Twelve Gates is excited to present a book launch event with Zara Chowdhary and her memoir, The Lucky Ones. On Friday, September 20th, 2024, from 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM, Zara Chowdhary and Sham-e-Ali Nayeem will be in conversation about Chowdhary’s memoir, The Lucky ones, a moving memoir by a survivor of anti-Muslim violence in contemporary India that delicately weaves political and family histories in a tribute to her country’s unique Islamic heritage.
In 2002, Zara Chowdhary was sixteen years old and living with her family in Ahmedabad, one of India’s fastest-growing cities, when a gruesome train fire claimed the lives of sixty Hindu passengers. The country’s long-simmering Hindu-Muslim tensions ignited into a three-month violent siege across Gujarat. One day, Zara was a bright teenager preparing for her school exams and making plans for her future, and the next she found herself under lockdown at home with her family, fearing for their lives as Hindu neighbors, friends, and members of civil society transformed overnight into bloodthirsty mobs. The chief minister of the state at the time, Narendra Modi, was later accused of fomenting the massacre, and yet a decade later, rose to become India’s prime minister.
THE LUCKY ONES entwines lost histories across a subcontinent, examines forgotten myths, prods at family’s secrets, and gazes unflinchingly back at a country rushing to move past the biggest pogrom in its modern history. With stunning clarity, we witness the violence through Zara’s teenage eyes, and how she and her family struggle through while locked down in their home for months. Zara also weaves in her present-day perspective as she uncovers what really happened across Gujarat in those horrific weeks and tells the stories of victims—stories that have become legendary among Indian Muslims even as they’ve been suppressed by Hindu nationalist political forces. With Modi having won re-election and the “world’s largest democracy” hurtling toward cacophonous Hindu nationalism, these stories need to be heard.
Zara Chowdhary is a writer and lecturer at the University of Wisconsin. She has an MFA in creative writing and environment from Iowa State University and a master's in writing for performance from the University of Leeds. She has previously written for documentary television, advertising, and film. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her partner, child, and two cats.
Sham-e-Ali Nayeem is an interdisciplinary artist, poet, sound practitioner and recovering social justice lawyer with Hyderabadi (Deccan) Muslim roots. She is the author of the poetry collection, City of Pearls (Upset Press, 2019) and has released two musical albums; City of Pearls (2019) and Moti Ka Sheher (2023) featuring self composed musical interpretations from her book. Sham-e-Ali is the recipient of the 2022 Leeway Transformation Award, the 2016 Loft Literary Center Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship, and the 1997 echoing green fellowship.
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