Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Cussing and loud noises terrify me even today. They make
Speaker 2: me feel like I'm picking at a knot above my
Speaker 2: skill level to untangle. Then I feel the knot in
Speaker 2: the back of my neck, Then in my back I
Speaker 2: touch them sometimes these knots and feel two thoughts spring
Speaker 2: from them, as they did that night on the balcony.
Speaker 2: One is a potent mix of fear and anger, wanting
Speaker 2: the person who scares me to die, wishing to transfer
Speaker 2: my pain to someone who deserves it in my churlish mind.
Speaker 2: The other voice is Amas, calmly chanting in my years
Speaker 2: for as long as it takes my breathing to return
Speaker 2: to normal, for the not to release. Where you come
Speaker 2: from does not have to be who you become.
Speaker 1: That's Zarah Chowdry, writer and lucky at the University of Wisconsin,
Speaker 1: an author of the recent memoir The Lucky Ones. Zara's
Speaker 1: is a story of a family's life lived at the
Speaker 1: intersection of political upheaval, violence, racism, and one young woman's
Speaker 1: courage and tenacity in the face of some very rough odds.
Speaker 1: It's also a story of the enduring power of love.
Speaker 1: I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets
Speaker 1: that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
Speaker 1: and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
Speaker 2: I grew up in the city called Ahmedabad, which is
Speaker 2: the biggest city in the westernmost state of India called Gujad.
Speaker 2: It's a state that borders Pakistan on one side and
Speaker 2: then it has the Arabian Sea to the south. Now, Ahmadabad,
Speaker 2: as the name suggests, was a city that was founded
Speaker 2: by a Muslim sultanate, a Muslim sultan called Ahmed Shahbadsha.
Speaker 2: And that's why it was a city that had these
Speaker 2: foundations literally carved into rock. And I grew up in
Speaker 2: the old part of the city across this river Sabermati
Speaker 2: that ran north to south, and so the eastern part
Speaker 2: of the city of Amdabad was all the old established
Speaker 2: ways of the sultanate. Even as I grew up, you
Speaker 2: could see the remains of the fort. There were these
Speaker 2: incredible giant doors, really ornate and beautifully carved out of
Speaker 2: stone and rock, from which traders and saints and armies
Speaker 2: just marched in and out through the centuries. The space
Speaker 2: was dotted with shrines Sufi shrines that we called Arghas masques.
Speaker 2: And then within this over the centuries, life had just
Speaker 2: sort of sprung and grown in this layered way. So
Speaker 2: you had stores, and you had restaurants, and there was
Speaker 2: the public school and then the little Jesuit convent schools
Speaker 2: and homes that were of every shape and size, and
Speaker 2: it was just this very sort of tightly knit and
Speaker 2: close community that all flourished on one side of the river.
Speaker 2: But as we went through the eighties and the nineties
Speaker 2: and the early two thousands, and India I was about
Speaker 2: sixty odd years from its foundation. From its founding, this
Speaker 2: city started to grow westward and across the river towards
Speaker 2: the horizon in some ways. And the folks that tended
Speaker 2: to move that side were mostly the majority Hindo citizens
Speaker 2: of the city. And so by the time I was
Speaker 2: growing up in the city, which was in the nineties,
Speaker 2: and Udabad was already one of the most segregated cities
Speaker 2: in India. Now, I did not understand this word or
Speaker 2: this language at the time, but I do remember the
Speaker 2: feeling of our side of the city, the old sort
Speaker 2: of ancient side growing into a kehetto, and the one
Speaker 2: on the other side sort of springing and coming alive
Speaker 2: in everything that modernity had to offer. So this was
Speaker 2: an India that had just been liberalized economically, which meant
Speaker 2: that there was a free market, and suddenly we had
Speaker 2: important goods flooding in. And so one side of the
Speaker 2: river started to chase after that, and in many ways
Speaker 2: it almost felt like they were willing to leave us behind.
Speaker 2: And so I grew up in this place that had
Speaker 2: really parted along the lines of the river.
Speaker 1: That's fascinating. Did you know or sense as a child,
Speaker 1: I don't imagine that you had the word ghetto. Did
Speaker 1: you have the sense that there was this segregation or
Speaker 1: did that come later?
Speaker 2: I think it became very obvious very early on that
Speaker 2: we were the poorer side of the city, because that's
Speaker 2: where the slums first established themselves along the river. And
Speaker 2: what it meant then to live in these sort of
Speaker 2: even more mixed societies right where you have those who
Speaker 2: are working and living in the slum, those who live
Speaker 2: in cooperative buildings, those who live in small tenement bungalows,
Speaker 2: is that we're all kind of living cheek in general
Speaker 2: in this way that is just tight and suffocating, And
Speaker 2: so I might not have had the word ghetto at
Speaker 2: the time, but I had the word slum. I had
Speaker 2: the word narrow lanes and gullies, and so we were
Speaker 2: very much defined by this very constrained geography.
Speaker 1: So in your home, this Jasmine apartment C eight, there
Speaker 1: are quite a few people living in your family home,
Speaker 1: which was usual right where extended families would live together.
Speaker 2: That's correct, yes, And the same sense of suffocation that
Speaker 2: one could feel emanating from the outside was very much
Speaker 2: how the household also built. We lived in this apartment building,
Speaker 2: ten story stall. We were on the eighth floor. We
Speaker 2: had what some would call a magnificent view of the
Speaker 2: river and the city across and all the bridges across
Speaker 2: of it. But inside the house there were three generations
Speaker 2: again living in this tightly packed unit. There was my grandparents,
Speaker 2: my dad's parents. There was my parents, and then my
Speaker 2: dad's younger sister who was divorced and had moved in
Speaker 2: with us with her only child. So her daughter, me
Speaker 2: and then my younger sister, we were the three children
Speaker 2: in the house. And then you had these three generations
Speaker 2: that were all also similarly buying for their little piece
Speaker 2: of the sky. They were all buying for space and
Speaker 2: importance and clarity as to their roles. And so we
Speaker 2: grew up in a place where it was on the
Speaker 2: one hand, incredible to have just constant access to your grandparents, right,
Speaker 2: and they're just bounds of history and wisdom. But at
Speaker 2: the same time there's also biases, and there's constant pettiness,
Speaker 2: and there's constant balancing of deep affection with dense jealousy
Speaker 2: and envy.
Speaker 1: Tell me about Ama, your mother.
Speaker 2: So my mother, Roxana, who I call Ama, she came
Speaker 2: from the southern part of India. She came from a
Speaker 2: coastal city called Madras, which is we now call it Chene.
