'Places Live in Our Bones'

Zara Chowdhary's memoir on surviving the 2002 Gujarat carnage has recently won the 2025 Shakti Bhatt Prize. She tells TMS that though there are braver testimonies, her book provides a framework for the world to understand authoritarianism.

- PARAMITA GHOSH

Twelve years after her father's death, 32-year-old Zara Chowdhury wrote a poem, not addressed to her Papa, but about him. More of a rattling of chains and less of a cry against 'the men who trouble papa at work' and thereby put their home in a state of perennial crisis, she writes of Zaheer Chowdhary, a Gujarat government employee in Ahmedabad, a believer "in the system" even as it failed him, and whose impotent rage spilled at the dining table almost daily and devoured his family. This was a family already bleeding and aflame, when a train caught fire 128 kilometers from their city in 2002.

Gujarat, 2002, brings to mind the burning train at Godhra full of karsevaks returning home from Ayodhya. It also brings to mind the burnt flesh of Ahsan Jafri, a former parliamentarian, among the 35 other residents of Gulbarg Society killed in an act of hate in a pogrom, not too far from Jasmine apartments, where the Chowdharys lived. After 2002, Chowdhary left Ahmedabad and made Chennai her home; she now lives in the US with her family. Her memoir,