Living and dying as 'second-class' citizens

Zara Chowdhary's memoir of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom is an invaluable portrait of the subcontinent's fractured past and present

- Somak Ghoshal

Zara Chowdhary's powerful debut, The Lucky Ones, is pitched as a memoir, but it is much more than a personal story. It is, rather, an exploration of the dark recesses of Indian society, a long perspective into the history of violence against minorities running across the subcontinent and, most poignantly, a shattering reminder of the bruised and battered world we live in.

While the focus of her narrative is on the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat following the burning of Sabarmati Express in Godhra, Chowdhary zooms in and out expertly to give us a telescopic view of the depredations of humanity. Fittingly, she begins with one fateful date on which her world, as a 16-year-old girl, turned upside down: 27 February 2002. That day, as it turns out, comes trailing a long history of upheavals, both cosmic and human.

On this date in 837 CE, Haley's comet is spotted by humans moving closest to Earth. In 1803, the Great Fire of Bombay burns down the city on the same day. A century later, in 1921, Fascists rise against communists in Italy, and in 1933, the Nazis and communists lock horns in Germany on 22 February.

These wounds of the past turned into scabs over time, picked at and prodded occasionally by disruptive forces, leaving their mark on the world at large. But the devastations of 2002 fester to this day, leaving deep gashes on the body politic of India from which the nation is far from recovered.

As trident-bearing mobs unleash unspeakable destruction on their Muslim neighbours, Chowdhary is months away from taking her board exams. Instead of revising hard for the first major trial of her life, her head is filled with names and events that have now become seared into our collective consciousness—Bilkis Bano, Best Bakery Case, Maya Kodnani, Haren Pandya and Ahsan Jafri, among others.

Like the concentric circles of hell, described by the Italian poet Dante in