When Home Turns Hostile
An intimate new memoir about growing up amid love and hate that reveals the dark soul of India.

Zeyad Masroor Khan fell in love for the first time at the age of five. It was this love that drew him out of the comforting embrace of Farsh Manzil, his ancestral home in Uttar Pradesh’s Aligarh, on the ‘unofficial Line of Control between adjacent Hindu and Muslim ghettos’, and fuelled his first direct interactions with Hindus.
In Upar Kot or UK, where Khan grew up, comic books were considered the “pinnacle of vice”, he writes in his memoir City On Fire: A Boyhood in Aligarh. Comics took him to Hindu neighbourhoods, though warnings to avoid these areas where there were "no Muslims in sight" were dire: "Have you seen the well in Katra? Many bodies of little Muslim kids are found in it. They lure you in with comic books and kill you."
Khan ventured fearfully, usually with a friend, and equipped with an authentic sounding Hindu pseudonym such as Abhinav in case anyone asked. It is thanks to this infatuation—the first of many loves such as video games, mixtapes and even the Tablighi Jamaat—that the reader is treated to a crash course in Hindi comics, where secret agents such as Ram and Rahim save the country from terrorists, aliens and vampires. Rahim, Khan soon realises, is the only Muslim hero in a world where his community always plays the part of loyal sidekick or villain. The author will have you know that Diamond Comics are for kids, Tulsi Comics are too Hinduised, and Raj and Manoj Comics are the DC and Marvel of India respectively.

I’m not a big fan of young Indian men writing coming-of-age memoirs. For me, the apparent ease and confidence with which men write memoirs only serves as a grim reminder of the stunning stories that hibernate in the deepest recesses of women’s hearts, never making it to an editor’s desk. But as the lives of Indian Muslims are turned inside out and as they are made to feel unwanted in their own country, attacked for the way they dress, pray, eat, speak, Khan’s book is an important reminder of how home can turn hostile.
Khan’s country is a place where neighbours who are nice to you can become menacing as soon as a clash breaks out. Where families may abandon property because it was set on fire during a riot. Where you’re likely to witness the death of innocents, only because of their religion. Where a member of the mob that attacks your school bus may recognise you and identify you as Muslim—and from whom you may buy groceries a few days later, as if nothing happened. Where the only rule is not to trust the other community or you might end up dead. Violence is a continuum and a cloud of fear tracks you doggedly. “Before it occurs in the physical realm, ghettoisation begins in the minds of men and women,” Khan writes.
India is a divided country and yet, a lesson Khan learns years later, after he leaves home and then returns, is that those who are actually impacted by the everyday communal tragedies that unfold here are not the ones who make political capital of their losses. They recognise that all people of a particular religion are not responsible for the horror that they may have faced.
City on Fire is an intimate growing up story about love and hate that you’ve likely not heard told with such honesty before. “As a society we have never accepted that we are fearful and hateful in our hearts, and that’s why we can’t get over it,” Khan writes, analysing our long-running affair with hate. “After all, can we ever get over something we don’t even see?”
Riots and trauma surface with alarming regularity through Khan’s childhood and boyhood. His first encounter with a polarised city is at age four, when he presses a button hanging above a window at home, that is seemingly not connected to anything. It turns out to be an alarm to inform the neighbourhood that Hindu rioters are headed their way. At 15, when he watches a burning jeep on television, his heart is filled with pride that his balcony, under which rioters have burned a new car, is on the national news.
It’s only when he says farewell to Aligarh in 2010 and heads to Delhi to study journalism at Jamia Millia Islamia that he believes he is fulfilling his dream of leaving behind the city where he was “neither caged nor free”.
In adulthood, in Delhi, Khan tells his friends that riots like back home would never happen in the big city. “There would be too much media scrutiny.” Yet a decade after he arrives, in February 2020, communal violence engulfs the capital. After living through the riots, Khan decides to return to Aligarh. That’s also the time he understands that the idea of ‘leaving everything behind’ is just an illusion.
I’m glad Khan didn’t follow the advice of his class teacher, who told him after he wrote a gushy essay on Osama Bin Laden, that he should learn to keep his opinions to himself. “It could get you into trouble some day,” she said. I disagree. We need more people to share their stories as candidly as Khan has.
Priya Ramani is a Bengaluru-based journalist and is on the editorial board of Article-14.com.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of BQ Prime or its editorial team.