Q&A with Zara Chowdhary, author of “The Lucky Ones”
“How do you count your dead when the dying happens on the run? How do you account for them when there is only so much you can pick up? Only so much you can carry?”
These are just some of the many interrogations that haunt Zara Chowdhary’s The Lucky Ones, her debut memoir that was released earlier this summer. Part coming of age story and part historical document, The Lucky Ones examines the aftermath of the 2002 Sabarmati Express train fire in Gujarat, India, which killed 60 Hindu right-wing volunteers and was quickly pinned on the country’s Muslim minority as an “act of terror” they committed.
Living in the city of Ahmedabad, Chowdhary, who was 16 at the time, and her family, became just a few of the five million Indian Muslims whose lives were upended by the incredibly violent post-fire massacres—killings that Chowdhary asserts were a genocide. Overnight, their Hindu neighbors, along with complete strangers, descended upon their home, bloodthirsty and intent on revenge.
In heartbreakingly beautiful and measured prose, Chowdhary writes with definitive clarity about the injustice her people faced, and seeks to carve out a story of a history erased, a pain systematically disappeared. With deep mastery for conveying the interiority of herself and others, she charts the lives of her family as they move through the harrowing terrain of a country and world that has not only turned their backs against them, but actively seeks their demise.
While C-8 Jasmine—the segregated Muslim apartment complex in which she lived—is the vantage point from which Chowdhary witnesses Ahmedabad crumble beneath her, transformed by mob and curfew into a place of danger and hatred, it is through the process of deep introspection and grappling with her past that Chowdhary emerges a young woman from the city’s ashes. With its pains and triumphs, The Lucky Ones is immediately recognizable to anyone who has been on the receiving end of deeply ingrained and systemic discrimination, and tries to define themselves amidst and beyond it.
Chowdhary sat down for a Q&A with Madison365’s Rodlyn-mae Banting to discuss her book. She is a featured author at this year’s Wisconsin Book Festival Fall Celebration (October 17-20).
RB: Throughout your book, you repeatedly call the mobs and killings that followed the train fire a genocide, which is not how national and international memory remembers it—in fact, they’ve tried to bury its aftermath. This reminded me of a line in Solmaz Sharif’s poem “Look,” where she writes, “It matters what you call a thing.” What are you aiming to do in telling this story and asserting that it was, in fact, a genocide against your people?
ZC: The inspiration, and I think a lot of the strength [it took] to write this book, comes from a lot of Holocaust literature that I studied very intentionally in graduate school. And in the process of doing that, I was taken through all of these descriptions and definitions of what is a pogrom, what is ethnic cleansing, what constitutes a genocide. And something that felt very clear to me from the start was this question of intentionality. What is it that the mob intends to do or the state mechanism intends to do? If the intention is the psychological, emotional, or physical decimation of a people, then you know that there is a clear intent of genocide. Genocide is often so misquoted and misunderstood because of the way that the Holocaust looms largest in our understanding that we think, unless it’s that scale and it’s that industrialized approach, it’s not genocide. We don’t recognize that in a lot of societies of this world, there have been—even since the Holocaust—many instances of this intention to an entire population, to erase them culturally, to decimate them economically, to target women through gross sexual violence. All of these many different stages constitute a genocide. And because [I’ve lived through] the slower steps of dehumanizing, segregating, [and] cutting off relationships between groups, and then the actual act of killing and massacring people, there’s no doubt in my mind that this was genocide.
When you’ve seen and felt every stage of that unfold, you might not have the language for it when it happens to you. But many years later now, when I started to study and see what happened in Bosnia, or I understand what is happening in Gaza, I’m able to see those many different ways in which genocide plays out. I recognize that there isn’t any one scale or one way to say “this is genocide,” but there’s a clear playbook, and once you understand that playbook, it makes it clearer what to name something. 
RB: Early on in the book, you tell stories of other people who were murdered by the mobs with great detail and empathy. How did you come to those stories and what was your process of embodying them?
ZC: So the folks that I eventually chose to center in the book were people who I could draw parallels with, but were not fully exactly like me. It was this test of the limits of my own empathy to be able to [say], “Well, yes, I see my grandfather or shades of my grandfather in the figure of Ahsan Jafri,” but [he] was also so much more than that and so different from [how] I grew up around and the experiences I had. So how do I understand this man and the big sacrifice that his life eventually became?