Speaker 2: And she came from an army family. Her father was
Speaker 2: a major in the Indian Army for all of his career,
Speaker 2: and so she grew up almost this vagabond way where
Speaker 2: they were moved around every two years. And so she
Speaker 2: had lived everywhere from up in the Himaliyas and Kashmi
Speaker 2: to down at the very end of India and Trivandrum
Speaker 2: where you can just see the Bay of Bengal and
Speaker 2: the Indian Ocean. From there, she had lived on the
Speaker 2: Mango coast on the western side. She had lived in
Speaker 2: the center of India where you got great oranges, and
Speaker 2: so she had had this incredible rich life for the
Speaker 2: first few years or early years where she had just
Speaker 2: bounced around and met all these different cultures and languages
Speaker 2: and foods and people in the army. But then she
Speaker 2: also lost her father when she was thirteen, and that
Speaker 2: changed the fortunes of her family. Her mother instantly sort
Speaker 2: of crumbled under widowhood in a way that a lot
Speaker 2: of women in India did, at least in that generation.
Speaker 2: And she took on this burden on her very sort
Speaker 2: of nimble shoulders at the time of becoming the face
Speaker 2: of the family. And what that meant was that she
Speaker 2: suddenly felt like the honor of the family, its pride,
Speaker 2: its sense, and dignity all rested on her. That's a
Speaker 2: huge burden for somebody who's twelve or thirteen to carry
Speaker 2: on their shoulders. And she had decided at a very
Speaker 2: early age that she was going to do everything the
Speaker 2: right way, including go to college for a a sort
Speaker 2: of checklist career that would just get her a good husband,
Speaker 2: should marry into a good family, and that's how she
Speaker 2: ended up meeting my father through a marriage proposal in India,
Speaker 2: we had arranged marriages. A relative or a family friend
Speaker 2: might introduce you to somebody that they think is a
Speaker 2: good match for you. And so this was a relative
Speaker 2: who knew this family in Ahmadabad, Gudrat, thousands of miles
Speaker 2: away from where my mother was living in the south,
Speaker 2: and they just happened to know them and thought that
Speaker 2: they were incredibly suave and sort of you know, this
Speaker 2: liberal educated Muslim family. Everybody served in the government. The
Speaker 2: son had gone to America and had an MBA, and
Speaker 2: he was tall and strapping and handsome, and my mom
Speaker 2: was a very tall woman for Indian culture, and she
Speaker 2: had been told growing up that this was not an advantage.
Speaker 2: She was also dark for somebody in a culture that
Speaker 2: really values light skinness, and so this became a burden
Speaker 2: that she was already silently caring. And so when this
Speaker 2: marriage proposal came of this fair, tall, handsome foreign educated
Speaker 2: government servant, it seemed like the perfect match for someone
Speaker 2: like her. My dad was the most quirky human that
Speaker 2: I will ever know in my life. And it is
Speaker 2: strange to say that now in retrospect, because at the time,
Speaker 2: growing up in his shadow, it felt like my father
Speaker 2: was a monster. My dad was the oldest child of
Speaker 2: a public servant. His mother came from a sort of
Speaker 2: almost aristocratic family in Amadabad who had sort of old
Speaker 2: money and had a very wide social network, and so
Speaker 2: he had grown up essentially with a silver spoon in
Speaker 2: the fifties and sixties, which is many people think of
Speaker 2: that as India's golden period in terms of, you know,
Speaker 2: we had great cinema happening, There was so much social
Speaker 2: upliftment for people. We had all these big projects going
Speaker 2: on that were going to really transform the country. It
Speaker 2: was a time of a lot of hope. And my
Speaker 2: dad was growing up in that time, and he was
Speaker 2: growing up with that silver spoon, knowing that as the
Speaker 2: only son in the household, he could ask and he
Speaker 2: would receive. He straight out of college and he wasn't
Speaker 2: the brightest student his sister was, but he was offered
Speaker 2: the opportunity to go study in America, and so he
Speaker 2: comes to California in the seventies, has the time of
Speaker 2: his life for three years and meets some incredible other
Speaker 2: Indian students who are also here at the same time,
Speaker 2: forges these friendships that last him for the rest of
Speaker 2: his life. But he's also just not what's the word,
Speaker 2: he's not practical enough in the way of thinking of
Speaker 2: his future. He's thought that being here, being in America,
Speaker 2: he's already set that this is it, and he's made it.
Speaker 2: And he doesn't go back on time the way his
Speaker 2: visa stipulated he had to. And so he's brought into
Speaker 2: court in California and the judge gives him two options.
Speaker 2: One that he was not going to be able to
Speaker 2: come back to the US for at least a decade,
Speaker 2: because that's usually how long those things last. The other
Speaker 2: thing it really meant was that this star son, this
Speaker 2: prince of the family, had terribly and desperately failed. He
Speaker 2: was supposed to go there and make a name for
Speaker 2: himself and do something, and everybody else was you know,
Speaker 2: this was the time of that brain drained, the first
Speaker 2: round of it, when all of our doctors and engineers
Speaker 2: came to the US. He was supposed to be one
Speaker 2: of them. And instead he comes back with his tail
Speaker 2: between his legs and he's not sure if he's going
Speaker 2: to ever be able to go abroad anywhere and establish
Speaker 2: a life for himself. But also he didn't come from wealth.
Speaker 2: He came from social status, but he didn't come from wealth.
Speaker 2: And to come back to a father who was retiring,
Speaker 2: who had just bought this apartment in Jasmine, had put
Speaker 2: most of his retirement savings into his young son. This
Speaker 2: also meant that he had failed that investment in many ways.
Speaker 2: And so by the time I came along and our
Speaker 2: life in the nineties sort of is the memory that
Speaker 2: I have. This before time, from what I understand, became
Speaker 2: really a time when that guilt and that shame became
Speaker 2: weaponized against him in his own household, and he was
Speaker 2: constantly reminded every time everybody drank and got tipsy and
Speaker 2: then started to fight in the house. This was always
Speaker 2: a story that came out the fact that they put
Speaker 2: all their money in my dad, and my dad was
Speaker 2: still back here, still working for the government, and that
Speaker 2: nothing came out of that whole episode.
Speaker 1: When your parents met, was this something that your mother
Speaker 1: sort of knew and signed on for or do you
Speaker 1: think it became something that she came to realize. And
Speaker 1: also how long were they married before you were born.
