City on Fire: A Boyhood in Aligarh

City on Fire is a rare visceral portrait of how everyday violence and hate become part of our lives and consciousness, of a society where name and clothes mark out a person as the ''other''. Zeyad Masroor Khan was four years old when he realized that an innocent act of playing with 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 rumours of a bloodthirsty mob on the prowl.

• | Author: Zeyad Masroor Khan
• | Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
• | Publication Date: Mar 21, 2025
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• | Binding: Paperback / softback
• | ISBN-13: 9789365693102
• | ISBN-10: 9365693101