Similarly, with Bilkis Bano, I think that thread of motherhood [was] very taught and very important for me to tug at because this was a book that was examining my mother. But at the same time, I have become a mother in the process of [writing] this book. So I had that thread that helped me unravel and really look at [Bilks’] story. But she’s had such a different life experience to mine: We were divided by caste and class. We’re divided by urban and rural. So often, we tend to look at people in these two-dimensional, sort of photographic ways. If you type Bilkis Bano into Google, you will see a middle-aged woman outside a court or in these interviews looking numb in many ways. And so then it becomes that leap of imagination, of asking yourself, when this woman was 19, she was barely a woman. You know what that feels like [to be 19]. Those are ways in which I had to tear open stories and examine what was inside it. Because when people are made into survivors and witnesses, they tend to lose their layers and they tend to flatten their identity.
RB: You wrote this project in the company of other writer friends who were also working on their own memoirs. What did it mean to have this writer community as you revisited your trauma and underwent the book-writing process?
ZC: I mean, this book has seen so many different communities because I started it in an MFA program, and those three years were really formative to the manuscript. That’s where it really started to take shape. But for me, it’s all of those groups that really sat down with the story. And it was people who were poets, who were looking at it line by line and seeing what I was trying to do with language. It was friends of mine who were strong fiction [and] mystery writers [who could see] that there was drive and propulsion. It was all of these different folks who came in, but also just people who held me through it, who made me a cup of tea and brought me some lavender to sleep when I wouldn’t be able to sleep for days.
In the pandemic years—because that’s when I did a bulk of the shaping of the manuscript and shaping it for an American audience—one of the main groups that I became part of was with Tessa Hulls and Margaret Juhae Lee, who are both memoirists. And it was that year and a half of all three of us being agented, going to market, trying to sell these books, trying to figure out [our proposals]. It’s such a time of insecurity, right? And yet, in this room, when we sat together, there was no room for insecurity. There was just room for expressing the deep guilt we felt or the rage we felt. These two women really helped me through that whole journey [of who I want to be] as a writer, and how much I wanted to push the story, push myself, put myself out there, and also what was okay to hold back and what was okay to keep. They just gave me so much permission in so many ways. It was liberating to be in community with them.
RB: In reading The Lucky Ones, I found the figure of your father to be one of the most complicated portraits you paint—amidst descriptions of his failures to be your family’s “strongman,” are also flashes of tenderness shown to you, your sister, and your mother, as well as anecdotes of his alcoholism and depression. How did you navigate writing this honest depiction of him? Of any your family members?
ZC: This idea of the strongman, in a political sense, is so powerful right now. Across the globe, we’re seeing strongmen rise out of the electorate and societies seem to be drawn towards them, and we seem to want them. I constantly joke about how I think America has daddy issues. In writing my father, I think that was really what I ended up confronting. I ended up realizing why we have, as individuals and as a society, [are drawn] towards these men who we think are going to offer us some greater sense of safety than what we can already carry within us, what we can already have if we just formed our own communities. It was that little child inside me, that 8-year-old, that 10-year-old, that 15-year-old girl who was constantly looking for this man to stand up for her and for her mom. In confronting that, I felt like I cracked open the appeal of someone like Modi, and that became the spine of the story. For me, the fact that what was patriarchy at the dinner table became fascism on the streets—that similarity suddenly felt so potent that I felt driven to weave that in and see how that works on the page.
RB: So much of your girlhood and adolescence was shaped by the train fire and its violent aftermath. At the center, I felt, was this knowing that you were being persecuted and hated for your religion, and at times, hiding your Muslim faith was the only thing that kept you safe. How has this shaped your relationship with your religion today?
ZC: My relationship with Islam has been, as you’d say on Facebook, complicated. It’s gone up and down through the many different phases of my life. If I had to think of the years before 2002, I was very much a tentative Muslim in that I wanted acceptance, for instance, from my Yemini friend, who was more pious. I wanted that kind of validation and acceptance.