Speaker 2: They were married in nineteen eighty four and I was
Speaker 2: born in nineteen eighty six. My mother also liked me,
Speaker 2: and I guess before me really had pieced the story
Speaker 2: together through these drunken outbursts in our household, because the
Speaker 2: story she was told when the proposal came to her
Speaker 2: was here as this wonderful man who's handsome and educated,
Speaker 2: and he has a foreign degree and he's working in
Speaker 2: the government. He will rise and will have job security.
Speaker 2: This family seemed to have roots in this city. It's
Speaker 2: a beautiful city with a great culture. You'll have a
Speaker 2: wonderful life. And it's only when she moved to Amzabad
Speaker 2: and she started to live within this household, and also
Speaker 2: as she realized her place in the household, that she
Speaker 2: really started to dig for this information and understand that
Speaker 2: this man who was almost a decade older than her,
Speaker 2: whom she had married because he looked so great on paper,
Speaker 2: had all of these hidden failures and pockets of secrets
Speaker 2: that nobody had bothered to tell her.
Speaker 1: Sarah and her younger sister Misha absorb a great deal
Speaker 1: of tension in the close quarters of their very crowded home.
Speaker 2: So you know, looking back now, I had this memory
Speaker 2: of always feeling just fear in my body, and not
Speaker 2: just fear of people, but I used to feel fear
Speaker 2: of the space of the apartment itself. I would not
Speaker 2: want to go out into the balcony after dark. There
Speaker 2: were certain darker corners of the house, but the light
Speaker 2: from the lamp would just not reach, and I wouldn't
Speaker 2: want to go in there. And I would just constantly
Speaker 2: have these nightmares, if you know, all kinds of gnarly
Speaker 2: things coming out of the walls to get me. It's
Speaker 2: taken many years for me to look back at that
Speaker 2: and realize that I was constantly feeling the tension of
Speaker 2: the house. I knew, for instance, that at seven o'clock
Speaker 2: my house transformed in the evening. And you know, you
Speaker 2: would think that, oh, sundown in a Muslim household means
Speaker 2: everybody will get together and pray their sundown prayers, their nammas,
Speaker 2: and it's a time for piety in some ways, but
Speaker 2: not in my household. In my household, the bottle opened
Speaker 2: and my dad would start to pour himself a drink,
Speaker 2: and then another and another, and my grandfather would drink
Speaker 2: with him, and the women of the family would sit
Speaker 2: around and it would all start with jovial chatting, and
Speaker 2: then as my dad would drink more and more and
Speaker 2: my grandfather would stop and try to slow him down.
Speaker 2: Things would just get more belligerent, and I would see
Speaker 2: my mom trying to sort of recede into the kitchen
Speaker 2: and watch from there. We would usually be asked to
Speaker 2: go into the bedroom and play there, but we would
Speaker 2: know that voices are rising, temperatures are rising outside. At
Speaker 2: some point, we would hear a plate crash into the wall,
Speaker 2: or we'd hear somebody take off their slipper and throw
Speaker 2: it across the room, and that's when we would know
Speaker 2: things had been set on fire, that we're just now
Speaker 2: in the middle of a terrible dinner, that we're all
Speaker 2: going to have to sit and endure and eat and
Speaker 2: swallow even when everybody's see them.
Speaker 1: In India, indeed across South Asia, families who are able
Speaker 1: to send children to convent schools. Being educated in a
Speaker 1: convent school brings with it a social status because it
Speaker 1: usually means students will learn British English and know how
Speaker 1: to comport themselves in society. For girls, this is particularly
Speaker 1: the case. Coming out of a convent school means they'll
Speaker 1: come out finished, polished in ways that make them valuable
Speaker 1: for marriage. In fact, it is not uncommon for matrimonial
Speaker 1: columns in Indian newspapers even today to refer to a
Speaker 1: potential bride as fair, slim and convent educated. And so
Speaker 1: it is a stroke of luck that Zara's family has
Speaker 1: roots in Ahmedabad and three generations have been educated at
Speaker 1: the only convent school in town.
Speaker 2: My grandmother, my dad's mother, my aunt, and then my
Speaker 2: sister and I and my cousin, all of us had
Speaker 2: studied in this one convent school of Montgomery and the
Speaker 2: school was across the So each morning there would be
Speaker 2: an auto rickshaw that would stop, drive up and stop
Speaker 2: at the base of our building. You would run down,
Speaker 2: get into it and it would go across the bridge
Speaker 2: and take us to school. And so we would go
Speaker 2: in this very packed auto rick show with you know,
Speaker 2: little water services and bags hanging outside of it, and
Speaker 2: it was all very funny even as we were doing
Speaker 2: it as children. And then we would go to school
Speaker 2: where you had all of these different classes of the
Speaker 2: city and it was like watching a cross section of
Speaker 2: our society, but in awkward teenage bodies and pre previous
Speaker 2: and bodies and in great pinafore uniforms. So you had
Speaker 2: the girls who came in the fancy sort of imported cars.
Speaker 2: You had the click that came in the bus. You
Speaker 2: had the ones whose parents dropped them off on a scooter,
Speaker 2: and then you had us who came in the auto
Speaker 2: rickshaw from the other side of town. And even how
Speaker 2: we sat and ate at lunch was very clearly marked
Speaker 2: by that class. And so as much as you would
Speaker 2: think that, you know, going to school been an escape
Speaker 2: for these kids, you know, they could go there and
Speaker 2: just be themselves and have fun and run around, school
Speaker 2: was also very clearly a place that was that had
Speaker 2: this hierarchy of class. We didn't know this at the time,
Speaker 2: but there was also hints of that sort of bigotry
Speaker 2: towards minorities. Even within a convent, a Catholic institution, you
Speaker 2: would have teachers who would sort of point you out
Speaker 2: and say, oh, aren't you that Mazzi girl from a
Speaker 2: cross down and Mazzi would be Muslim. But school was
Speaker 2: still a place where we did the things that really
Speaker 2: brought us joy to some degree. So I wrote from
Speaker 2: when I was really young, and so I would just
Speaker 2: stand up and read the things I wrote in class.
Speaker 2: I was always the English teacher's better than nobody else's.
Speaker 2: My sister loved to dance, and so she would just
Speaker 2: break into dance in the hallways, and you know, the
Speaker 2: teachers would point at her and be like, oh, that
Speaker 2: kid needs to be on our stage at the end
Speaker 2: of the year. So it was a place for us
Speaker 2: to also show ourselves in a way that we just
Speaker 2: be seen within our household. But school still had its
Speaker 2: own sort of micro tensions, and we were working our
Speaker 2: way through it and in a way that is not
Speaker 2: unique to us. It's not a story that is only
Speaker 2: this by and mind. It's the story of every single
Speaker 2: human in South Asia who goes to this sort of
Speaker 2: diverse and complicated school in a diverse and complicated society.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Speaker 1: It's February twenty seventh, two thousand and two. Zara is sixteen.
