‘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...

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