An Active Annihilation

Growing up in Ahmedabad, one of India’s fastest-growing cities in the early 2000s, Zara’s world ignited –both literally and figuratively.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
Cussing and loud noises terrify me even today. They make
me feel like I'm picking at a knot above my
skill level to untangle. Then I feel the knot in
the back of my neck, Then in my back I
touch them sometimes these knots and feel two thoughts spring
from them, as they did that night on the balcony.

(00:27):
One is a potent mix of fear and anger, wanting
the person who scares me to die, wishing to transfer
my pain to someone who deserves it in my churlish mind.
The other voice is Amas, calmly chanting in my years
for as long as it takes my breathing to return
to normal, for the not to release. Where you come

(00:49):
from does not have to be who you become.

Speaker 1 (00:57):
That's Zarah Chowdry, writer and lucky at the University of Wisconsin,
an author of the recent memoir The Lucky Ones. Zara's
is a story of a family's life lived at the
intersection of political upheaval, violence, racism, and one young woman's
courage and tenacity in the face of some very rough odds.

(01:20):
It's also a story of the enduring power of love.
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets

(01:42):
that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and the secrets we keep from ourselves.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
I grew up in the city called Ahmedabad, which is
the biggest city in the westernmost state of India called Gujad.
It's a state that borders Pakistan on one side and
then it has the Arabian Sea to the south. Now, Ahmadabad,
as the name suggests, was a city that was founded
by a Muslim sultanate, a Muslim sultan called Ahmed Shahbadsha.

(02:15):
And that's why it was a city that had these
foundations literally carved into rock. And I grew up in
the old part of the city across this river Sabermati
that ran north to south, and so the eastern part
of the city of Amdabad was all the old established

(02:35):
ways of the sultanate. Even as I grew up, you
could see the remains of the fort. There were these
incredible giant doors, really ornate and beautifully carved out of
stone and rock, from which traders and saints and armies
just marched in and out through the centuries. The space
was dotted with shrines Sufi shrines that we called Arghas masques.

(02:59):
And then within this over the centuries, life had just
sort of sprung and grown in this layered way. So
you had stores, and you had restaurants, and there was
the public school and then the little Jesuit convent schools
and homes that were of every shape and size, and
it was just this very sort of tightly knit and
close community that all flourished on one side of the river.

(03:23):
But as we went through the eighties and the nineties
and the early two thousands, and India I was about
sixty odd years from its foundation. From its founding, this
city started to grow westward and across the river towards
the horizon in some ways. And the folks that tended
to move that side were mostly the majority Hindo citizens

(03:47):
of the city. And so by the time I was
growing up in the city, which was in the nineties,
and Udabad was already one of the most segregated cities
in India. Now, I did not understand this word or
this language at the time, but I do remember the
feeling of our side of the city, the old sort
of ancient side growing into a kehetto, and the one

(04:08):
on the other side sort of springing and coming alive
in everything that modernity had to offer. So this was
an India that had just been liberalized economically, which meant
that there was a free market, and suddenly we had
important goods flooding in. And so one side of the
river started to chase after that, and in many ways

(04:29):
it almost felt like they were willing to leave us behind.
And so I grew up in this place that had
really parted along the lines of the river.

Speaker 1 (04:37):
That's fascinating. Did you know or sense as a child,
I don't imagine that you had the word ghetto. Did
you have the sense that there was this segregation or
did that come later?

Speaker 2 (04:52):
I think it became very obvious very early on that
we were the poorer side of the city, because that's
where the slums first established themselves along the river. And
what it meant then to live in these sort of
even more mixed societies right where you have those who
are working and living in the slum, those who live

(05:12):
in cooperative buildings, those who live in small tenement bungalows,
is that we're all kind of living cheek in general
in this way that is just tight and suffocating, And
so I might not have had the word ghetto at
the time, but I had the word slum. I had
the word narrow lanes and gullies, and so we were
very much defined by this very constrained geography.

Speaker 1 (05:36):
So in your home, this Jasmine apartment C eight, there
are quite a few people living in your family home,
which was usual right where extended families would live together.

Speaker 2 (05:48):
That's correct, yes, And the same sense of suffocation that
one could feel emanating from the outside was very much
how the household also built. We lived in this apartment building,
ten story stall. We were on the eighth floor. We
had what some would call a magnificent view of the
river and the city across and all the bridges across

(06:09):
of it. But inside the house there were three generations
again living in this tightly packed unit. There was my grandparents,
my dad's parents. There was my parents, and then my
dad's younger sister who was divorced and had moved in
with us with her only child. So her daughter, me
and then my younger sister, we were the three children

(06:30):
in the house. And then you had these three generations
that were all also similarly buying for their little piece
of the sky. They were all buying for space and
importance and clarity as to their roles. And so we
grew up in a place where it was on the
one hand, incredible to have just constant access to your grandparents, right,
and they're just bounds of history and wisdom. But at

(06:53):
the same time there's also biases, and there's constant pettiness,
and there's constant balancing of deep affection with dense jealousy
and envy.

