City on Fire: A Boyhood in Aligarh

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 serpen...