Speaker 1: In the nearby town of Gujarat, a train appears to
Speaker 1: have been set on fire. There are many casualties. At
Speaker 1: least fifty eight people have died. The state's chief minister,
Speaker 1: Narendra Modi immediately labels this as an act of terror.
Speaker 1: Remember where we are in time, February two thousand and two,
Speaker 1: Just months after the attacks on the World Trade Center
Speaker 1: on September eleventh, two thousand and one.
Speaker 2: To have grown up in India in the eighties and
Speaker 2: nineties is to have known violence. There has been sectarian
Speaker 2: violence and ethnic violence in sports throughout our nation's independent history.
Speaker 2: And so even as I was four or five or
Speaker 2: six growing up in Ambalabad, I remember for something as
Speaker 2: silly as if, you know, India and Pakistan had a
Speaker 2: cricket match and Pakistan won and India lost. Everybody would
Speaker 2: get upset about it and then go out and burn
Speaker 2: somebody's bike and you know, start burning tires. And so
Speaker 2: for me to stand on the balcony of my building
Speaker 2: and look down and see people burning things because they're
Speaker 2: mad because of you know, cricket match was not unusual.
Speaker 2: This was a place where children were already kind of
Speaker 2: accustomed in some strange way to this sort of minimized
Speaker 2: and normalized violence. But what happened in two thousand and
Speaker 2: two is that there was a train coming into Gujrat
Speaker 2: to a station close to Ahmadabad from a city in
Speaker 2: central India called Ayodya. It's a city that people now
Speaker 2: recognize because it's been back in the news for a
Speaker 2: while with the resurgence of modin India. But Ayodya in
Speaker 2: central India is known for a lot of Hindus in
Speaker 2: their sort of mythological and faith imagination as the birthplace
Speaker 2: of law Dram, who was one of the biggest deities
Speaker 2: in the Hindu faith. In nineteen ninety two, a mob
Speaker 2: of almost one hundred thousand Hindu religious workers slash volunteers
Speaker 2: vigilantes had been brought there by the BJP, which is
Speaker 2: the big Hindu right party in India and its many
Speaker 2: affiliated parties, had brought this mob of one hundred thousand
Speaker 2: angry people to a mosque that was in Ayudia, and
Speaker 2: the mosque itself was about five hundred years old from
Speaker 2: the Mughal dynasty. And they were so enraged because they
Speaker 2: had been told the story for decades by the Hindu
Speaker 2: right that this place used to be the birthplace of
Speaker 2: Laudram and this mosque was built on it by desecrating
Speaker 2: that holy place. And so this mob of one hundred
Speaker 2: thousand charges at this building and with pick axes and
Speaker 2: knives and stones and rocks and hammers, they bring this
Speaker 2: whole ancient monument crashing down. And as they do it.
Speaker 2: This new starts to spread across India, and this is
Speaker 2: in the early nineties when we don't yet have live
Speaker 2: news and live televisions, certainly no Internet. But it starts
Speaker 2: to trickle down into cities like mine in Mderbagh, and
Speaker 2: there's rioting, there's looting, there's burning in all of these places.
Speaker 2: And yet for the decade after that, it was like
Speaker 2: Indians did what we always did. We saw these bursts
Speaker 2: of violence and then we found our way back to
Speaker 2: peace and we said, you know what, we believe in secularism,
Speaker 2: we believe in coexistence. We're going to make this work.
Speaker 2: And so we had found this tenuous piece in a
Speaker 2: place like Amedabad. But a lot of these folks who
Speaker 2: had initially demolished the mosque and or who believed that
Speaker 2: that's the place that Lordraam was born and they wanted
Speaker 2: a temple there. They kept going back each year on
Speaker 2: these quote unquote pilgrimages to au there. And one such
Speaker 2: train of pilgrims was coming back to Ameddabad in two
Speaker 2: thousand and two in February, and on the twenty seventh
Speaker 2: of February, that train with the carriages that were carrying
Speaker 2: these pilgrims caught fire. This was less than six months
Speaker 2: after this language of terror and violence and terrorism had
Speaker 2: very clearly and closely been attached to the identity of Muslims.
Speaker 2: And while America might have done it with the radar
Speaker 2: pointed at the Middle East, it really had this fluctuating
Speaker 2: sort of rippling effect across the globe, including in communities
Speaker 2: like mine and states like mine. And so when the
Speaker 2: chief Minister, who sort of like the governor for our state,
Speaker 2: goes to the site of this carnage just a few
Speaker 2: hours after it's happened, there's been no forensic analysis, there
Speaker 2: hasn't yet been a full investigation, and he simply calls
Speaker 2: it an act of error. That phrase alone is enough
Speaker 2: to activate the hate that has been simmering underneath all
Speaker 2: of this for decades.
Speaker 1: So then in fairly short order it becomes clear that
Speaker 1: the fires that you're seeing from your balcony are not
Speaker 1: a minor thing. Word starts coming from all over the place,
Speaker 1: from relatives in different parts of India that if you
Speaker 1: are a Muslim, you are in danger.
Speaker 2: Right, And so that very evening of the twenty seventh
Speaker 2: of February two thousand and two, we were all sitting
Speaker 2: in our apartment, and my father was just pacing up
Speaker 2: and down, actually waiting for my mom to come back
Speaker 2: home from the bazaar. She would do this thing where
Speaker 2: she would run off to the bazaar to go grab
Speaker 2: a few things, but really it was her way of
Speaker 2: getting away from the apartment and from all of us,
Speaker 2: and she had been gone for almost three or four
Speaker 2: hours at the time, and he was waiting for her
Speaker 2: to come back home. What I didn't understand at the
Speaker 2: time was that he was also waiting for her to
Speaker 2: come back home because news of this train burning had
Speaker 2: just broken out. Our usual protocol living on this side
Speaker 2: of the city, in this ghetto was buy all your supplies,
Speaker 2: talk up your fridge, make sure you have everything you
Speaker 2: need so in case for the next two or three
Speaker 2: days there's a curfew, there's a lockdown, You'll be fine.