Speaker 1 (07:05):
Tell me about Ama, your mother.

Speaker 2 (07:07):
So my mother, Roxana, who I call Ama, she came
from the southern part of India. She came from a
coastal city called Madras, which is we now call it Chene.
And she came from an army family. Her father was
a major in the Indian Army for all of his career,
and so she grew up almost this vagabond way where

(07:29):
they were moved around every two years. And so she
had lived everywhere from up in the Himaliyas and Kashmi
to down at the very end of India and Trivandrum
where you can just see the Bay of Bengal and
the Indian Ocean. From there, she had lived on the
Mango coast on the western side. She had lived in
the center of India where you got great oranges, and
so she had had this incredible rich life for the

(07:52):
first few years or early years where she had just
bounced around and met all these different cultures and languages
and foods and people in the army. But then she
also lost her father when she was thirteen, and that
changed the fortunes of her family. Her mother instantly sort
of crumbled under widowhood in a way that a lot

(08:13):
of women in India did, at least in that generation.
And she took on this burden on her very sort
of nimble shoulders at the time of becoming the face
of the family. And what that meant was that she
suddenly felt like the honor of the family, its pride,
its sense, and dignity all rested on her. That's a

(08:35):
huge burden for somebody who's twelve or thirteen to carry
on their shoulders. And she had decided at a very
early age that she was going to do everything the
right way, including go to college for a a sort
of checklist career that would just get her a good husband,
should marry into a good family, and that's how she

(08:56):
ended up meeting my father through a marriage proposal in India,
we had arranged marriages. A relative or a family friend
might introduce you to somebody that they think is a
good match for you. And so this was a relative
who knew this family in Ahmadabad, Gudrat, thousands of miles
away from where my mother was living in the south,
and they just happened to know them and thought that

(09:16):
they were incredibly suave and sort of you know, this
liberal educated Muslim family. Everybody served in the government. The
son had gone to America and had an MBA, and
he was tall and strapping and handsome, and my mom
was a very tall woman for Indian culture, and she
had been told growing up that this was not an advantage.

(09:37):
She was also dark for somebody in a culture that
really values light skinness, and so this became a burden
that she was already silently caring. And so when this
marriage proposal came of this fair, tall, handsome foreign educated
government servant, it seemed like the perfect match for someone
like her. My dad was the most quirky human that

(10:04):
I will ever know in my life. And it is
strange to say that now in retrospect, because at the time,
growing up in his shadow, it felt like my father
was a monster. My dad was the oldest child of
a public servant. His mother came from a sort of
almost aristocratic family in Amadabad who had sort of old

(10:27):
money and had a very wide social network, and so
he had grown up essentially with a silver spoon in
the fifties and sixties, which is many people think of
that as India's golden period in terms of, you know,
we had great cinema happening, There was so much social
upliftment for people. We had all these big projects going
on that were going to really transform the country. It

(10:49):
was a time of a lot of hope. And my
dad was growing up in that time, and he was
growing up with that silver spoon, knowing that as the
only son in the household, he could ask and he
would receive. He straight out of college and he wasn't
the brightest student his sister was, but he was offered
the opportunity to go study in America, and so he

(11:10):
comes to California in the seventies, has the time of
his life for three years and meets some incredible other
Indian students who are also here at the same time,
forges these friendships that last him for the rest of
his life. But he's also just not what's the word,
he's not practical enough in the way of thinking of

(11:31):
his future. He's thought that being here, being in America,
he's already set that this is it, and he's made it.
And he doesn't go back on time the way his
visa stipulated he had to. And so he's brought into
court in California and the judge gives him two options.
One that he was not going to be able to

(11:52):
come back to the US for at least a decade,
because that's usually how long those things last. The other
thing it really meant was that this star son, this
prince of the family, had terribly and desperately failed. He
was supposed to go there and make a name for
himself and do something, and everybody else was you know,
this was the time of that brain drained, the first

(12:13):
round of it, when all of our doctors and engineers
came to the US. He was supposed to be one
of them. And instead he comes back with his tail
between his legs and he's not sure if he's going
to ever be able to go abroad anywhere and establish
a life for himself. But also he didn't come from wealth.
He came from social status, but he didn't come from wealth.

(12:35):
And to come back to a father who was retiring,
who had just bought this apartment in Jasmine, had put
most of his retirement savings into his young son. This
also meant that he had failed that investment in many ways.
And so by the time I came along and our
life in the nineties sort of is the memory that

(12:55):
I have. This before time, from what I understand, became
really a time when that guilt and that shame became
weaponized against him in his own household, and he was
constantly reminded every time everybody drank and got tipsy and
then started to fight in the house. This was always
a story that came out the fact that they put

(13:16):
all their money in my dad, and my dad was
still back here, still working for the government, and that
nothing came out of that whole episode.

Speaker 1 (13:25):
When your parents met, was this something that your mother
sort of knew and signed on for or do you
think it became something that she came to realize. And
also how long were they married before you were born.

