A memoir bearing witness to the 2002 Gujarat pogrom from the perspective of one who lived during and beyond the violent and traumatic events, The Lucky Ones archives the invasiveness of violence and its contamination of different aspects of a Muslim life. Recounting the experience of living in the midst of riots, Zara Chowdhary’s memoir is a story of how riots look from within the houses of those affected and what it means to have violence enter the bodies and tissues of a community.
The book begins with a walk-through of the social and political history of different cities, simultaneously exhuming the history of riots in the places that the narrator touches, particularly Ahmedabad and Ayodhya. It logs specific dates and times across all chapters, seeking to memorialize what could have been buried under state-sponsored narratives of violence. The historical archiving also tells us about the limits of journalism and how literature could possibly fill in the gaps between the two. Alongside her personal narratives, the memoir includes fact-finding reports and journalistic pieces; shows how the camera records what it sees and, by extension, journalism’s (un)recordability and its selectiveness that produces fractured and manufactured narratives. Even though the narrator remains an absent observer who admits to privileges and protections owing to her class, which makes her present yet absent from the theatre of violence, the memoir is a testimony to the micro-fears of the everyday life of being a Muslim.