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Journalism of Courage
‘But here this morning, I still believe the state. My family has always worked for this state. How can I not?” Imagine growing up in a family where your father has served the government; and one of your grandparents, the army. Imagine knowing and loving no other country but the one you were born in, a state that you were born in. Now, imagine everything you have loved and called your own turning against you. Imagine a horrible incident taking place several kilometres away and you being held responsible because you shared one thing in common
with the perpetrators — your faith.
In a riveting debut, The Lucky Ones, Zara Chowdhary makes us confront uncomfortable questions against the backdrop of the 2002 Gujarat riots. The book opens with the events of February 27, 2002, the day of the Godhra train burning. A sense of menace envelops the Chowdhary household on the top floor of a middle-class, mid-rise apartment building in Ahmedabad’s Khanpur.
The mother has been missing for two hours. While people being incommunicado for a couple of hours is normal — mobile phones are yet to become a permanent appendage — February 27, in Gujarat, was not a normal day. The mother returns after some time but you know that it will take a long, long time before normalcy returns to this home, and state, if at all.
Chowdhary is not your typical victim, in the sense that her family members were, as the title goes, The Lucky Ones; spared the worst that the riots threw up, although by a whisker. Despite that, it is a telling commentary on the state of affairs in Gujarat at the time — the crippling fear among the minorities, the apathy of the authorities, the fight to stay alive and the kindness of strangers piercing through like a single ray of sunlight from behind the darkest of clouds.
The book is written in an easy and engaging tone. Reading it is anything but. Turning each page is akin to revisiting every single act of horror that was reported at the time (Gulberg society massacre, Naroda Patiya case, Bilkis Bano case) but also learning about tragedies from different nooks and corners that never made it to the television bulletin — a family preparing for a wedding but now fending off an angry mob, residents of a slum gearing up to go down fighting. The description is graphic, enough to make you put down the book, take a moment and reflect. “How do you count the dead when the dying happens on the run…?”
But saying that the book is only about the riots would be incorrect. It is also the story of Gujarat. Its history, culture, Sufi saints, bureaucracy, bridges and the ever-growing chasm between old Ahmedabad and the new city. “But none of this happens in a day, does it?” says the author and you are drawn in. It is also the story of a family: an angst-filled teenaged girl in a household that has only one man but patriarchy in abundance; a mother who spreads herself thin to keep the family nourished but is never acknowledged; a man who suffers harassment and discrimination at work but thinks nothing of inflicting the same on his wife. It reminds you that the war with patriarchy doesn’t stop, even in the middle of riots.
Chowdhary’s way of writing makes the reader feel like they are right in the middle of the action — at the gleeful Garba night, at the adrenaline-infused patangbaazi session, in front of the television as each member of the household starts to fear the worst but won’t share with each other (“No sounds tonight. All of us are pretending to sleep”), peering through the French window to see what fresh hell the day has brought in its wake. Sitting “helpless in our homes waiting for the mob to find us…”
This is a shocking, numbing book that does not hold its punches but is also heartwarming and comforting when it narrates the little acts of joy snatched from the jaws of frenzy all around. And then through conversations in the family, you get principles to live your life by. “Where you grow up doesn’t have to be who you become”. This one deserves to be read in one go. And then, re-read.