Speaker 2 (13:42):
They were married in nineteen eighty four and I was
born in nineteen eighty six. My mother also liked me,
and I guess before me really had pieced the story
together through these drunken outbursts in our household, because the
story she was told when the proposal came to her
was here as this wonderful man who's handsome and educated,

(14:04):
and he has a foreign degree and he's working in
the government. He will rise and will have job security.
This family seemed to have roots in this city. It's
a beautiful city with a great culture. You'll have a
wonderful life. And it's only when she moved to Amzabad
and she started to live within this household, and also

(14:24):
as she realized her place in the household, that she
really started to dig for this information and understand that
this man who was almost a decade older than her,
whom she had married because he looked so great on paper,
had all of these hidden failures and pockets of secrets
that nobody had bothered to tell her.

Speaker 1 (14:49):
Sarah and her younger sister Misha absorb a great deal
of tension in the close quarters of their very crowded home.

Speaker 2 (14:58):
So you know, looking back now, I had this memory
of always feeling just fear in my body, and not
just fear of people, but I used to feel fear
of the space of the apartment itself. I would not
want to go out into the balcony after dark. There
were certain darker corners of the house, but the light

(15:19):
from the lamp would just not reach, and I wouldn't
want to go in there. And I would just constantly
have these nightmares, if you know, all kinds of gnarly
things coming out of the walls to get me. It's
taken many years for me to look back at that
and realize that I was constantly feeling the tension of
the house. I knew, for instance, that at seven o'clock

(15:40):
my house transformed in the evening. And you know, you
would think that, oh, sundown in a Muslim household means
everybody will get together and pray their sundown prayers, their nammas,
and it's a time for piety in some ways, but
not in my household. In my household, the bottle opened
and my dad would start to pour himself a drink,
and then another and another, and my grandfather would drink

(16:02):
with him, and the women of the family would sit
around and it would all start with jovial chatting, and
then as my dad would drink more and more and
my grandfather would stop and try to slow him down.
Things would just get more belligerent, and I would see
my mom trying to sort of recede into the kitchen
and watch from there. We would usually be asked to

(16:23):
go into the bedroom and play there, but we would
know that voices are rising, temperatures are rising outside. At
some point, we would hear a plate crash into the wall,
or we'd hear somebody take off their slipper and throw
it across the room, and that's when we would know
things had been set on fire, that we're just now

(16:43):
in the middle of a terrible dinner, that we're all
going to have to sit and endure and eat and
swallow even when everybody's see them.

Speaker 1 (16:56):
In India, indeed across South Asia, families who are able
to send children to convent schools. Being educated in a
convent school brings with it a social status because it
usually means students will learn British English and know how
to comport themselves in society. For girls, this is particularly

(17:17):
the case. Coming out of a convent school means they'll
come out finished, polished in ways that make them valuable
for marriage. In fact, it is not uncommon for matrimonial
columns in Indian newspapers even today to refer to a
potential bride as fair, slim and convent educated. And so

(17:39):
it is a stroke of luck that Zara's family has
roots in Ahmedabad and three generations have been educated at
the only convent school in town.

Speaker 2 (17:49):
My grandmother, my dad's mother, my aunt, and then my
sister and I and my cousin, all of us had
studied in this one convent school of Montgomery and the
school was across the So each morning there would be
an auto rickshaw that would stop, drive up and stop
at the base of our building. You would run down,
get into it and it would go across the bridge
and take us to school. And so we would go

(18:11):
in this very packed auto rick show with you know,
little water services and bags hanging outside of it, and
it was all very funny even as we were doing
it as children. And then we would go to school
where you had all of these different classes of the
city and it was like watching a cross section of
our society, but in awkward teenage bodies and pre previous

(18:34):
and bodies and in great pinafore uniforms. So you had
the girls who came in the fancy sort of imported cars.
You had the click that came in the bus. You
had the ones whose parents dropped them off on a scooter,
and then you had us who came in the auto
rickshaw from the other side of town. And even how
we sat and ate at lunch was very clearly marked

(18:54):
by that class. And so as much as you would
think that, you know, going to school been an escape
for these kids, you know, they could go there and
just be themselves and have fun and run around, school
was also very clearly a place that was that had
this hierarchy of class. We didn't know this at the time,
but there was also hints of that sort of bigotry

(19:15):
towards minorities. Even within a convent, a Catholic institution, you
would have teachers who would sort of point you out
and say, oh, aren't you that Mazzi girl from a
cross down and Mazzi would be Muslim. But school was
still a place where we did the things that really
brought us joy to some degree. So I wrote from

(19:36):
when I was really young, and so I would just
stand up and read the things I wrote in class.
I was always the English teacher's better than nobody else's.
My sister loved to dance, and so she would just
break into dance in the hallways, and you know, the
teachers would point at her and be like, oh, that
kid needs to be on our stage at the end
of the year. So it was a place for us

(19:57):
to also show ourselves in a way that we just
be seen within our household. But school still had its
own sort of micro tensions, and we were working our
way through it and in a way that is not
unique to us. It's not a story that is only
this by and mind. It's the story of every single
human in South Asia who goes to this sort of

(20:18):
diverse and complicated school in a diverse and complicated society.

