Twelve years after her father’s death, 32-year-old Zara Chowdhary wrote a poem, not addressed to her Papa, but about him. More of a rattling of chains and less of a cry against ‘the men who trouble papa at work’ and thereby put their home in a state of perennial crisis, she writes of Zaheer Chowdhary, a Gujrat government employee in Ahmedabad, a believer “in the system” even as it failed him, and whose impotent rage spilled at the dining table almost daily and devoured his family. This was a family already bleeding and aflame, when a train caught fire 128 kilometres from their city in 2002.
Gujrat, 2002, brings to mind the burning train at Godhra full of karsevaks returning home from Ayodhya. It also brings to mind the burnt flesh of Ahsan Jafri, a former parliamentarian, among the 35 other residents of Gulbarg Society killed in a pogrom, not too far from Jasmine apartments, where the Chowdharys lived.
After 2002, Chowdhary left Ahmedabad and made Chennai her home; she now lives in the US with her family. Her memoir, The Lucky Ones (Context), the winner of the 2025 Shakti Bhatt Prize, is a story of witness; of being warred upon by the family and the state; of migration and a putting down of roots as well as of uprooting, from the point of view of the exiled; of women’s solidarities inside the home when its centre does not hold.
There is, however, nothing more disturbing when a work of literature tries to be the reader’s conscience. Chowdhary’s book, while being most focused on the study of the self, her family and city’s past to stand, as she says, on “softer ground”, is most of all a dare. Are there things a writer can own up to as having seen and felt, which s/he can put before a public, a king, or the most powerful men of their lands? The Lucky Ones has attempted to do that.
Excerpts from a conversation with the author:
Did the process of writing The Lucky Ones start with the prose poem? And what made you begin a book on 2002 with your mother’s disappearance for a few hours from home?
Yes, the short poem embedded almost midway in the book, was a moment of discovery for me. Poetry has always been that unlocking. When I wrote about these invisible men who “troubled my papa at work” I was suddenly writing in the voice of the child me, and in that voice I found a direct throughline from the destructive violence of daily workplace discrimination against a Muslim or a marginalised citizen to the father who would come home to drink, and then the violence made more potent by patriarchy, would spill on his family. The book, starting with a mother missing and her daughters feeling bereft, felt like the punch one needs to carve into a bigger story of the constant trepidation in our lives, external and internal.
What are the images of 2002 you still carry with you?
I see my father’s loneliness. I don’t think I realised at the time how helpless it must have felt to be a lion of a human, this big looming persona, this person with a booming laugh, this ability to look through the world with piercing judgement, and then to feel so reduced to a dispensable body— the state he had served, didn’t want him, his family looked at him for a saviour he couldn’t be, and then the pogrom brings this impossible scale of brutality that he has no way to save us from.
For years now, I’ve constructed a very deliberate habit for myself -- to focus on those who did show agency. The women in our home, and also every person who came after. The teachers who protected me and offered my voice their guidance and shaping; the family friends in Chennai, who let us heal in silence, held us in tenderness; the girls from our apartment, we grew up with—we will always be each other’s witnesses. But no one more than my mother, who constantly offered forgiveness to our resentful young minds as a grace.
Why have you closed the eyes in the photographs with tape?
A poet friend once told me she doesn't let people take her pictures because she feels the camera steals a part of your soul. If our eyes are mirrors to the worlds we contain beyond this one story, I am experimenting with ways now to collect what remains of our story outside the world's glare.
Where is home for you now? Have you taken your child or immediate family to Ahmedabad?
I think as a young person I gave up on the city, and on the state as a mechanism to protect my broken spirit. It felt wasteful to pine for a place where both governance and the citizenry seemed to see you as second class. The sense of betrayal from people I went to school with, or family friends, who’d seen us grow up, was so strong that for many years if I met someone from Gujarat, I’d feign having no connection or knowing nothing. I was from Chennai; that became my identity.
Then in 2012, I happened to visit Ahmedabad very briefly for a workshop. And it was destabilising, to see how quickly I crumbled into my old self, the one that knew where the best mutton samosas were, the one, who could predict the masjid that would appear as the autorickshaw rounded a particular corner, the one who felt uneasy in a hotel room, on the swankier/wrong side of the river from the home she'd always known. Places live in our bones. And that trip reminded me, my bones carry my dada's Punjab, my mother's Chennai, my Nani's Ratnagiri, my nana's Afghan blood, but also my bones carry Gujarat.
Why did you wait for so many years to write this? Was it just 2002 or you needed other dust to settle down?
This was the one story I never wanted to write. I wrote this book as an exploration of the people and places that made me this person–– who even in 2025, even under the daily onslaught of witnessing how people, who share my religious identity, continue to be marginalised, continues to hold hope for her country. This propensity for hope doesn't come from a singular strength of character but from a community that has always answered calls for resistance in the Indian context.
In 2020, I saw young Muslim scholars and speakers like Umar, Gulfisha, Sharjeel, Afreen and others channel that hopefulness. And I saw our ability through a deep understanding of the revolutionary roots of our literature to spark a wider societal awareness, to offer grounded forms of resistance. This has been the contribution of the Indian Muslim in every generation of this country's history. From Wali Gujarati, Ghalib and Khusrau, to Rashid Jahan, Sajjad Zahir and Faiz, to Ehsan Jafri, Banu Mushtaq, Sahir Ludhianvi, Ismat, Kaifi..., this is not a new legacy. I was simply writing within that legacy with more confidence and belonging, recognising these voices as my scaffolding.
Why did you feel the need to designate some people in your book as a Hindu aunty, or Hindu teacher or a Muslim uncle?
Because when you write for an American reader [the book was first submitted to an American publisher] they are looking at us as a homogenous blob of brown-skinned people. The nuance of our contentions makes very little sense in their world. We are, unfortunately, entering a place as a society where we aren't allowed to simply be that “5th floor wale aunty” or that “nukkad pe khade ande wale chacha”. And so, I guess, our literature is being forced to mimic those historical changes.
Has writing this book helped you attain closure in any way?
Our world is rotating on the hurriedly sutured wounds of the oppressed. And wounds cannot be tended by words, they need justice, and action. At most, literature can provide a momentary reprieve. But the work remains to be done on the streets and inside our homes.
What are you working on next?
I am going back to my first love, to fiction. Writing The Lucky Ones sharpened away any unnecessary wrestling I used to do with the truth. I'm going back to fiction a little more fearless.