Book review of “The Lucky Ones” by Zara Chowdhary

What began as an attack on a train carrying Hindu pilgrims home from a religious ceremony escalated into a retaliatory attack against the state’s large Muslim minority. In what is now known simply as the Gujarat riots, hundreds if not thousands of families were attacked, hunted down and killed by vigilantes. Months of lockdowns and curfews followed. There was widespread international criticism, much of it directed at the leadership of the state’s then-chief minister, Modi. Journalists and human rights observers accused his Hindu nationalist government of failing to intervene and tolerating—and, some suspected, even colluding with—the attackers. Modi was acquitted of all charges, but the taint of that moment has only grown with time, as the BJP’s national rise has been accompanied by new outbreaks of violence and hatred.

The Lucky Ones is the new memoir by Indian Muslim writer Zara Chowdhary, who hid as a teenager in Gujarat during the riots. Where the sterile language of news reports falls short, Chowdhary’s memoir fills in the gaps with a powerful testimony delivered with exacting and unsparing subjectivity. Unlike those hunted, raped and murdered during those months, Chowdhary is one of the “lucky ones,” and her Muslim memoir is the song of her survivors. As a writer, she is a keen student of Anne Frank, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Marjane Satrapi – memoirists whose groundbreaking works are masterpieces of political and national history. Chowdhary deftly weaves the rise of right-wing politics with the rude awakening and pain of entering womanhood alongside her beloved sister. Textiles and fabrics – an ode to the Muslim weavers and craft traditions she loves deeply – become a recurring motif. Even the book’s cover features two young women peering through a tear in a piece of patterned Indian fabric.

The story takes place largely on an eighth-floor balcony overlooking the city of Ahmedabad, in the apartment where Zara and her family are trapped for months. In deliberate echoes of Holocaust narratives, Chowdhary, shutting herself in the flimsy walls of her small house, is haunted by what happens to those less fortunate than her. The balcony of the complex, called Jasmine Apartments, becomes both an architectural interstitial space between the inside and outside of the house and a literary symbol from which the adult Chowdhary can occupy a space to relive her past life. She writes, “A thousand invisible fingers point at our balcony from every direction, millions of eyes turn to where Muslims across the state sit huddled in their homes. It doesn’t matter that evening that this land we all stand on is Gandhi’s land. Something has been disemboweled. Something has changed. A new land and a new people reborn in fire.”

The author now lives and teaches in Wisconsin. The book is a sharp critique of Modi’s India, but also a requiem and reclamation of her family’s secular India, which included – and can still include – a wide range of people. That former life was interconnected across class, caste and religion, with Hindu deities dancing alongside Sufi songs and civil servants dedicated to the nation-state and ignoring the call of tribalism. Chowdhary’s professional background in film and advertising is reflected in the powerful and flickering scenes that punctuate the narrative. There are brief and powerful evocations of sensory memories and the melancholy of a home and country left behind. There is a palpable love for the culture and language in which Chowdhary grew up, as she describes the nostalgic scent of neighborhood flowers and her mother’s food. But a seething and understandable political anger also permeates the memoir, which seeks both catharsis and a kind of literary retribution. By writing into the void where erasure and degradation once reigned, Chowdhary revives the lost dignity of her family’s Indian Muslims and ensures that they are recognized as citizens.

Like many contemporary memoirs that break easy linearity or the conclusive, final release of redemption narratives, “The Lucky Ones” is a book without easy answers or easy hope. The structure of its short chapters is intentionally fragmentary and discursive, as unpredictable and ponderous as memory itself. The reading experience can be disorienting, but throughout the book I had the profound feeling that I was in the hands of a writer in control of what she wanted to express—who held firmly to the idea that if journalism tells the reader what happened, it is literature that reveals how it felt. This debut is a testament to the power of literature to do what other forms of language and commentary cannot, and turn its readers into a tribe of lucky ones.

Bilal Qureshi is a cultural writer and radio journalist.