Speaker 1 (20:28):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
It's February twenty seventh, two thousand and two. Zara is sixteen.

(20:52):
In the nearby town of Gujarat, a train appears to
have been set on fire. There are many casualties. At
least fifty eight people have died. The state's chief minister,
Narendra Modi immediately labels this as an act of terror.
Remember where we are in time, February two thousand and two,

(21:15):
Just months after the attacks on the World Trade Center
on September eleventh, two thousand and one.

Speaker 2 (21:22):
To have grown up in India in the eighties and
nineties is to have known violence. There has been sectarian
violence and ethnic violence in sports throughout our nation's independent history.
And so even as I was four or five or
six growing up in Ambalabad, I remember for something as

(21:42):
silly as if, you know, India and Pakistan had a
cricket match and Pakistan won and India lost. Everybody would
get upset about it and then go out and burn
somebody's bike and you know, start burning tires. And so
for me to stand on the balcony of my building
and look down and see people burning things because they're
mad because of you know, cricket match was not unusual.

(22:03):
This was a place where children were already kind of
accustomed in some strange way to this sort of minimized
and normalized violence. But what happened in two thousand and
two is that there was a train coming into Gujrat
to a station close to Ahmadabad from a city in
central India called Ayodya. It's a city that people now

(22:26):
recognize because it's been back in the news for a
while with the resurgence of modin India. But Ayodya in
central India is known for a lot of Hindus in
their sort of mythological and faith imagination as the birthplace
of law Dram, who was one of the biggest deities
in the Hindu faith. In nineteen ninety two, a mob

(22:48):
of almost one hundred thousand Hindu religious workers slash volunteers
vigilantes had been brought there by the BJP, which is
the big Hindu right party in India and its many
affiliated parties, had brought this mob of one hundred thousand
angry people to a mosque that was in Ayudia, and

(23:11):
the mosque itself was about five hundred years old from
the Mughal dynasty. And they were so enraged because they
had been told the story for decades by the Hindu
right that this place used to be the birthplace of
Laudram and this mosque was built on it by desecrating
that holy place. And so this mob of one hundred

(23:32):
thousand charges at this building and with pick axes and
knives and stones and rocks and hammers, they bring this
whole ancient monument crashing down. And as they do it.
This new starts to spread across India, and this is
in the early nineties when we don't yet have live
news and live televisions, certainly no Internet. But it starts

(23:53):
to trickle down into cities like mine in Mderbagh, and
there's rioting, there's looting, there's burning in all of these places.
And yet for the decade after that, it was like
Indians did what we always did. We saw these bursts
of violence and then we found our way back to
peace and we said, you know what, we believe in secularism,

(24:15):
we believe in coexistence. We're going to make this work.
And so we had found this tenuous piece in a
place like Amedabad. But a lot of these folks who
had initially demolished the mosque and or who believed that
that's the place that Lordraam was born and they wanted
a temple there. They kept going back each year on
these quote unquote pilgrimages to au there. And one such

(24:39):
train of pilgrims was coming back to Ameddabad in two
thousand and two in February, and on the twenty seventh
of February, that train with the carriages that were carrying
these pilgrims caught fire. This was less than six months
after this language of terror and violence and terrorism had

(25:00):
very clearly and closely been attached to the identity of Muslims.
And while America might have done it with the radar
pointed at the Middle East, it really had this fluctuating
sort of rippling effect across the globe, including in communities
like mine and states like mine. And so when the
chief Minister, who sort of like the governor for our state,

(25:20):
goes to the site of this carnage just a few
hours after it's happened, there's been no forensic analysis, there
hasn't yet been a full investigation, and he simply calls
it an act of error. That phrase alone is enough
to activate the hate that has been simmering underneath all
of this for decades.

Speaker 1 (25:39):
So then in fairly short order it becomes clear that
the fires that you're seeing from your balcony are not
a minor thing. Word starts coming from all over the place,
from relatives in different parts of India that if you
are a Muslim, you are in danger.

Speaker 2 (25:59):
Right, And so that very evening of the twenty seventh
of February two thousand and two, we were all sitting
in our apartment, and my father was just pacing up
and down, actually waiting for my mom to come back
home from the bazaar. She would do this thing where
she would run off to the bazaar to go grab
a few things, but really it was her way of
getting away from the apartment and from all of us,

(26:19):
and she had been gone for almost three or four
hours at the time, and he was waiting for her
to come back home. What I didn't understand at the
time was that he was also waiting for her to
come back home because news of this train burning had
just broken out. Our usual protocol living on this side
of the city, in this ghetto was buy all your supplies,
talk up your fridge, make sure you have everything you

(26:40):
need so in case for the next two or three
days there's a curfew, there's a lockdown, You'll be fine.
You can survive, you can feed your family. And Yet,
when we sat down to ashually look at the news
that evening and my mom came back, and we realized
the gravity of what had happened, the fact that these
were religious pilgrims, that we lived in a state, whether

