City of Fear

by Robin David

How to stay normal when things fall an unexpurgated account. In two successive years Gujarat, and in particular Ahmedabad, was visited by two calamities, one natural and the other man-made. On 26 January 2001 an earthquake struck, killing thousands. A year later, Gujarat underwent a communal carnage that once more undermined all the certainties of life. For Robin David, an assistant editor with the Times of India, the two events engendered a tectonic shift in his own life. The earthquake left huge cracks in his ancestral home. And the riots made the simple act of walking through a familiar neighbourhood dangerous - especially as his house was located on the dividing line between two communities. Reluctantly, he and his mother decided to shift to another locality. The migration forced them to leave behind an entire lifestyle and an intriguing domestic history of stuffed animals with their glassy stares, family heirlooms and large stacks of receipts, bills and letters - a compendium of life's minutiae - that his grandfather had never been able to part with. that making a new home was not as easy as they had imagined.

264 pages, Paperback

First published December 10, 2007

Reviews

[Adam Clark · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a quite astonishing extended phallic metaphor which is almost worth getting the book for alone. Sorry for starting with that, but it does stick in the mind.

Otherwise this is a curious personal tale of the trauma caused by the deadly 2001 Gujarat earthquake and subsequent communal violence in 2002 and its effects on the author and his Jewish-Indian family. Much of it is darkly comic, some of it is straight first-hand reportage, other parts are close to magical realism.

Not all of it works -see the metaphor mentioned above- but there are many brilliant passages. A reporting trip into the riots that could easily turn deadly if the mob discovers the author´s circumcision, or an extended piece on the motions of the dust from a dried out riverbed. At times the book can be fragmentary, repetitive (snakes, ghosts and light recur) or confusing in the way of nightmares but it's absorbing at the same time.

[June · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent account of the Hindu-Muslim conflict in Gujarat, by a Jewish journalist caught between both sides.

[Danish · Rating 5 out of 5]

very well written and quite affecting account of the riots. more importantly forms a real connect of sorts.