City on Fire : A Boyhood in Aligarh

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.