But on the other hand, it always felt [to me] like organized, conservative religion was always demanding extra submission from me as a girl than it was from [everyone else] and I wasn’t sure where I fit in that kind of organized religion growing up. I think what happened with 2002— and which was perhaps the experience for a lot of people who grew up here under 911—is that your identity as a Muslim gets so sharply outlined. Everything else you are, and this amazing complicated being that you are, just gets minimized and distilled down to that. You could have all of these different ways in which you are expressing yourself and your life in the world, [but people always ask], “But what about Islam?” So you are constantly defending a thing that you perhaps don’t fully understand, even. And that became very true to our experience as well, for my sister and I in those immediate months.
I think because we left [Ahmedabad], we had the space to breathe and renegotiate our relationship with [Islam], and find our own quiet and refuge to reestablish that tie. I think that made all the difference for someone like me, because then I found home in Islam. I found a place in Islam for someone like me who has multiple facets to her personality, and who is not the textbook good Muslim girl. And I think ever since that, if anything, I felt faith to be a very strong presence in my life, because it’s the thing that brings me back to the sense of gratitude.
RB: There are so many stories in your book about women in your family whom you admire, namely your Amma and Phupu, whose lives were shaped by patriarchy in different ways. Both of them, though, found ways to resist the oppressive forces in their lives. How did they influence your views of feminism, whether in India or in the US?
ZC: I think the difference is not between India and the US. I think sometimes the difference can be generational, because I do think in my generation, I’m seeing a lot more solidarity and less of this sense of there’s room for only one voice at the table, which was very real for women from our mothers’ generations or our grandmothers’ generations. When I think about women like Phupu or my Amma, my Dadi or my Nani, these are all women who dealt with ideas of widowhood, divorce, [and questions like], “What does it mean to have an early marriage and not really know what life outside of it is like? What does it mean to have a career and be a single mother, and then what does it mean to be the queen bee in the house and know that the men listen to you and you’re the matriarch, and that all the fortune of the other women in the house are tied to what you think and what you say to the men? These are very different explorations that I was able to make into feminist thinking, and how sometimes it gets warped and becomes patriarchy, but we still think it’s feminism.
It became really interesting for me to also interrogate what I have been conditioned to think of as a strong woman or an independent woman, because as I was first writing, I remember writing my Phupu with this more heroic flair and looking down at my mother and feeling that she was always more submissive and didn’t stand up for herself. I had to really closely examine those biases that were built into me, and what it was that I was angry about, and how much of that was fair. Doing that more intimate examination really showed me that we do judge ourselves and each other so much more harshly than we ever judge the men or than we ever blame men.
RB: Throughout the book, you chart the very acute hatred spurred by the train fire alongside the protracted, lifelong hatred and discrimination your father faced as a Muslim man working in the Indian government. What do you hope to impart on your readers about hate, especially amidst Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and an election year where one party is actively endorsing hatred of all kinds?
ZC: It’s strange that this book has come out now, and yet it doesn’t feel at all abnormal. It doesn’t feel jarring in some ways. I think what led to me writing this book at this point are some of the same factors that have brought us to this point as humans. There has been a slow-burning violence and this global shift towards lesser and lesser tolerance. And when I think about tolerance, I think of how this message was imbibed in us in India through Gandhi and through our freedom movement of secular tolerance towards each other, of unity and diversity. And yet, in just the last 30 years of my life, I’ve seen this steady move towards hegemony and towards one group wanting authoritarian rule over everybody else. And I think that those anxieties, the same anxieties that have led to this book, are the anxieties that have led to this fire globally. The climate emergency is at our door, and there is so much urgency and anxiety there. We’re not sure how to deal with it. We don’t know what to do. There’s not one unified voice that’ll help us get past it or mitigate it. So there’s even more room now for distraction, and there’s even more room for noise.
[In the pandemic], the whole world had a communal experience where we were all feeling our own mortality and we were feeling fragile, and we were feeling this intense fear. At the same time, we also felt this deep care for wanting this to go away so that everybody can be okay. It felt like suddenly everybody realized how hard it would be if [the basic delights of life] went away forever. And to think that less than three years later, we’re in an active, ongoing genocide, and we’re not finding it in ourselves to say stop? That dissonance is something I’m really sitting with right now. I think a lot of what writers and artists are creating right now is a response to that anxiety that we all know and we feel that maybe as a human species, we’re moving more and more towards this desensitized future where we don’t have the tools anymore to empathize. Those tools have been stolen from us.
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