From Dream to Nightmare: On the Deadly Manifestations of Religious Hatred in India

Ayodhya, the Nightmare

On the morning of February 27, 2002, a train on its way from Ayodhya, a small city in north-central India, to my home state of Gujarat in the West stopped at a small, dusty station called Godhra. Travelers disembarked for snacks and chai; vendors climbed on board to sell their wares. No one really knows what happened next, but as the train tooted its horn and departed the station, the emergency brake was pulled. Two of the train’s carriages were on fire; their doors were locked from the inside. At least fifty-eight people died.

In Ayodhya, a Mughal-era mosque called the Babri Masjid had stood for five hundred years. At some point during the British Raj, an idea spread among radicalized Hindus that the mosque had been built over the bones of an old Hindu temple, perhaps even the very birthplace of Ram, a much-revered Hindu deity. Over the decades, demands grew to “return” the land to Hindus, even though its modern-day ownership lay with the Muslim Waqf Board, an administrative body that oversaw the care and maintenance of Indo-Islamic monuments.

In 1992, a mob of more than a hundred thousand Hindu karsevaks stormed the ancient monument and tore it down. Religious violence broke across India in response. The right-wing party, the BJP, which had led the call for the mosque’s demolition, gained immense popularity after this moment. And each year after, groups of these karsevaks would travel to Ayodhya and protest at the demolition site. The hope was to pressure the Indian Supreme Court, which was hearing a suit on the ownership of the property, to hand over the property to them. Ten years after the mosque’s destruction, on February 27, 2002, one such group was returning to their homes in Gujarat on that train.

Theories abound: that a kerosene stove got knocked over; that a Muslim vendor on board got into an argument with the pilgrims; that there was a fight on the platform between a Muslim chai seller and the passengers. But on that day, local news agencies heavily controlled by the state rushed to call it an “Islamic terrorist attack.” The state’s chief minister, Narendra Modi, immediately declared it an “act of terror.” The next day raging Hindu mobs, comprising thousands of people, poured into Gujarat’s streets, in cities, villages, and towns, looting, raping, and burning alive the state’s Muslim citizens.

The massacre continued for three months.

Ayodhya, the Dream

Every two years our father, Papa, a Gujarat state government employee, would get free tickets to take his family anywhere he wished within the country’s vast and mind-boggling train system. Every two years, Papa would use these free tickets to take us to only one place: Ayodhya.

This Ayodhya was not the small, dusty town in north-central India that lay at the heart of the “Hindu-Muslim problem.” Our Ayodhya was a home; a beautiful redbrick, three-story home fragrant with jasmine blossoms and filter coffee. A home for which we sat in a train for thirty-six hours, crossed five states, and traveled fifteen hundred kilometers south. A home that welcomed us with open arms and belonged to Papa’s friends from his time in the United States as a student. Ila auntie and her brother had met Papa in California in 1975 when they all landed in the same graduate program. Now their children, pets, and extended families filled the redbrick home. And every two years this home would take us under its care. It became our most enduring memory of summer.

Sometimes Dadi and Dada would also tag along to this Ayodhya. Together the Muslim Chowdharys and the Hindu Reddys would spend two months road-tripping across southern India in a convoy of cars, eating at roadside restaurants, staying with old friends along the way, and bumbling about the jungles of the misty Nilgiri Hills looking for elephants, tigers, and bison.

We would make stops in Mysore, Madras, Coorg, and Chittoor, crisscrossing three southern states. Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Tulu, Urdu, and English would flow in and out of rolled-down windows into our ears and mingle in our mouths. Back in Ayodhya, the grown-ups would congregate each night around dinner and scotch. Amma would stand in the kitchen orchestrating Ila auntie’s domestic staff in a rendition of her biryani. Papa would be outside drinking himself senseless, but he’d remain in mostly good spirits, rubbing and comparing beer bellies with Rishi uncle, Ila auntie’s brother.

He became the closest thing our father had to a brother too. Papa, who was terrible with languages and generally hated everything South Indian because that’s where his wife came from, would marvel at the sweetness of the staff’s Telugu, calling it “music to his ears.” Every two years for two whole months, Papa was among friends, people who loved and accepted him despite all his late-night raucousness.

Rishi uncle would arrive for dinner from a long day at his candy factory, bearing huge plastic bags of multicolored treats for Misba and me. Sugary bars made of fresh South Indian mango pulp, hard-boiled sweets in flavors like guava and tamarind and banana and butter.

At some point he and his wife would sweep us away to their apartment, a short car ride away in Bangalore. Their daughters and Misba and I would curl up on their couch and watch Julia Roberts’s rom-coms and episodes of Friends (a treat for us, since Papa didn’t allow cable TV in our house and Dadi wouldn’t let us sit on her sofa). At their kitchen table, our mothers would hold cups of tea and each others’ hands, swapping stories of their husbands and mothers-in-law, how nothing changed in the tapestries of their lives except the reminiscing over the wide-eyed young women they’d once been and the current sagging of their breasts.

In Ayodhya, we’d gather around a huge dinner table, eating and laughing for hours until Papa would say something caustic to Amma. The men, women, and children would immediately coalesce around us, shielding Amma, ruffling our hair and smoothing our troubled cheeks. Someone would distract Papa and softly chastise him just enough so that that side of him would shamefully, quickly retreat.

At night, the older kids would spoil us with late-night ice cream drives and movies at the new malls that were sprouting up around quaint 1990s Bangalore. On hotter days, we’d simply run around their garden with the dog or sit under the giant jackfruit tree in the yard, eating mangoes. I’d often slow down in front of the beautiful Ganesh idol in Ayodhya’s hallway, take in its lines and curves, its every bronze detail, watch the ghee lamp at his feet burn, lazy and luminous as our days.

The children would sit around their elders and speak and argue freely. Misba and I would listen in awe to these kids who knew so much, read so much, lived such rich lives. They were wealthy, no doubt. But in more than money. On these children had been bestowed indiscriminate acceptance from their elders and an almost miraculous courage that came with it. Misba and I would marvel at how easily they loved us. During those summers at Ayodhya, there was safety in numbers.

Those who loved us and protected our mother outnumbered Papa. In a way, through these summers at Ayodhya we experienced for ourselves what keeps humans and their awkwardly built societies together, a society made of people as different as a Zaheer and a Rishi, a Rukhsana and an Ila. Misba and I quickly learned that when we were among them, they took turns keeping watch over us. And Amma and us girls poured out our food, our holidays, our stories, our politics, our dreams, our biases, in wholly unfiltered ways. We felt encouraged to. Everyone gave of themselves generously, saw differences as something to learn from rather than to fear, and everyone protected the children. And we in turn let it shape us.

We learned to love the parts of one another we didn’t quite understand: the language, the food, the distinctive beauties of our monotheistic and pluralistic faiths. But, most important, Misba and I learned how daughters deserved to be spoken to and asked who they wanted to be. We learned that our mother was loved, even admired, in this other world. It was as if for a brief while every two years, under this Ayodhya’s magnanimous roof, we mattered. We were awake and we were alive.

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Excerpted from The Lucky Ones: A Memoir by Zara Chowdhary. Copyright © 2024 by Zara Chowdhary. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.