City on Fire cover art

City on Fire

A Boyhood in Aligarh

Preview

£0.00 for first 30 days

Try for £0.00
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

City on Fire

By: Zeyad Masroor Khan
Narrated by: Adwait Karambelkar
Try for £0.00

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £8.99

Buy Now for £8.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

'An intimate new memoir about growing up amid everyday communalism'—The Hindu

Zeyad Masroor Khan was four years old when he realized that an innocent act of clicking 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 rumors of a bloodthirsty mob on the prowl.

In his coming-of-age memoir, Khan writes, with searing honesty and raw power, about the undercurrents of religious violence and the ensuing 'othering' that followed him everywhere he went: from his schooldays in Aligarh, when hopping over to the lending library to the 'Hindu' part of town to find his favorite comic book or lighting candles with neighbors on Diwali was fraught with tension; through his years as a college student in Delhi, where being denied apartments because of his name was the norm; to ultimately becoming a journalist documenting history of his country as it happened.

City on Fire is a rare, visceral portrait of how everyday violence and hate become a part of our lives and consciousness; 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

©2023 Zeyad Masroor Khan (P)2024 HarperCollins Publishers
Biographies & Memoirs Hinduism City
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

Listeners also enjoyed...

H-Pop cover art
Twilight Prisoners cover art
Ashoka cover art
2024 cover art
Before I Forget cover art

What listeners say about City on Fire

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.