Our City That Year: A Novel

“That year, in our city, Hindus abandoned their pacifism. We’ve run out of other cheeks to turn, they proclaimed. We’re helpless! they screamed. They climbed atop mosques and waved the flag of Devi from the prongs of tridents proclaiming, What was done to us will be visited on them! Wrong shall be answered with wrong!”

In an unnamed city in India, violence is erupting between Hindus and Muslims, each side viewing the other with suspicion, rage, and blame. As their identities sharpen, friends and colleagues turn against each other. Hospital beds fill up and classrooms empty out. Curfews are imposed. Residents flee en masse.

Three intellectuals find themselves paralyzed by anxiety and fear. Shruti, a creative writer, spends her time writing and rewriting the same sentence. Hanif is sidelined by his academic department for his secular beliefs. And Sharad finds it increasingly difficult to connect with Hanif, his childhood friend. The only one left to bear witness is the novel’s unnamed narrator, who hurries to transcribe everything that’s happening.

Explosive, raw, and uncompromising, Our City That Year unfolds in a time of rising uncertainty and dread, when nothing will go back to being as it was before. Twenty-five years after its original publication in Hindi, Shree’s clarion call to bear witness to the toxic ideology of religious nationalism is timelier than ever, speaking to the growing divisions across global borders.

Translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell