City on Fire: A Boyhood in Aligarh

by Zeyad Masroor Khan

English 312 pages 2 editions

NOW IN PAPERBACK Zeyad Masroor Khan was four years old when he realized that an innocent act of playing with a switch near a window overlooking the street could trigger a riot. As the distant thud of a crowd grew closer and calls for murder rent the air, he got his first taste of growing up in Upar Kot, a Muslim ghetto in Aligarh. Khan’s world was far removed from the Aligarh of popular imagination–of poets, tehzeeb and the intellectual corridors of the Aligarh Muslim University. His was a city where serpentine lanes simmered with violence, homes fervently prayed to dispel the omnipresent fear of a family member turning up dead, and the soft breeze that blew over crowded terraces carried rumours of a bloodthirsty mob on the prowl. City on Fire is a rare visceral portrait of how everyday violence and hate become part of our lives and consciousness, of a society where name and clothes mark out a person as the ‘other’. It is as much an incisive examination of religion and violence, imagined histories and fractured realities, grief and love in today’s India, as it is a paean to the hope of continued unity, to an idea of India.