THE LUCKY ONES

An elegantly rendered debut memoir of a Muslim family living through widespread religious violence.

As Chowdhary recounts, her extended middle-class family was essentially trapped in their apartment in the Muslim “ghetto” of Ahmadabad for many weeks following the horrendous train burning that killed Hindu passengers at Godhra on Feb. 27, 2002. The then-little-known chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, inflamed the violence by calling it an “Islamic terrorist attack,” and, as the author writes, “the next day raging Hindu mobs, formed by thousands of people, poured into Gujarat’s streets, in cities, villages, and towns, looting, raping, and burning alive the state’s Muslim citizens. The massacre continued for three months.” At the time, Chowdhary was 16, hoping soon to take her end-of-year exams. Instead, she was forced to navigate unimaginable terror outside her home, as well as the familial tension building inside their apartment, involving her mother, Amma, a soldier’s daughter from Madras; Papa, a hard-drinking retired government clerk; and his critical mother, Dadi. The author describes how she was understandably protective of her mother, the dark-skinned outsider whom Papa and Dadi often blamed for their misfortunes. Chowdhary establishes the sense of foreboding immediately: “Our home believed in many things but not its daughters.” The author sensed that the delicate balance among the neighbors of different religions living “cheek by jowl” in the city had been irreparably ruptured by the violence, in which Modi was blamed for being complicit. “It doesn’t matter this evening that this land we all stand on is the land of Gandhi,” she writes near the beginning of this memorable book. “Something has been eviscerated. Something has changed. A new land and a new people reborn in fire.”

A tight, suspenseful narrative that interweaves one girl’s keen observations of family within India’s problematic history.