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Review: The Lucky Ones by Zara Chowdhary
A memoir of growing up in a volatile home at a volatile time, this is a political enquiry into the process of shrinking in the face of discrimination and violence
“Where you grow up does not have to be who you become.” Zara Chowdhary’s mother would tell her and her sister. The girls were growing up in a volatile home, in a crumbling and steadily ghettoizing neighbourhood in Ahmedabad in the 1990s, a place then of only “casual intolerance.” The city had “slowly splintered” along two sides of the Sabarmati. “The Hindu side willing to leave us behind as it rushed westward into the new millennium. Simply being Muslim and navigating daily lives with the many labels — Pakistani, anti-national, miyas, mossis — was exhausting,” Chowdhary writes. Her acclaimed memoir The Lucky Ones, which was a finalist for the PEN America award in the nonfiction category this year and won the Shakti Bhatt prize 2025, is about a Muslim teenager coming of age during the 2002 riots in Gujarat. It’s a record of terror within and without. As the city burned, the Chowdharys were confined to their flat by the months’ long curfew. On the streets were murderous mobs. Indoors, the flat was alight with tempers and resentments.
Her father’s simmering rage was exacerbated by his drinking. Her widowed grandmother’s upper crust snobbery, ruffled by her diminished circumstances, had congealed into bitter spite. Her fiery aunt — a respected economics professor — and cousin had moved to the shiny new city across the river but rushed back to the old city during the riots. “To become aware of your minority status brings with it this understanding of the ghetto. It is a place that constantly saves you, even as every day it threatens to kill you on the inside,” Chowdhary writes. Previously the family’s fights would often start with her aunt scoffing “at the rest of us for not leaving the ghetto” — and somehow “always end at Amma, the minority they could all gang up and blame their misfortunes on.” As daughters of the “outsider, the daughter-in-law,” Chowdhary and her sister felt like “second-class” citizens and “belonged where she stood, in a tiny kitchen with its jammed window and pigeons shitting outside in the old city.”
The Lucky Ones is primarily an account of the Gujarat riots. It opens with news of the Godhra train burning. Ahmedabad had a long history of communal violence, but there was a sense then in February 2002 that “something has been eviscerated. Something has changed. A new land and a new people reborn in fire.” Gujarat burned for three months and Chowdhary writes of the dread her family, neighbours, acquaintances live with as the number of dead climbs, hate speeches and news of arson and attacks pour in. She, a teenager preparing for her board exams, taught herself to dissociate. As she heard, from the balcony, the clanging of swords, the shrieks, the angry mob on the streets, she began practising every night “to allow my mind to float out upward and look away from my body, believing that if I can detach well enough, I may not feel anything. I may not even remember it.”
She writes of living in terror, cops showing up at the gate, of grim tidings, of watching the news that sounds too dreadful to be true and of rumours that are believable because it’s a time when the worst is happening. She writes about food running out and her mother stretching a single potato for two meals for eight people. And the kindness of her Hindu schoolteacher, the wife of a senior police officer, who called to ask about them — and sent a police car full of fresh produce. She writes about wondering why her Hindu friends hadn’t called to check in on her — until, at the end of three months, one of them, seemingly clueless about the Chowdharys’ and other Muslims’ ordeal, calls. Interspersed within these sections are profiles and stories of victims, survivors and perpetrators of the violence. And harrowing as parts of the book are, its written with such gentle elegance, it almost feels as if Chowdhary is holding your hand as she takes you through the lives and horrors of Ehsan Jafri, Bilkis Bano, Farzana... and the less known tragedies of “the lucky ones,” families like hers who came out of the carnage physically unscathed, if completely shattered.
Reviews for The Lucky Ones have focused on the story of a young ordinary girl living through the Gujarat riots. In some, comparisons have been made to Anne Frank. But this is too facile an equivalence to be made. Chowdhary’s memoir is less testament, more political enquiry into the process of shrinking, of growing smaller, in the face of discrimination and violence. While documenting persecution of Muslims, she shows how family, which, as the smallest unit of society, reflects the structure and values of the state — diversity, differences and all.
