one of them, who knew nothing about the plight of Chaudhary and other Muslims, called. These sections include profiles and stories of victims, survivors, and perpetrators of violence. And as harrowing as parts of the book are, it is written with such gentle elegance, it almost feels as if Choudhary is holding your hand and she leads you through the lives and horrors of Ehsaan Jafri, Bilquis Bano, Farzana… and through the lesser-known tragedies of the “lucky ones”, families like theirs who came out of the genocide physically unscathed, even if completely broken.

Reviews for lucky people Focuses on the story of a young ordinary girl living during the Gujarat riots. In some, comparisons have been made to Anne Frank. But it is very easy to make this equivalence. Chaudhary’s memoir is less a testimony and more a political investigation of the process of shrinking and becoming smaller in the face of discrimination and violence. While documenting the persecution of Muslims, she shows how the family, as the smallest unit of society, reflects the structure and values ​​of the state – diversity, differences and all.

In the Chaudhary family, like modern India, an odd and often quarrelsome union of cultures and geographies, “Grandfather is from Punjab in the north. Grandmother is Gujarati. Amma’s mother is from the mango coast of western India. Her deceased father is from the south. We blame diversity for the unrest. Lots of stories in conflict with each other, no shared language.”

Chaudhary goes back and forth in time, uncovering her family’s stories and tongues – showing how “Chaudhary” or Desai or Shah or Patel” and a million other surnames can be Muslim – something that always baffles people and is exhausting to explain to them – “In South Asia, we didn’t all arrive yesterday on a camel; we have assimilated regionally and socially over the millennia and have become linguistic, aural, culturally Indian Hindus. are as diverse as religions.”

Chaudhary’s grandfather, his grandfather, belonged to a family of Punjabi landlords from Gurdaspur. His mother, a young widow, resisting offers of remarriage and other attempts by men to gain control of her land, set fire to her own fields, shouting that she would rather burn the world than hand over her children’s inheritance. “In Punjab it does not matter whether you are Hindu, Muslim or Sikh. All that matters is that you are ready to sacrifice your life for your land.”

But his grandfather did not want anything to do with the land. He fled to Bombay and was studying to become a civil servant when his mother decided to move to Pakistan during partition. The idea was unimaginable to him; He considered himself an intrinsic part of secular India and so he remained. In the 1950s, he was posted in Ahmedabad, where he fell in love with the daughter of a retired Gujarati magistrate of the British era and married her. The couple became part of Ahmedabad’s elite class – they lived in a posh area, he was up for promotion, she drove a Corvette while smoking cigarettes, they waltzed.

So, when his aged mother wrote to him – “Even Lord Rama returned from his exile after 14 years. I have not seen you in 21 years” – he agreed to travel with his family. But the timing couldn’t have been worse. His visit to Pakistan fueled gossip, which was further compounded by the 1971 war a few years later. He was never promoted again, remaining Assistant Sales Tax Commissioner until his retirement. His wife, accustomed to a good life, could not recover from this shock.

In the 1970s, he and a Hindu friend, both of whom were senior officials in government services, “post-Partition people were hoping that their secular and cosmopolitan spirit would rain down on these muddy shores” and built Khanpur’s housing society, Jasmine, in which his family lived, as a cosmopolitan haven. “Secularism and pluralism were not distant constitutional values… they constituted names on the nameboard… by the elevator.” This didn’t work. Chaudhary’s father hoped the world would treat them the same way it had treated them—but by then “other young people, with half their privilege and twice the hunger, were joining the workforce,” Chaudhary writes. Dinner-time conversations during his childhood often included the teasing and jabs he faced at the Gujarat Electricity Board – a colleague calling him a “descendant of Taimur Lang” or someone asking when he was going to Pakistan. She writes that this daily harassment continued for two decades until she took early voluntary retirement.

Chaudhary writes about how politics dissolves into the personal and poisons it even more. If the world of his father and grandmother had not been cruel, would they have been a little kinder?

what makes lucky people An extraordinary memoir, apart from its literary merits, the astonishing beauty of its sentences is that even though it has the potential to speak to millions of people, it is a book that only Zara Choudhury could have written. 150,000 Muslim people were displaced after the riots. Chaudhary, her mother and sister moved to Madras where the girls learned they could be openly Muslim, which showed them an India they “knew only from a distance. Our shoulders relax. Our smiles widen. We begin to say our names out loud again.”

Now, she writes, “When it feels like my motherland is abandoning me, telling me I am not hers, she is not mine, and my soul wants to cry like an orphan child. I remind myself that my best mother has entrusted me with belonging: my Amma.”

Saudamini Jain is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.