(27:02):
Hindu rites were in power, this language of terror was
already circulating, and there was news that the bodies of
these folks who had perished in the carnage were going
to be then paraded in a convoy across the state
and brought to Mzabad. We knew in our bones that
this was not going to be like any other violence
or any other spurt of rioting, that this was going

(27:25):
to be something bigger. And so the very next morning,
as I woke up in a city that was under curfew,
I knew that a curfew usually means nobody steps out.
There's usually shoot at side orders, or at least there's
police all around, and you can't step out to your street,
you can't go buy anything. The shops at close schools

(27:46):
are shut. And I remember walking out onto the balcony
of our apartment, and that balcony really was the place
room where I could see the whole city. And I
suddenly start to see these spirals of smoke across the
river but also on our side of the river. And
that's when I know that the burning has started, that

(28:09):
for sure, there are not only other people riding on
the street, but that this is very clearly now about
the Muslims, and it's about punishing the Muslims for the
thing that has been done to the dream.

Speaker 1 (28:26):
In a home already so full of simmering tension that
simmer comes to a boil as terror, violence, and fear encroaches.
By this point, Zara's grandfather has already passed away, so
he is not witnessed to this catastrophe. But their home
is as crowded and tense as always, and now they're
not just crowded, they're trapped under curfew, and all of

(28:51):
this at an especially tender time for Zara. She's just
about to take her board exams. In many ways, this
would have been her ticket out.

Speaker 2 (29:01):
It's so interesting that that year when this happens is
my tenth grade, and in the tenth grade in India,
you have to give these exams, these very big major
exams an end of yeer are called the boards, and
the boards essentially allow you to decide if you can
go into the sciences or the humanities, or hammer or whatever.
And so in many ways their career defining for us.

(29:22):
And there's a lot of pressure on these exams, and
for me, these exams were actually about to happen within
a week to ten days from that day when the
train burned, and so up till that day, I was
really with my nose deep inside textbooks, just waiting to
sort of memorize all of this and go give my
exams and you know, vomit it all out on an

(29:43):
exam paper somewhere and get some sort of decent grade,
get to the next level in my eleventh and twelve,
go off to college, just get the hell out of here. Instead,
what happens is now we're stuck in curfew. My aunt,
who had moved out to an apartment across the city,
move back in with her daughter, and with the boards

(30:04):
postponed indefinitely, no idea when they're going to happen, and
all of us just sort of waiting and holding our
breath each night. It becomes this atmosphere of knowing what
it feels like to be prey, to be hunted. And
it's striking to me to remember now that that's also

(30:25):
the year when we were actually taught about the Holocaust
in India. Just a year ago previous to this, my
history teacher had actually given me the Diary of Ann
Frank as a gift because she saw how I love
to write, and she saw how I was just so
involved in learning about what had happened to the Jews
in Germany and across Europe. And I remember, even through

(30:49):
those early days of the lockdown, sort of looking at
that copy of that book and lying in our living
room on a little couch there with that book, and
just not knowing how my life had suddenly become this weird,
strange parallel to what that young girl was feeling in

(31:09):
that Suddenly it felt like there was a microscope somewhere
and on a strip there were people like me that
were going to be studied and looked for because we
were looking and we were listening to these stories of
mobs rampaging the streets with lists in their hands, knowing
which homes are Muslims, which businesses are Muslim, who is

(31:30):
married to a Muslim, whose child is dating a Muslim,
and how they could go around nabbing exactly that person
they were looking for, in many cases really checking to
see their circumcised or not, and then burning them alive
on the street. So it became this way of understanding
that the way you look, the name, you carry, the

(31:51):
identity markers on you have already marked you as a target.
And to then just sit in this apartment with nowhere
to go, nowhere to run, and every few days to
hear these mobs of people trying to break into your neighborhood,
break through the police barrier, really just wanting to get
their hands on you. It was that sort of terror

(32:11):
that goes on to live in your bones.

Speaker 1 (32:14):
That period of time. How did it act upon your father,
your parents? There's a scenario in which that it could
have brought them closer together, where your father could have
been drinking less, or your grandmother could maybe have been nicer.
I mean, how did it act upon them during that

(32:35):
time when you were so completely trapped with them.

