City of Fear

An extraordinary account of ordinary people in troubled times

In 2001, a calamitous earthquake struck Gujarat. A year later came the kind of communal carnage the nation had not seen since the Partition. For Robin David, then an assistant editor with the Times of India, the two events engendered a tectonic shift in his own life. The earthquake left deep cracks in his ancestral home, while the riots undermined all the certainties of life, making it impossible to walk through hitherto familiar neighbourhoods. A decade later, the wounds have not healed. At a time when the memory of the riots has already faded in the minds of many, City of Fear documents the varied forms of fear that people in Gujarat experienced during that period, especially those of the author s own Indian Jewish Bene Israeli family.