‘I will never have the courage to completely abandon
my home , Aligarh- a beautiful curse’
I assume for many people, especially from urban areas, reading Zeyad Masroor Khan’s poignant coming of age memoir, City on Fire (Harper Collins, 2023) would be like entering a parallel universe where you never know when your neighborhood will turn on you or your family and a riot can break out at the drop of a hat. Having experienced this from close quarters once, I can assure you that it can be a horrible experience. For others who have grown up in similar and small communally sensitive towns like Meerut or Moradabad will be able to identify more with his story which is based in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh.
Aligarh is normally in the news because of AMU (Aligarh
Muslim University) or due to the recent news of request for its name change to ‘Hari’garh
from ‘Ali’garh by a section of the right-wing. Only a few kilometers away from
the University, are located densely populated colonies with crisscrossing narrow
roads (‘How can a lane be this narrow?’) which have often been ravaged by
deadly riots in the past and are sharply divided on communal lines namely Hindu
areas and Muslim areas. The author grew up in one such colony (Uber Kot) in his
ancestral home (Farsh Manzil) in a joint family. The author tracks his journey
from growing up in this Muslim ghetto to going to school and university, first
in Aligarh and then in Delhi to working in Delhi and finally being back to
Aligarh to focus on his writing. It is quite interesting to realize that even
though there’s always an underlying animosity between the two neighborhoods,
they also cannot do without each other because of the commercial inter-dependence
on each other. At another level it is frightening to imagine that the person
whom you’ve know for a long time and been talking normally all this time might
just take your life the next moment! The author also interweaves in this
journey, the personal happening in his life as the joint family grew and the
tensions it created within. I think he has nicely balanced this internal personal
narrative along with the external.
While in Delhi he realizes that the hatred and animosity he
thought he had left behind in Aligarh had followed him to the big city as he is
forced to abandon his home in Delhi during the peak of the anti-CAA protest
which lead to riots in parts of the capital city. As they say the more you try to
run from something, the more you may be nearing it.
However, the author ends on a reconciliatory and hopeful
note in spite of what we have witnessed in the last decade, which I guess is a
testament to his love for his ‘home’.
- Amir Bashir
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