Speaker 2 (32:38):
There's this funny thing about how when somebody controls them
out of oxygen you can have, then everybody is going
to fight to breathe, right, And that's sort of how
it felt in that house, So like we were all
sort of fighting to breathe and live a little longer,
and sometimes fighting each other. And we had been doing
that for years in many ways, just sort of you know,

(33:01):
wanting to be seen in this household that didn't seem
to fully see anyone. But during the lockdown, it felt
like there was this both sides. On the one hand,
there was solidarity where all of us women, my aunt,
my cousin, my sister, my Moham, and I we would
just sort of get together on the bed in the

(33:22):
night and we would be massaging my aunt's feet she
had very close veins that were really painful, and laughing
and giggling and trying to feel better about our circumstances.
And then there would be other times where just because
we couldn't have enough milk in the house and my
dad couldn't have his full glass or his full cup
of chie or my grandmother couldn't have eggs the way

(33:43):
she wanted, that would just be uproar over breakfast. And
so that's kind of dissonance, you know, not recognizing that
you're in the middle of an active annihilation and you're
still kind of being petty and we're all picking on
each other in these ways. But despite that, I thinking
that there was this external force and this exterminating force

(34:04):
that was looking at us as just vermin as people
to be cleansed out of here. It did bring us
a sense of safety in just seeing other people around
us alive through those days. I think as much as
I had this history of really having a very antagonistic
relationship with my grandmother. She hated me, I hated her

(34:27):
for most of my growin years, and yet there would
be delight in just seeing her do the most basic
things every day. You know, she would wake up and
put curlors in her hair in front of the mirror
and hum a song and still wear her lovely chiffon, sorry,
and wear her string of pearls, and still sit even
within this massacre. And to see her do those basic

(34:49):
routine things on a daily basis. I remember watching her
sometimes in front of the mirror and saying, well, this
is what it feels like to be alive.

Speaker 1 (35:03):
We'll be right back. In April, curfew is slightly lifted

(35:29):
and the boards get announced again, but tensions are so high.
There's concern that this invitation to take the boards is
a trap and that Muslim students who show up will
be targets. But Zara is determined because her future depends
on performing well on these boards. Azara is contending with this.
She also overhears her mother on the telephone. She catches

(35:52):
something about Madras and realizes her mother is plotting her
own escape.

Speaker 2 (35:59):
So to understand the plot to escape, you actually have
to understand where my father was at this point. So
my father had come back from America in the eighties
after his big debacle and not taken up a job
in the Gujarat government in their electricity board, and he
very quickly understood that his Muslim identity was not really

(36:23):
welcome in this workplace. And throughout the years growing up
and through those evenings of watching him frustrated and sort
of given to alcoholism, the one thing we had understood
is that the electricity board when my father worked, was
a place that was perpetuating slow violence on this man.

(36:46):
That every day he came back from work diminished and
degraded and made to feel like a second class citizen
at his own workplace. And so just the year before
the violence broke out in two thousand and two, my
father had taken quote unquote voluntary retirement from the government.

(37:07):
Now there's a whole story to how much that arm
had been twisted to get him to take that voluntary
retirement and leave. But for a man who had had
twenty years in service in public service and who had
really thought that he was following in his father's footsteps,
he was doing the right thing. He was doing what
was expected of him. That was a blow that he

(37:31):
never recovered from. And so for almost a year before
the train even burned, I had watched my father just
take a shower every morning where his pajamas again, lie
down on the bed where my grandfather used to lie
before he died, and just watched the fans circling over him.
He was not a very religious man, so he didn't

(37:51):
know a lot of prayers and chants. But whatever little
he knew, he would just keep sort of repeating it
over and over like a children's rhyme. And this man,
who who had been so big and towering and frightful
for me when we were younger, was slowly just sort
of shrinking into this vegetable on this bed. And so
in two thousand and two, three months into the lockdown,

(38:15):
when we knew that the exams were happening not happening,
at some point they would announce them and we'd have
to I would have to go give them. My mom
had possibly just had enough, and she usually would not
dare to ask my father for a break. She would
not dare to ask my father for money, She would

(38:37):
not look at him or turn to him for any
kind of support, because that's how their marriage had sort
of rotten from the inside. But this spring, as the
violence outside grew, her brothers from the US called her
up and they tell her on the phone that her mom,
who has been living in America, is going to be visiting,

(38:59):
and that she will be in Madras for a few
months and that she would love to see the kids
in her And my mom doesn't tell us this. She
just quietly listens to them, takes in the news that
her mother is going to be visiting, and she's not
usually allowed to go see her mom. It's a contentious
topic in our house how much my mother is allowed

(39:22):
to travel by herself or go anywhere by herself. And
so she just comes to us one afternoon when Miss
buy and I are sitting there sort of just trying
to count down the days till my exams, and she's
holding the phone in her hand, and she's been on
the phone with somebody that works in the railway's department
and that is a family friend and can possibly help

(39:44):
us get tickets to Madras. And then I hear her
saying on the phone, yes, I only need three tickets,
which is astounding to me. The idea that this woman
would say three, and that means that my father is
not going, means that she is finally rebelling.

Speaker 1 (40:06):
And there's another seminal instance of words overheard that shapes
this period of time. Psara and her family.

