‘The Lucky Ones’: Zara Chowdhary’s memoir dredges up one family’s memories of the Gujarat riots

There was a point around halfway through The Lucky Ones where I was reminded suddenly of a book of a totally different genre – Andre Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name. The latter was a work of fiction, a romance novel set in 1980s Italy. The Lucky Ones is set in Gujarat in the early 2000s, and one will never stop wishing it was fiction, but it is a memoir.

The commonality between the two that struck me was the way they take their time to dwell, meditate even, on a strand of emotion that forms the core of the entire work – eschewing the usual pillar of both novels and memoirs, which is, well, plot. There is, of course, a catalyst of an event: the arrival of the beautiful and mysterious stranger, the burning of the train bogey at the Godhra station.

Because Call Me By Your Name is all different shades of desire, and The Lucky Ones is about terror through and through.

From the inside looking out

But Chowdhary’s memoir is not from the point of view of one (directly) brutalised by the mobs. She witnesses many of the most infamous moments of the genocide – the gang rape of Bilkis Bano, the killing of Ehsan Jafri – through the television, the newspaper, and, years after the actual incidents, through other retrospective reports and survivor’s accounts. The memoir is a deep dive into the thousand-square-foot apartment in a dilapidated building in Gujarat, where she and her family were quarantined – for lack of a better word – while communal violence blazed through the state.

In less skilled hands this book would have been a kind of textbook-esque laundry list of tragedies, or, worse, a repetitive account that should have been an article and not a book. The Lucky Ones is, in reality, an account of the experience of Islamophobia and patriarchy from the inside looking out; the months after the burning of the train act as a fulcrum, the climax that lights up so many red herrings and instances of foreshadowing in hindsight.

Chowdhary’s point of view is that of the average person occupying that everyday position of being neither totally exposed to the violence, nor completely shielded from it. She draws us into the fetid stagnance in that flat, day after day, the way it is both turbulent and cyclical during the riots, the way no relationship is left unmuddied by the psychological toll it takes on a person: the knowledge that her Hindu school friends cannot be called in the middle of the night should the mob arrive at the Chowdhary house because their parents have long since decided that her family is “simply not worth it”.

The writer touches on moments months or years before and after the genocide without losing track of her thread: the politics of piety in her Muslim friend group, for instance, the way a girl who was at the top of the food chain one day by virtue of her Arabic authenticity loses that status overnight in the wake of 9/11, which is seen by Chowdhary’s Indian Muslim circle as an act of betrayal by Arabic Muslims against the others. Literally speaking, the title refers to the lucky few among the dead whose graves are touched by flowers meant for a nearby shrine, but it is obvious that it also acknowledges the macabre fact that Chowdhary and her family, for all they went through, are in fact the lucky ones.

It’s an easy book to lose your place in, for two reasons.

The tropes and narrative devices

First, the structure is not really a linear narrative – we pause not only to skip ahead to the future but also for asides describing particular characters and places, not all of which really touch on the events of 2002. In the acknowledgements Chowdhary mentions that the project started as a collection of essays written over her MFA programme, which does explain the structure a little bit – it’s more like a large room than a corridor. But then, is it possible to write about a thing like this another way? And Chowdhary takes advantage of the movement, to reflect, to view the events from the perspective of both a teenager and an adult; in the case of the events of the riots this is usually to make a point about all the ways both the State and Hindu majoritarian society failed – worse than failed, colluded, conspired against – the Muslim community in 2002. The greatest beneficiary of this device is her father, who goes from deadbeat drunk coward to deadbeat drunk shrewd strategist. I know we’re only seeing her perspective, but she really is quite fair.

The second reason: so many different points in it are near-identical. Perhaps a leftover from the earlier essay-collection format, characters (narrator included) come to and voice some ideas over and over. Look, this intersection between craft and subject seems unavoidably sticky. I have no doubt that one can criticise the depiction of an event no matter what the nature of that event is, and that undermining one cannot be conflated with undermining the other.

That said, in this case, I can concede that in the case of The Lucky Ones, it does come down to the reader a little bit whether aspects like this are bugs – cases of the editor dropping the ball – or features. They’re experiencing a kind of cabin fever, after all. Of course, they find themselves confined mentally too, running on a hamster wheel of thoughts after a point. All I have to say about it is that the hamster wheel is not something the narrative itself highlights or even appears aware of; it does not read like this is a point Chowdhary is trying to make. Yes, it would have been possible for her to do so in a way that wasn’t heavy-handed or artificial.

To flip this question a little: that there are elements of this book that appear clichéd is a foregone conclusion; it can’t be any other way, because the violence that it is talking about does not happen in very many ways. Instead, The Lucky Ones stands testament to the argument that trite is not mutually inclusive with bad writing or a dull story. All the well-worn tropes and narrative devices of both the memoir/personal essay and the Conflict Book – elements that I had read countless times already, that I thought were the reason I had lost my taste for both – are ones that Chowdhary invokes again, in total earnestness, with neither apology nor self-consciousness. A lot of the time, she was right in betting that I would be moved.

The quality of the writing helps. Granted, Chowdhary’s subject is inherently horrific, but that is not the only reason the book lands the way it does. Her chapters are studded with lines that are both interesting thoughts and beautifully executed – “In Hinduism, fire is a means by which physical life transforms into something more eternal…mukti, they call it. Freedom. In Islam, to have been touched by fire is to know Allah’s wrath. Azaab, they call it. Hellfire.” In a striking book full of striking subject matter – in a conversation that began before 2002 and doesn’t seem to have an end in sight – Chowdhary’s way with words remains her greatest asset.

The Lucky Ones: A Memoir, Zara Chowdhary, Westland.