Speaker 2: You can survive, you can feed your family. And Yet,
Speaker 2: when we sat down to ashually look at the news
Speaker 2: that evening and my mom came back, and we realized
Speaker 2: the gravity of what had happened, the fact that these
Speaker 2: were religious pilgrims, that we lived in a state, whether
Speaker 2: Hindu rites were in power, this language of terror was
Speaker 2: already circulating, and there was news that the bodies of
Speaker 2: these folks who had perished in the carnage were going
Speaker 2: to be then paraded in a convoy across the state
Speaker 2: and brought to Mzabad. We knew in our bones that
Speaker 2: this was not going to be like any other violence
Speaker 2: or any other spurt of rioting, that this was going
Speaker 2: to be something bigger. And so the very next morning,
Speaker 2: as I woke up in a city that was under curfew,
Speaker 2: I knew that a curfew usually means nobody steps out.
Speaker 2: There's usually shoot at side orders, or at least there's
Speaker 2: police all around, and you can't step out to your street,
Speaker 2: you can't go buy anything. The shops at close schools
Speaker 2: are shut. And I remember walking out onto the balcony
Speaker 2: of our apartment, and that balcony really was the place
Speaker 2: room where I could see the whole city. And I
Speaker 2: suddenly start to see these spirals of smoke across the
Speaker 2: river but also on our side of the river. And
Speaker 2: that's when I know that the burning has started, that
Speaker 2: for sure, there are not only other people riding on
Speaker 2: the street, but that this is very clearly now about
Speaker 2: the Muslims, and it's about punishing the Muslims for the
Speaker 2: thing that has been done to the dream.
Speaker 1: In a home already so full of simmering tension that
Speaker 1: simmer comes to a boil as terror, violence, and fear encroaches.
Speaker 1: By this point, Zara's grandfather has already passed away, so
Speaker 1: he is not witnessed to this catastrophe. But their home
Speaker 1: is as crowded and tense as always, and now they're
Speaker 1: not just crowded, they're trapped under curfew, and all of
Speaker 1: this at an especially tender time for Zara. She's just
Speaker 1: about to take her board exams. In many ways, this
Speaker 1: would have been her ticket out.
Speaker 2: It's so interesting that that year when this happens is
Speaker 2: my tenth grade, and in the tenth grade in India,
Speaker 2: you have to give these exams, these very big major
Speaker 2: exams an end of yeer are called the boards, and
Speaker 2: the boards essentially allow you to decide if you can
Speaker 2: go into the sciences or the humanities, or hammer or whatever.
Speaker 2: And so in many ways their career defining for us.
Speaker 2: And there's a lot of pressure on these exams, and
Speaker 2: for me, these exams were actually about to happen within
Speaker 2: a week to ten days from that day when the
Speaker 2: train burned, and so up till that day, I was
Speaker 2: really with my nose deep inside textbooks, just waiting to
Speaker 2: sort of memorize all of this and go give my
Speaker 2: exams and you know, vomit it all out on an
Speaker 2: exam paper somewhere and get some sort of decent grade,
Speaker 2: get to the next level in my eleventh and twelve,
Speaker 2: go off to college, just get the hell out of here. Instead,
Speaker 2: what happens is now we're stuck in curfew. My aunt,
Speaker 2: who had moved out to an apartment across the city,
Speaker 2: move back in with her daughter, and with the boards
Speaker 2: postponed indefinitely, no idea when they're going to happen, and
Speaker 2: all of us just sort of waiting and holding our
Speaker 2: breath each night. It becomes this atmosphere of knowing what
Speaker 2: it feels like to be prey, to be hunted. And
Speaker 2: it's striking to me to remember now that that's also
Speaker 2: the year when we were actually taught about the Holocaust
Speaker 2: in India. Just a year ago previous to this, my
Speaker 2: history teacher had actually given me the Diary of Ann
Speaker 2: Frank as a gift because she saw how I love
Speaker 2: to write, and she saw how I was just so
Speaker 2: involved in learning about what had happened to the Jews
Speaker 2: in Germany and across Europe. And I remember, even through
Speaker 2: those early days of the lockdown, sort of looking at
Speaker 2: that copy of that book and lying in our living
Speaker 2: room on a little couch there with that book, and
Speaker 2: just not knowing how my life had suddenly become this weird,
Speaker 2: strange parallel to what that young girl was feeling in
Speaker 2: that Suddenly it felt like there was a microscope somewhere
Speaker 2: and on a strip there were people like me that
Speaker 2: were going to be studied and looked for because we
Speaker 2: were looking and we were listening to these stories of
Speaker 2: mobs rampaging the streets with lists in their hands, knowing
Speaker 2: which homes are Muslims, which businesses are Muslim, who is
Speaker 2: married to a Muslim, whose child is dating a Muslim,
Speaker 2: and how they could go around nabbing exactly that person
Speaker 2: they were looking for, in many cases really checking to
Speaker 2: see their circumcised or not, and then burning them alive
Speaker 2: on the street. So it became this way of understanding
Speaker 2: that the way you look, the name, you carry, the
Speaker 2: identity markers on you have already marked you as a target.
Speaker 2: And to then just sit in this apartment with nowhere
Speaker 2: to go, nowhere to run, and every few days to
Speaker 2: hear these mobs of people trying to break into your neighborhood,
Speaker 2: break through the police barrier, really just wanting to get
Speaker 2: their hands on you. It was that sort of terror
Speaker 2: that goes on to live in your bones.
Speaker 1: That period of time. How did it act upon your father,
Speaker 1: your parents? There's a scenario in which that it could
Speaker 1: have brought them closer together, where your father could have
Speaker 1: been drinking less, or your grandmother could maybe have been nicer.
Speaker 1: I mean, how did it act upon them during that
Speaker 1: time when you were so completely trapped with them.
Speaker 2: There's this funny thing about how when somebody controls them
Speaker 2: out of oxygen you can have, then everybody is going
Speaker 2: to fight to breathe, right, And that's sort of how
Speaker 2: it felt in that house, So like we were all
Speaker 2: sort of fighting to breathe and live a little longer,
Speaker 2: and sometimes fighting each other. And we had been doing
Speaker 2: that for years in many ways, just sort of you know,
Speaker 2: wanting to be seen in this household that didn't seem
Speaker 2: to fully see anyone. But during the lockdown, it felt
Speaker 2: like there was this both sides. On the one hand,
Speaker 2: there was solidarity where all of us women, my aunt,
Speaker 2: my cousin, my sister, my Moham, and I we would
Speaker 2: just sort of get together on the bed in the
Speaker 2: night and we would be massaging my aunt's feet she
Speaker 2: had very close veins that were really painful, and laughing
Speaker 2: and giggling and trying to feel better about our circumstances.