Speaker 2 (40:15):
My father's mother who lived with us, really came into
her own as the monstrous matriarch. I mean, there's no
other kind of or simpler way to say it. And
I laugh as I say this, because somewhere I've made
her into this cartoon figure in my head to be
able to deal with who she was to us. But
with my grandfather passing away, it's sort of like every

(40:38):
chain that could have held her back, any sort of
civility that she could have had towards us, melted away.
And one day I walked past the living room and
I just overhear her telling my father that, oh, you know,
I heard Zarah told this relative of ours that she
would really like it if you and your wife and

(41:00):
that you've got a divorce, and my heart just sank.
This was a whole year before the riots and the
fires and everything, but this was also when my father
had just lost his job. He was already this man
who was broken and who was lying in bed each
day staring into nothingness. We were on the cusp of

(41:25):
going off to high school and college, and we had
just sort of found a way to remain in peace
with our father, To know that he was strange and
didn't know how to show us his affection fully, that
he was just not happy with the way his life was,
and this is all we could get in terms of

(41:45):
fatherly love. And to hear her say those things to
him in that moment, even though she had done small
things like this before and whispered. You know, there's always
a whisper network of gossip and scandal around us, but
just so directly walk in there and break her son
in this way. It was shattering to hear. It was

(42:07):
also terrifying to hear because I knew what would come next.
I knew that it would in some ways solidify the
growing paranoia in my father's head that his wife was
going to run off and his children didn't want him,
and that all of his life was going to come
down to being a failure.

Speaker 1 (42:28):
There is yet another complexity hovering that is invisibly hovering
over the atmosphere in Zara's home and particularly within her parents' marriage,
something that has been there, deeply felt unspoken, the kind
of sorrow and grief that has the power to shape everything.

(42:48):
In the two years before Zara was born, her parents
had had and lost a son.

Speaker 2 (42:55):
Growing up, I always had the suspicion, even though nobody
said these things directly in our home, but I always
had a suspicion that my father's family would have rather
had boys than my sister and me. And they would
say a lot of things, you know, cover it up
about it. Oh, you know, girls are like gods luxury,
and they bring so much luck. And look at all

(43:16):
the women in our family. Everybody is so highly educated,
and sisters a professor, and all of these things. But
I just always knew, especially for my dad, in the
ways that he would light up talking about cricket to me,
and then something would die in his eyes when he
would see my disinterest, or the way that he would
try and teach me how to throw a ball against

(43:38):
the walls in our hallway, and then how excited he
would get if I could do it well. And it
was these small ways in which I realized that this
man should have been dad to a boy, and that
instead he was stuck with two girls who he didn't
really know what to do with, and there was always
this howering sense of disappointment in our lives. But my

(44:00):
mom had mentioned once or twice to us growing up
about a child whom she simply called Mohammed, and Mohammed
usually is just the name you give to every new
child at birth, and she said that there was a
baby before you. But you know, I didn't live, and
I didn't understand too much growing up of it. I
thought this was just you know, a pregnancy that she

(44:22):
didn't fully carry, or perhaps she never really you know,
saw the baby, something went wrong as she was delivering.
But it was many years later, actually, and over many
conversations with my mother, that I'd slowly been able to
piece the story together. And the story is that, right

(44:43):
as soon as she got married to my dad and
moved to Gudhath, into this new state, this new family,
this new culture, she found herself pregnant just a few
months later. And this was a twenty one year old woman,
you know, just hasn't even fully graduated from college, and
now she finds self having a child with a man
who she's only getting to know and not fully convinced

(45:06):
she really likes or loves at this point, and she
goes through what is a very difficult pregnancy, and she's
told in her six or seventh month by the doctor
in Amabat that something doesn't seem right and she shouldn't
either go ahead with it or that then she needs
to sew up the lining of her uterus and take
these extra medications and injections and whatnot. And again, she's

(45:30):
essentially a young girl who's having these things happen to
her body for the first time. And so, as is
cultural for us, she is sent off to her mother's
house in Madras to deliver the baby, and usually the
ideas that the husband will come in when the baby
is born and take the family back home. And so

(45:51):
she goes to Madras and she's trying to be happy
and joyful about the fact that this is going to
be her first child, and the doctor does tell her
that it might be a boy, and so what a
prize that is that, you know, first shot, she's got it.
She's giving them the sun, the male air that they
want in many ways. And then she delivers. She goes

(46:12):
into labor and she delivers, and he does happen to
be a beautiful baby boy. And he's brought into her
arms and she gets to look at him, and then
she realizes that he has a cleft palate, and the
doctor tells her that the baby's brain is not fully developed,

(46:32):
and that this baby is not going to live for
more than two days. And so this woman who thought
her life had only just begun and that somehow, especially
by having this male child, it would fill with joy
and flowers, and that she would find acceptance and validity
and love in this man and in this family, she

(46:55):
is suddenly holding a child that's about to die, and
her husband not even there, the man she made this childhood,
is not around to hold her. The next day, my
father takes an emergency slight out of Ambabad, which is
very expensive to do at the time, flies into Madras,

(47:16):
and just as he lands in Madras and is driving
to the hospital, is around the time when the baby
passes away. So he never actually gets to hold his
son or see his son. And so he goes home
and he sees my mother, who's also there without child,
empty womb, just sitting there, looking completely numb and lost,

(47:39):
and he just goes up to her and puts his
hand on her head and on her shoulder, and the
way my mother tells me this now, she says it
very flippantly, because it's almost like she doesn't want to
be there sitting on that bed anymore in her memory.
But to me, it seems like man and woman that

(48:02):
were strangers to each other, that were put in this
life together, that made this baby. We're trying to grieve
a thing that they didn't even fully understand had happened
to them. And that was the only time that she
cried and my father held her, and then he never
spoke about this child ever again. I never once in

(48:23):
his lifetime heard him speak to me about mom.

