The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian
What does it actually feel like to be invisible? Journalist Neha Dixit spent nearly a decade finding out, tracing the life of one working-class Indian woman from the early 1990s right up to the present. The result is quietly devastating. Syeda X fled Banaras for Delhi with her family following the violence that erupted after the demolition of the Babri Masjid. What awaited her in the capital wasn't refuge so much as a different kind of exhaustion: a grinding rotation of low-paid jobs, from trimming denim threads to shelling almonds, cooking namkeen to assembling tea strainers. More than fifty types of work in total, each one precarious, each one replaceable. Take a single day off and someone else steps into your shoes without a second glance. Dixit populates this account with vivid, sometimes brutal, supporting figures: a Chandni Chowk rickshaw driver killed in a terrorist attack, a doctor arrested for determining foetal sex, a vigilante whose sister runs off with Syeda's son, and officers who treat young Muslim men as sport. The narrative arrives at a grim kind of symmetry when Syeda's world is upended yet again during the Delhi riots of 2020. Displacement, it turns out, is simply the texture of her existence. Written with genuine warmth and unflinching clarity, this is a book that holds up a mirror to an India that its privileged residents would rather not see. It speaks for countless others whose stories go unrecorded, and it does so with real moral weight.
- Author: Dixit
- Publisher: Juggernaut
- Genre: Journalism & Media Studies
- ISBN: 978-9353455033
- Pages: 369 pages