Speaker 2: And then there would be other times where just because
Speaker 2: we couldn't have enough milk in the house and my
Speaker 2: dad couldn't have his full glass or his full cup
Speaker 2: of chie or my grandmother couldn't have eggs the way
Speaker 2: she wanted, that would just be uproar over breakfast. And
Speaker 2: so that's kind of dissonance, you know, not recognizing that
Speaker 2: you're in the middle of an active annihilation and you're
Speaker 2: still kind of being petty and we're all picking on
Speaker 2: each other in these ways. But despite that, I thinking
Speaker 2: that there was this external force and this exterminating force
Speaker 2: that was looking at us as just vermin as people
Speaker 2: to be cleansed out of here. It did bring us
Speaker 2: a sense of safety in just seeing other people around
Speaker 2: us alive through those days. I think as much as
Speaker 2: I had this history of really having a very antagonistic
Speaker 2: relationship with my grandmother. She hated me, I hated her
Speaker 2: for most of my growin years, and yet there would
Speaker 2: be delight in just seeing her do the most basic
Speaker 2: things every day. You know, she would wake up and
Speaker 2: put curlors in her hair in front of the mirror
Speaker 2: and hum a song and still wear her lovely chiffon, sorry,
Speaker 2: and wear her string of pearls, and still sit even
Speaker 2: within this massacre. And to see her do those basic
Speaker 2: routine things on a daily basis. I remember watching her
Speaker 2: sometimes in front of the mirror and saying, well, this
Speaker 2: is what it feels like to be alive.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back. In April, curfew is slightly lifted
Speaker 1: and the boards get announced again, but tensions are so high.
Speaker 1: There's concern that this invitation to take the boards is
Speaker 1: a trap and that Muslim students who show up will
Speaker 1: be targets. But Zara is determined because her future depends
Speaker 1: on performing well on these boards. Azara is contending with this.
Speaker 1: She also overhears her mother on the telephone. She catches
Speaker 1: something about Madras and realizes her mother is plotting her
Speaker 1: own escape.
Speaker 2: So to understand the plot to escape, you actually have
Speaker 2: to understand where my father was at this point. So
Speaker 2: my father had come back from America in the eighties
Speaker 2: after his big debacle and not taken up a job
Speaker 2: in the Gujarat government in their electricity board, and he
Speaker 2: very quickly understood that his Muslim identity was not really
Speaker 2: welcome in this workplace. And throughout the years growing up
Speaker 2: and through those evenings of watching him frustrated and sort
Speaker 2: of given to alcoholism, the one thing we had understood
Speaker 2: is that the electricity board when my father worked, was
Speaker 2: a place that was perpetuating slow violence on this man.
Speaker 2: That every day he came back from work diminished and
Speaker 2: degraded and made to feel like a second class citizen
Speaker 2: at his own workplace. And so just the year before
Speaker 2: the violence broke out in two thousand and two, my
Speaker 2: father had taken quote unquote voluntary retirement from the government.
Speaker 2: Now there's a whole story to how much that arm
Speaker 2: had been twisted to get him to take that voluntary
Speaker 2: retirement and leave. But for a man who had had
Speaker 2: twenty years in service in public service and who had
Speaker 2: really thought that he was following in his father's footsteps,
Speaker 2: he was doing the right thing. He was doing what
Speaker 2: was expected of him. That was a blow that he
Speaker 2: never recovered from. And so for almost a year before
Speaker 2: the train even burned, I had watched my father just
Speaker 2: take a shower every morning where his pajamas again, lie
Speaker 2: down on the bed where my grandfather used to lie
Speaker 2: before he died, and just watched the fans circling over him.
Speaker 2: He was not a very religious man, so he didn't
Speaker 2: know a lot of prayers and chants. But whatever little
Speaker 2: he knew, he would just keep sort of repeating it
Speaker 2: over and over like a children's rhyme. And this man,
Speaker 2: who who had been so big and towering and frightful
Speaker 2: for me when we were younger, was slowly just sort
Speaker 2: of shrinking into this vegetable on this bed. And so
Speaker 2: in two thousand and two, three months into the lockdown,
Speaker 2: when we knew that the exams were happening not happening,
Speaker 2: at some point they would announce them and we'd have
Speaker 2: to I would have to go give them. My mom
Speaker 2: had possibly just had enough, and she usually would not
Speaker 2: dare to ask my father for a break. She would
Speaker 2: not dare to ask my father for money, She would
Speaker 2: not look at him or turn to him for any
Speaker 2: kind of support, because that's how their marriage had sort
Speaker 2: of rotten from the inside. But this spring, as the
Speaker 2: violence outside grew, her brothers from the US called her
Speaker 2: up and they tell her on the phone that her mom,
Speaker 2: who has been living in America, is going to be visiting,
Speaker 2: and that she will be in Madras for a few
Speaker 2: months and that she would love to see the kids
Speaker 2: in her And my mom doesn't tell us this. She
Speaker 2: just quietly listens to them, takes in the news that
Speaker 2: her mother is going to be visiting, and she's not
Speaker 2: usually allowed to go see her mom. It's a contentious
Speaker 2: topic in our house how much my mother is allowed
Speaker 2: to travel by herself or go anywhere by herself. And
Speaker 2: so she just comes to us one afternoon when Miss
Speaker 2: buy and I are sitting there sort of just trying
Speaker 2: to count down the days till my exams, and she's
Speaker 2: holding the phone in her hand, and she's been on
Speaker 2: the phone with somebody that works in the railway's department
Speaker 2: and that is a family friend and can possibly help
Speaker 2: us get tickets to Madras. And then I hear her
Speaker 2: saying on the phone, yes, I only need three tickets,
Speaker 2: which is astounding to me. The idea that this woman
Speaker 2: would say three, and that means that my father is
Speaker 2: not going, means that she is finally rebelling.
Speaker 1: And there's another seminal instance of words overheard that shapes
Speaker 1: this period of time. Psara and her family.
Speaker 2: My father's mother who lived with us, really came into
Speaker 2: her own as the monstrous matriarch. I mean, there's no
Speaker 2: other kind of or simpler way to say it. And
Speaker 2: I laugh as I say this, because somewhere I've made
Speaker 2: her into this cartoon figure in my head to be
Speaker 2: able to deal with who she was to us. But
Speaker 2: with my grandfather passing away, it's sort of like every
Speaker 2: chain that could have held her back, any sort of
Speaker 2: civility that she could have had towards us, melted away.
Speaker 2: And one day I walked past the living room and
Speaker 2: I just overhear her telling my father that, oh, you know,
Speaker 2: I heard Zarah told this relative of ours that she
Speaker 2: would really like it if you and your wife and
Speaker 2: that you've got a divorce, and my heart just sank.