Like modern India, a heterogenous and often bickering union of cultures and geographies, in the Chowdhary family, “Dada is from Punjab in the North. Dadi is Gujarati. Amma’s mother is from the mango coast of western India. Her dead father is from the South. We blame the diversity for the disturbance. Too many stories in collision with one another, no shared tongue.”
Chowdhary goes back and forth in time, paring out the stories and tongues of her family — showing how “Chowdhary” or Desai or Shah or Patel “and a million other surnames” can be Muslim — something that always baffled people and she found tiresome to explain — “in South Asia, we didn’t all arrive yesterday on camelback; we have assimilated regionally and socially over millennia and are as diverse linguistically, aurally, culturally as Indian Hinduism.”
Chowdhary’s grandfather, her Dada, came from a family of Punjabi zamindars in Gurdaspur. His mother, a young widow, fended off remarriage proposals and other attempts by men to gain control of her land, by setting her own fields on fire, yelling, declaring that she’d rather burn the world than hand over her children’s legacy. “In Punjab it doesn’t matter if you are Hindu, Muslim or Sikh. It matters only that you are willing to lay down your life for your land.”
But her Dada didn’t want anything to do with the land. He ran away to Bombay and was studying to become a civil servant when his mother decided to leave for Pakistan during Partition. The idea for him was unthinkable; he thought of himself as an intrinsic part of secular India, and so he remained. In the 1950s, he was posted in Ahmedabad where he fell in love with and married the daughter of a retired Gujarati British-era magistrate. The couple became a part of Ahmedabad elite — they lived in a posh neighbourhood, he was up for a promotion, she drove a Corvette smoking cigarettes, they did the waltz.
So, when his ageing mother wrote to him — “even Lord Ram returned from his exile after 14 years. I haven’t seen you in 21” — he agreed to visit with his family. But the timing couldn’t have been worse. His trip to Pakistan fuelled gossip, complicated further by the 1971 war that followed a couple of years later. He was never promoted again, remaining until the day he retired, assistant sales tax commissioner. His wife, accustomed to the finest life, could not recover from this setback.
In the 1970s, he and a Hindu friend, both senior officers in the government services, “post-Partition men hoping their secular and cosmopolitan spirit would rub off on these muddy banks” of Khanpur built Jasmine, the housing society in which the family lived, as a cosmopolitan haven. “Secularism and pluralism weren’t distant constitutional values... they constituted the very names on the... nameboard by the elevators.” This did not last. Chowdhary’s father expected the world to treat him like it had his father — but by then “other young men, with half his privilege and twice the hunger, were joining the workforce,” Chowdhary writes. Dinner time conversations, during her childhood, often consisted of the snipes and jabs he faced at the Gujarat Electricity Board — a colleague who called him “a descendant of Timur Lang” or another who asked when he was moving to Pakistan. This daily harassment, she writes, went on for two decades until he took voluntary retirement early.
Chowdhary writes of how the political seeps into the personal, poisoning it more. Would her father and grandmother have been just a little kinder if their world hadn’t turned cruel?
What makes The Lucky Ones an exceptional memoir, apart from its literary merits, the stunning beauty of its sentences, is that even as it has the capacity to speak to millions, this is a book only Zara Chowdhary could write. After the riots, 150,000 Muslims people were displaced. Chowdhary, her mother and sister moved to Madras where the girls discover they can openly be Muslim, which showed them an India they had “only known from a distance. Our shoulders relax. Our smiles widen. We start to say our names out loud again.”
Now, she writes, “when it feels like my motherland is forsaking me, telling me that I am not hers, she is not mine, and my soul wants to cry like an orphaned child. I remind myself that my belonging was bequeathed to me by the best of mothers: my amma.”
Saudamini Jain is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.
