On the evening of 27th February 2002, sixteen year-old Zara would anxiously wait for her mother to come back from the market as she gets to know that a train full of karsevaks from Ayodhya has been burnt in Godhra. She has lived in Ahmedabad long enough to know that there will be consequences, however, unaware of the scale. Over the course of the next three months, she will be confined to her apartment in Khanpur, the Muslim-majority eastern side of Sabarmati, watching smoke rising from burnt bodies and houses from her balcony. She would watch the news of Muslims being slain and stabbed by swords. She will tremble with fear as policemen approach her building, as she knows they have been complicit in the massacre.
She would know of Ehsan Jafri who was burnt with other family members in his home in Gulbarga society. She would hear of Bilkis Bano, a pregnant Muslim woman who was raped by twelve men while fleeing with her family members when a Hindu mob attacked her home in Randhikpur. She will know that the mob murdered fourteen of Bano’s family members, including her two-year old daughter by smashing her head on a rock.
Sixteen year old Zara is not a stranger to violence. She has been seeing her father drinking his whiskey every night regurgitating the taunts and mocks his non-Muslim colleagues threw at him. She will attend her board exams, three months later, practising Ame Parsi chiye, ‘We are Parsis’ to camouflage her Muslim identity. She would eventually move to Chennai from Ahmedabad and many other places, carrying Ahmedabad and its wounds wherever she goes.
Twenty-two years later, Zara Chowdhary will write a memoir of her life and that of her family during those three months and several others preceding them. She will name it “The Lucky Ones”, indicative of the survival her family made, while the unlucky ones made into numbers in government records and eventually into unmarked graves.
Writing a review for this book is an exercise in vain. How do you ‘review’ a person’s account of witnessing a pogrom? How do you evaluate their memory and check the authenticity? How do you applaud them for their use of language when it was used to write an account of pain? How do you critique the structure of the writing while knowing that the author had to relive the trauma to put it into pen and paper?
However, the violence outside is not the only thing the book speaks about. While the smoke was rising outside, her home, in Zara’s words has been “quaking for years”. Throughout the book, we see an eldest child thrown into a dysfunctional family, watching her mother getting crumbled at her father’s hands, and her father at the fate of life. We also see her grieving her grandfather, reminiscing the family he lost decades before Zara was born. The balcony of her apartment was often her only refuge, the place where her grandfather used to stand after offering his morning prayers until it started being the viewpoint of the horrors outside.
Zara Chowdhary does not write this book with the expertise of a grown academician – sixteen year old Zara torn between the blood and tears both inside and outside is very present. This often makes one wonder – first, how does a sixteen year old understand and conceive the reality of a genocide? How do they accept the fact that there is always a threat out there? Secondly, how does the situation inside and outside her home interplay? Which one bothers her the most? This opens to very humane dialogue on people’s lives in the face of destruction. When the accounts of the genocide in Gujarat restricted itself to numbers and data, “The Lucky Ones” opens up a lived reality – a reality only survivors like the author can talk about.
How do you explain the genocide to others?
When asked what was her motive behind writing the book, author Zara Chowdhary told Maktoob that it was because of the “constant sullenness” she felt. Soon after the pogrom, Zara along with her mother and sister leaves for Madras, her mother’s hometown. She equates this migration to the one Prophet Muhammed took to Medina, with Madras becoming her Medina, where “the ocean and the people embraced our broken hearts and made us whole again”. Even if she finds refuge in the sea, was she able to forget Sabarmati and its ashes? In the same conversation with Maktoob, she adds that even though she demarcated her life as before and after 2002, she carried the “sullenness” throughout, adding that “when you tear something beautiful, there always remains a hole, even if you try to stitch it together”.
However, while reading the book, the emotions transgressed were not only of sullenness and pain, but also of a sense of belonging and assertion. She writes, “From the ashes of 2002 and of my family’s slow demise, I found fragments of belonging and memory, as assertion of who we were and how we had always belonged” – a sense of ownership of the experience she went through. While Zara narrates the account two decades later, the wound remains still afresh, bleeding out of every page. However, the blood bears witness to her binding with Ahmedabad – a place from where she had to flee, a place where her family built a home and lived their life.