Speaker 2: This was a whole year before the riots and the
Speaker 2: fires and everything, but this was also when my father
Speaker 2: had just lost his job. He was already this man
Speaker 2: who was broken and who was lying in bed each
Speaker 2: day staring into nothingness. We were on the cusp of
Speaker 2: going off to high school and college, and we had
Speaker 2: just sort of found a way to remain in peace
Speaker 2: with our father, To know that he was strange and
Speaker 2: didn't know how to show us his affection fully, that
Speaker 2: he was just not happy with the way his life was,
Speaker 2: and this is all we could get in terms of
Speaker 2: fatherly love. And to hear her say those things to
Speaker 2: him in that moment, even though she had done small
Speaker 2: things like this before and whispered. You know, there's always
Speaker 2: a whisper network of gossip and scandal around us, but
Speaker 2: just so directly walk in there and break her son
Speaker 2: in this way. It was shattering to hear. It was
Speaker 2: also terrifying to hear because I knew what would come next.
Speaker 2: I knew that it would in some ways solidify the
Speaker 2: growing paranoia in my father's head that his wife was
Speaker 2: going to run off and his children didn't want him,
Speaker 2: and that all of his life was going to come
Speaker 2: down to being a failure.
Speaker 1: There is yet another complexity hovering that is invisibly hovering
Speaker 1: over the atmosphere in Zara's home and particularly within her parents' marriage,
Speaker 1: something that has been there, deeply felt unspoken, the kind
Speaker 1: of sorrow and grief that has the power to shape everything.
Speaker 1: In the two years before Zara was born, her parents
Speaker 1: had had and lost a son.
Speaker 2: Growing up, I always had the suspicion, even though nobody
Speaker 2: said these things directly in our home, but I always
Speaker 2: had a suspicion that my father's family would have rather
Speaker 2: had boys than my sister and me. And they would
Speaker 2: say a lot of things, you know, cover it up
Speaker 2: about it. Oh, you know, girls are like gods luxury,
Speaker 2: and they bring so much luck. And look at all
Speaker 2: the women in our family. Everybody is so highly educated,
Speaker 2: and sisters a professor, and all of these things. But
Speaker 2: I just always knew, especially for my dad, in the
Speaker 2: ways that he would light up talking about cricket to me,
Speaker 2: and then something would die in his eyes when he
Speaker 2: would see my disinterest, or the way that he would
Speaker 2: try and teach me how to throw a ball against
Speaker 2: the walls in our hallway, and then how excited he
Speaker 2: would get if I could do it well. And it
Speaker 2: was these small ways in which I realized that this
Speaker 2: man should have been dad to a boy, and that
Speaker 2: instead he was stuck with two girls who he didn't
Speaker 2: really know what to do with, and there was always
Speaker 2: this howering sense of disappointment in our lives. But my
Speaker 2: mom had mentioned once or twice to us growing up
Speaker 2: about a child whom she simply called Mohammed, and Mohammed
Speaker 2: usually is just the name you give to every new
Speaker 2: child at birth, and she said that there was a
Speaker 2: baby before you. But you know, I didn't live, and
Speaker 2: I didn't understand too much growing up of it. I
Speaker 2: thought this was just you know, a pregnancy that she
Speaker 2: didn't fully carry, or perhaps she never really you know,
Speaker 2: saw the baby, something went wrong as she was delivering.
Speaker 2: But it was many years later, actually, and over many
Speaker 2: conversations with my mother, that I'd slowly been able to
Speaker 2: piece the story together. And the story is that, right
Speaker 2: as soon as she got married to my dad and
Speaker 2: moved to Gudhath, into this new state, this new family,
Speaker 2: this new culture, she found herself pregnant just a few
Speaker 2: months later. And this was a twenty one year old woman,
Speaker 2: you know, just hasn't even fully graduated from college, and
Speaker 2: now she finds self having a child with a man
Speaker 2: who she's only getting to know and not fully convinced
Speaker 2: she really likes or loves at this point, and she
Speaker 2: goes through what is a very difficult pregnancy, and she's
Speaker 2: told in her six or seventh month by the doctor
Speaker 2: in Amabat that something doesn't seem right and she shouldn't
Speaker 2: either go ahead with it or that then she needs
Speaker 2: to sew up the lining of her uterus and take
Speaker 2: these extra medications and injections and whatnot. And again, she's
Speaker 2: essentially a young girl who's having these things happen to
Speaker 2: her body for the first time. And so, as is
Speaker 2: cultural for us, she is sent off to her mother's
Speaker 2: house in Madras to deliver the baby, and usually the
Speaker 2: ideas that the husband will come in when the baby
Speaker 2: is born and take the family back home. And so
Speaker 2: she goes to Madras and she's trying to be happy
Speaker 2: and joyful about the fact that this is going to
Speaker 2: be her first child, and the doctor does tell her
Speaker 2: that it might be a boy, and so what a
Speaker 2: prize that is that, you know, first shot, she's got it.
Speaker 2: She's giving them the sun, the male air that they
Speaker 2: want in many ways. And then she delivers. She goes
Speaker 2: into labor and she delivers, and he does happen to
Speaker 2: be a beautiful baby boy. And he's brought into her
Speaker 2: arms and she gets to look at him, and then
Speaker 2: she realizes that he has a cleft palate, and the
Speaker 2: doctor tells her that the baby's brain is not fully developed,
Speaker 2: and that this baby is not going to live for
Speaker 2: more than two days. And so this woman who thought
Speaker 2: her life had only just begun and that somehow, especially
Speaker 2: by having this male child, it would fill with joy
Speaker 2: and flowers, and that she would find acceptance and validity
Speaker 2: and love in this man and in this family, she
Speaker 2: is suddenly holding a child that's about to die, and
Speaker 2: her husband not even there, the man she made this childhood,
Speaker 2: is not around to hold her. The next day, my
Speaker 2: father takes an emergency slight out of Ambabad, which is
Speaker 2: very expensive to do at the time, flies into Madras,
Speaker 2: and just as he lands in Madras and is driving
Speaker 2: to the hospital, is around the time when the baby
Speaker 2: passes away. So he never actually gets to hold his
Speaker 2: son or see his son. And so he goes home
Speaker 2: and he sees my mother, who's also there without child,
Speaker 2: empty womb, just sitting there, looking completely numb and lost,
Speaker 2: and he just goes up to her and puts his
Speaker 2: hand on her head and on her shoulder, and the
Speaker 2: way my mother tells me this now, she says it
Speaker 2: very flippantly, because it's almost like she doesn't want to
Speaker 2: be there sitting on that bed anymore in her memory.
