MATCHBOX

There is great beauty, transformative, tender, and painful, that makes each one of us dissolve into the little girl that Anne Frank was – hiding in an attic and writing about her first crush. It brings home the story of the Jews in a holocaust because it shows us what an adolescent’s discovery of the world was like, as she had to hide her identity. The everydayness and the teen in us made this a universal and forever story.

We need to be in the company of such writing about a regular teenage life from Gujarat, so that it can be removed from the cesspit of victim narratives and from the voyeuristic hyper-nationalisms of rape, murders and collection of ghoulish stories that shut us down.

Zara Chowdhury’s story – The Lucky Ones (Context/Westland 2024, 295 pages, Rs. 699) is about being a teenager in the ghettoised neighbourhood of Khanpur in the city of Ahmedabad. It is about a young girl dealing with a pretty sibling, an independent single aunt, a controlling grandmother, and parents in a dysfunctional marriage, who is learning what it was like to be Muslim. What it was like to be a specific kind of middle-class Muslim whose father was educated in the United States but chose to return to Gujarat and join the public service, the Gujarat Electricity Board. To see her father’s idealism be broken over a twenty-year period of service, and become the target of an angry aspirational work force, for being a “whiskey chugging, American MBA-toting…alien ‘other,’ as Zara puts it. Men trained and drip-fed by the VHP and Bajrang Dal slowly turned on her father at his work place, turning his life into what she calls a “twenty-year purgatory,” at the end of which her father became an alcoholic, “bitter and yet strangely incorruptible till the day he died.”

What are the small parts of this incremental discovery that showed Zara she was different?

Not being able to live in a mixed neighbourhood was one. A two-year reprieve in Baroda was such a sharp contrast because Zara and her sisters lived a regular middle-class life with Hindu and Parsi friends.

Why did that window shrink, when in her head she was just the same as other middle-class English-speaking city-bred adolescents? What did it mean to take a board exam in April 2002, with a curfew, just after people in Muslim majority buildings and colonies were killed for being Muslim? How did she keep her nerves in writing a board exam while covering her name on her answer sheet with one hand, just in case the tilak-wearing examiner spotted her for her religion?

On a day when exams were postponed and Muslims in her building were scared to go out, glued to the news of others around them being killed, her neighbour called her to come and watch Kaun Banega Crorepati on TV. And Zara muses – “Who doesn’t Want to Be a Millionaire in the middle of their own genocide? …I put on my chappals and fly out the door.”

There is a riveting account of a rumour spreading that Hindu mobs were poisoning milk packets in Muslim neighbourhoods. Zara takes us through how ludicrous this sounded to her and to her family. And then how a sensible family with a barely religious father starts to panic – what if?

“Isn’t our milkman Muslim?” she asks. “No beta, he’s that Gujarati uncle from the chowk behind…she sees my stunned face and chortles, as if trying to wipe away my fear. I don’t want to judge this invisible man who has lived in Khanpur with us for so long.” Later in the narrative sequence, Zara explains – “It was probably not true – in fact, very likely untrue – that anyone would try to poison a whole neighbourhood through milk…But this is howe delicate the foundations of a community – a broken community – become.”

The personal as political is brought home in Zara’s memoir best when it shows us that the ghettoization and othering heightens other family tensions, bringing them to the forefront. No one comes into this world with a clean slate. So, a rising xenophobia feeds into domestic violence, women turning on women. Men taking out their being belittled on their wives. This is what takes families apart. When a husband throws a fit about eating potatoes again for dinner, and his wife goes out into the curfew with her maid, risking their lives, to bring back different vegetables. And their risk and triumph goes unnoticed by the man. “Kya hai yeh khana? Enough of this watered-down nonsense…” Zara’s father had said. So, her mother and the cook Gulshan made their way into the back alleys during the one-hour reprieve in the curfew, while Zara and her sisters prayed nervously, hoping their mother would get home safe. They return home, with a bagful of onions, ladies’ fingers, squash, tomatoes, a gas cylinder, triumphant and excited. “Amma’s face is shining with sweat as she watches Papa process the bounty she’s brought home. Not a word of thanks escapes Papa’s pursed lips. Not a word of acknowledgement for what the women have done while the man of the house lay in bed rereading Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. ‘Chalo, Abhi kuch achcha banao…the light dims in Amma’s eyes. Gulshan (the maid) sips on her water slowly till he leaves the kitchen. Then she puts her glass down and touches my mother’s arm. ‘Chhodo Bhabhi, Bhai aise-ich hain.’ ”

Yet, there are moments of triumph, of flying kites. Of painting nails and putting up posters of Leonardo di Caprio. Of dreaming of falling in love. Of dealing with the glass being shattered by the father when he is drunk, of standing by the mother. Of discovering that this is what it’s like to grow up. To live through the shattering realization that you will be like every other adolescent and also not. You will make it past the fear, you will come out alive, from the pogrom of 2002, partly for living in a mixed building with a non-Muslim name. Partly because you can escape to your mother’s maternal home in Chennai (then Madras). And also, there is a part of you that dies a little each day.

You never want to belong to Ahmedabad – the city you were born in and where your dreams are entombed by the ghetto you live in. Where you also had tenderness in your father making sure he drove you in his new car to your board exam centre, placing his hand on your forehead for one whole minute. And where your grandmother told you stories of her Anglophile upbringing, as an army officer’s daughter, smoking cigarettes, and dancing to ‘Haye haye malmal ka kurta, malmal ke kurte pe chheent laal laal.’

It is in the everyday story, that the blue-notes of growing up Muslim can make us feel, what `othering’ can do. If you start out seeing the `other’ as separate, as distinct, as a story where victimhood is foregrounded, then the story is in a sense, told even before it’s begun. Read ‘The Lucky Ones,’ to open up your own heart and mind. To the unfolding of a process. It’s full, it’s rich and it will stay with you like The Diary of Anne Frank.