But the question still persists – how do you explain the genocide to others? How do you explain getting confined to your home with the thought of sworded men lurking in the streets? How do you explain this fear to people like Zara’s friend Aisha, who calls her after the exams for a movie, claiming that “there’s been no curfew for months”?
The book replies this through its sense of defiance – it is not an attempt to convince the readers of the author’s pain, it is an open invitation to understand and ally. Whether stood by or not, the memory will live on, questioning the false sense of stability.
Memories in the face of a disaster
The pogrom of Gujarat is not one that went undocumented. There are survivor accounts, (discrepant?) administrative data and reports of multiple non-governmental organisations. Yet, Chowdhary’s memoir turns itself into a piece of work that cannot be left out in the pursuit of knowing and understanding the pogrom that unfolded in 2002. Through bringing in the history of her family and that of the city, she points out that the pogrom was not a standalone incident – it had been brewing for long, through microaggressions and everyday discriminations.
She talks about how her grandfather was denied a promotion after the indo-Pak war of 1971, how her father’s colleagues would “casually” ask him when he was moving to Pakistan, how they transferred him unnecessarily. In fact, the seed of this memoir was a poem the author wrote about her father titled “To the men who trouble Papa at work”, eventually turning into the slower violence in her family and finally the book. She shares how her fifth-grade math teacher threw her workbook after learning she was Muslim, saying “good for nothing”. Later, when she narrates how a crowd of ten thousand armed with swords, tridents and bombs attacks a madrassa in Bhavnagar during the pogrom, she writes, “centuries of hate had built like sediment in the blood of Gujarat’s Hindus, that now they were ready to spill the blood of four hundred innocent children”.
Yet, for Zara and her sister Misba, the discrimination was however was not just outside their homes. They were “the daughters of an outsider” she writes, a woman who was “dark in complexion, a woman who couldn’t speak Gujarati, who came from the South with its funny languages and customs, and, most important, a girl who brought no dowry”. There is this constant coming back and forth of these two arenas – the bloodshed outside and the turmoil inside apartment C8, which often becomes an extension of one another.
Of Time and Place
The memoir is not structured in a linear fashion, there is no specific structure of events. She has written them in fragments, uncharted as a recollection yet clear as a nightmare. The period of three months of the pogrom is narrated through history – history of saints that lived in Khanpur, of mosques and bridges, her grandfather’s estranged family in Gurdaspur, the celebration of Uttarayan – everything bears witness to the imminent carnage. When asked why she chose such a style, she replied that it was the way through which the readers could understand the “texture and life of people”.
The premise itself becomes the story – with the Chowdharys in the eighth floor, Gulshan – the househelp who lives in the slum across the river, Zara’s friend Mana and her mother and sisters downstairs, with Mrs Pant, Hussain Bhai and Amal, Jasmine Apartments, her ancestral home which housed all of the above people becomes a site with a macabre yet keen familiarity.
Throughout the book, the story of Zara’s family unfolds like a continuous thread, weaving together personal and historical narratives of displacement, survival, and resilience. It begins with her grandfather’s running away from Gurdaspur and extends to Zara’s own return to Ahmedabad two decades after the pogrom. In tracing this journey, the memoir does not merely recount the horrors of a single event but maps a broader trajectory of loss and longing that spans generations.
Violence, in its many forms, remains a persistent force—sometimes erupting as large-scale communal carnage, at other times manifesting as the slow erosion of security and belonging. Its scale fluctuates, shifting between the overt brutality of mobs and the quieter, more insidious acts of discrimination – here, the one inflicted on Amma by her husband eventually poured out to Zara.
Whether in the structural barriers faced by her grandfather, the casual bigotry endured by her father, or the suffocating fear that defined Zara’s own adolescence, the memoir reveals how violence is not an isolated occurrence but a recurring presence—a warning and often a prediction.
The book is neither history nor storytelling, with narrations of displacement, loss and discrimination, “The Lucky Ones” persistently urges to see the pogrom with a sense of despair at the lives, an anger at the system and finally a sense of defiance – like how sixteen year old Zara did.