Speaker 2: But to me, it seems like man and woman that
Speaker 2: were strangers to each other, that were put in this
Speaker 2: life together, that made this baby. We're trying to grieve
Speaker 2: a thing that they didn't even fully understand had happened
Speaker 2: to them. And that was the only time that she
Speaker 2: cried and my father held her, and then he never
Speaker 2: spoke about this child ever again. I never once in
Speaker 2: his lifetime heard him speak to me about mom.
Speaker 1: Of course, never speaking of it again creates its own problems.
Speaker 1: As Zara writes in her memoir, guilt made her father
Speaker 1: a monster. The tension between her parents grew and grew
Speaker 1: on this toxic, fertile soil. And so when Zara overhears
Speaker 1: her mother on that phone call plotting her escape to Madras,
Speaker 1: her mother is attempting to secure only three tickets for
Speaker 1: herself and her daughters, and Zara's father, while he doesn't
Speaker 1: his blessing does give them permission to go.
Speaker 2: When my mother told him that she was taking the
Speaker 2: girls and leaving and going to Madras. It was supposed
Speaker 2: to be just for a break, just for a sort
Speaker 2: of quiet, small little getaway, so we could just get
Speaker 2: our brains back together and feel like full humans again.
Speaker 2: And yet somewhere I think my father knew that we're
Speaker 2: never coming back. And when he says, all right, you
Speaker 2: can go. It happens on the last day of my
Speaker 2: boards because while he was bringing me back from the exam,
Speaker 2: he is stopped by the cops on the street. And
Speaker 2: this is a man who takes such pride in belonging
Speaker 2: to his land. He knows every street of the city
Speaker 2: that he's grown up in, he knows people wherever he
Speaker 2: goes in this city. It is a city that knows
Speaker 2: him and loves him and owns him, and he belongs
Speaker 2: to it. And in that say, to be asked to
Speaker 2: get out of your car, to be searched humiliatingly in
Speaker 2: the middle of the street, in the middle of people
Speaker 2: watching him, and to be belittled and minimized and laughed
Speaker 2: and walked at him and sent off on your way.
Speaker 2: It's a thing that I didn't recognize then, But now
Speaker 2: that I feel like I understand my father, I know
Speaker 2: where it went and sat inside him. And how when
Speaker 2: he came home and he said, all right, go to Madras.
Speaker 2: That was my father saying you deserve this piece, and
Speaker 2: you deserve to go belong somewhere, because right now none
Speaker 2: of us belong to this place, and this place doesn't
Speaker 2: want any of us.
Speaker 1: Tzara's father does eventually come to Madras, but his presence
Speaker 1: there is short lived. He returns to the Jasmin apartments
Speaker 1: to c eight, and when Zara is nineteen, he passes
Speaker 1: away from cancer. In the meantime, Zara has aced her
Speaker 1: boards and finally the world opens up to her. Full
Speaker 1: of promise and possibility, she makes her way in the
Speaker 1: world to an innate combination of resilience, constitution, nature, and grit.
Speaker 1: But in order to thrive, Zara also needs to sever
Speaker 1: ties from her grandmother, who has been such a destructive influence.
Speaker 1: So she writes a letter disowning her grandmother and sends
Speaker 1: it to everyone in their community whose opinion matters. She
Speaker 1: never speaks to her grandmother again, and yet Ahmedabad holds
Speaker 1: sway over Zara and perhaps always will. She returns from
Speaker 1: time to time to the place that she will always
Speaker 1: carry with her.
Speaker 2: From the day I got on that train to leave
Speaker 2: Anderbad to everywhere that I have been in this world.
Speaker 2: I've lived in Mumbai and Hazerabad in the UK and
Speaker 2: in the US, and traveled across the world when I
Speaker 2: worked in film and so on. I have carried that
Speaker 2: feeling of being dislodged so much in my heart that
Speaker 2: that almost feels like home. I think, knowing that there
Speaker 2: are places in the world that might not want you
Speaker 2: because of the lievers you carry. It could be of faith,
Speaker 2: it could be of gender, it could be of who
Speaker 2: you decide to love and how you choose to live.
Speaker 2: But there are places in this world where you will
Speaker 2: not be welcome, even if you are off that land,
Speaker 2: even if you were born there, even if your ancestors
Speaker 2: are buried in that land. And so I've had to
Speaker 2: find ways to carry the land with me and within me.
Speaker 2: And to do that, I've had to go back and
Speaker 2: look at the parts of my own people that I
Speaker 2: could love. I've had to look at my father and
Speaker 2: remember how he would dance to Moster Pateli Khan's Sufi music,
Speaker 2: and he would light up when he would hear that song.
Speaker 2: I've had to go back and remember how incense smelt
Speaker 2: when my grandfather took us to all these shrines across
Speaker 2: Amberabad and prayed there with us. I make sure to
Speaker 2: hold and wear Fabrican textile that has hand block printed
Speaker 2: flowers that were so typical of Ambabad, where my mother
Speaker 2: spent hours and hours in the bazaar of me showing
Speaker 2: me how to match a pattern with the color. And
Speaker 2: so it's in these material ways that I surround myself.
Speaker 2: But I also have this deep, deep, deep belief that
Speaker 2: for every breath that I take, there will be a
Speaker 2: part of me that will always belong in the soil
Speaker 2: of amber Bad, and that I carry the soil of
Speaker 2: amza Bad with me.
Speaker 1: Here's Zara reading one last passage from her remarkable memoir
Speaker 1: The Lucky Ones.
Speaker 2: Some days when it feels like my motherland is forsaking me,
Speaker 2: telling me I am not hers, she is not mine,
Speaker 2: and my soul wants to cry like an orphan child,
Speaker 2: I remind myself that my belonging was bequeathed to me
Speaker 2: by the best of mothers, my Ammah. She lost a child,
Speaker 2: a chance at love, a life of freedom that she
Speaker 2: chose mis by and me to empty herself into. We
Speaker 2: own everything that is great and beautiful and redeemable about
Speaker 2: our country. It's humor, it's refuge, it's magnanimity, its humility,
Speaker 2: its ability to bend and absorb every shot of grief
Speaker 2: thrown its way, and from it to grow flowers, to
Speaker 2: meet life.
Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zaccur is
Speaker 1: the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
Speaker 1: If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
Speaker 1: please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
Speaker 1: on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
Speaker 1: eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
Speaker 1: find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd
Speaker 1: like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
Speaker 1: check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
Speaker 1: visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
Speaker 1: to your favorite shows.