Speaker 1 (48:32):
Of course, never speaking of it again creates its own problems.
As Zara writes in her memoir, guilt made her father
a monster. The tension between her parents grew and grew
on this toxic, fertile soil. And so when Zara overhears
her mother on that phone call plotting her escape to Madras,
her mother is attempting to secure only three tickets for

(48:55):
herself and her daughters, and Zara's father, while he doesn't
his blessing does give them permission to go.

Speaker 2 (49:05):
When my mother told him that she was taking the
girls and leaving and going to Madras. It was supposed
to be just for a break, just for a sort
of quiet, small little getaway, so we could just get
our brains back together and feel like full humans again.
And yet somewhere I think my father knew that we're
never coming back. And when he says, all right, you

(49:31):
can go. It happens on the last day of my
boards because while he was bringing me back from the exam,
he is stopped by the cops on the street. And
this is a man who takes such pride in belonging
to his land. He knows every street of the city
that he's grown up in, he knows people wherever he

(49:52):
goes in this city. It is a city that knows
him and loves him and owns him, and he belongs
to it. And in that say, to be asked to
get out of your car, to be searched humiliatingly in
the middle of the street, in the middle of people
watching him, and to be belittled and minimized and laughed

(50:13):
and walked at him and sent off on your way.
It's a thing that I didn't recognize then, But now
that I feel like I understand my father, I know
where it went and sat inside him. And how when
he came home and he said, all right, go to Madras.
That was my father saying you deserve this piece, and

(50:36):
you deserve to go belong somewhere, because right now none
of us belong to this place, and this place doesn't
want any of us.

Speaker 1 (50:52):
Tzara's father does eventually come to Madras, but his presence
there is short lived. He returns to the Jasmin apartments
to c eight, and when Zara is nineteen, he passes
away from cancer. In the meantime, Zara has aced her
boards and finally the world opens up to her. Full

(51:13):
of promise and possibility, she makes her way in the
world to an innate combination of resilience, constitution, nature, and grit.
But in order to thrive, Zara also needs to sever
ties from her grandmother, who has been such a destructive influence.

(51:33):
So she writes a letter disowning her grandmother and sends
it to everyone in their community whose opinion matters. She
never speaks to her grandmother again, and yet Ahmedabad holds
sway over Zara and perhaps always will. She returns from
time to time to the place that she will always
carry with her.

Speaker 2 (51:56):
From the day I got on that train to leave
Anderbad to everywhere that I have been in this world.
I've lived in Mumbai and Hazerabad in the UK and
in the US, and traveled across the world when I
worked in film and so on. I have carried that
feeling of being dislodged so much in my heart that

(52:19):
that almost feels like home. I think, knowing that there
are places in the world that might not want you
because of the lievers you carry. It could be of faith,
it could be of gender, it could be of who
you decide to love and how you choose to live.
But there are places in this world where you will
not be welcome, even if you are off that land,

(52:41):
even if you were born there, even if your ancestors
are buried in that land. And so I've had to
find ways to carry the land with me and within me.
And to do that, I've had to go back and
look at the parts of my own people that I
could love. I've had to look at my father and

(53:02):
remember how he would dance to Moster Pateli Khan's Sufi music,
and he would light up when he would hear that song.
I've had to go back and remember how incense smelt
when my grandfather took us to all these shrines across
Amberabad and prayed there with us. I make sure to
hold and wear Fabrican textile that has hand block printed

(53:26):
flowers that were so typical of Ambabad, where my mother
spent hours and hours in the bazaar of me showing
me how to match a pattern with the color. And
so it's in these material ways that I surround myself.
But I also have this deep, deep, deep belief that
for every breath that I take, there will be a

(53:47):
part of me that will always belong in the soil
of amber Bad, and that I carry the soil of
amza Bad with me.

Speaker 1 (54:02):
Here's Zara reading one last passage from her remarkable memoir
The Lucky Ones.

Speaker 2 (54:11):
Some days when it feels like my motherland is forsaking me,
telling me I am not hers, she is not mine,
and my soul wants to cry like an orphan child,
I remind myself that my belonging was bequeathed to me
by the best of mothers, my Ammah. She lost a child,
a chance at love, a life of freedom that she

(54:33):
chose mis by and me to empty herself into. We
own everything that is great and beautiful and redeemable about
our country. It's humor, it's refuge, it's magnanimity, its humility,
its ability to bend and absorb every shot of grief
thrown its way, and from it to grow flowers, to

(54:54):
meet life.

Speaker 1 (55:24):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zaccur is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also

(55:46):
find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,

(56:20):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.