The Many Lives of Syeda X review: Powerful portrait of India’s hapless migrants, helpless poor

That ordinariness does catch our attention now, in the pages of The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian, authored by journalist Neha Dixit and published by Juggernaut. Dixit’s powerful telling of ordinary lives — dirt-poor migrant workers struggling to eke out a living in shanty towns that exist in plain view yet go unacknowledged — is an extraordinary effort in capturing what it takes to survive on the margins, nursing hopes but battling never-ending hopelessness.

A paean to the grit of the poor

The story that Dixit ends up writing is a paean to the grit and gumption of the untold millions adrift on despair in urban India, narrated without condescension. The book is also as much a testimony to the author’s bottomless commitment to narrate and document real stories of a mass of real and unsung people that should really matter.

Tersely told in her last full-time job as a journalist not to waste any more time on telling ‘back-of-beyond’ and ‘bleeding heart stories of misery and deprivation (farmers’ suicides, human trafficking, and the poor being used as guinea pigs for clinical trials of drugs) to focus instead only on subjects that would make the upwardly mobile and the aspirational among us feel good, Dixit thankfully does the exact opposite, shedding light on the grim reality that India spends little time thinking about.

Starting off with a random Muslim family in the rural interiors of Uttar Pradesh trying hard to make ends meet by weaving Banarasi sarees, the book then traverses decades and at least three generations to detail — at length — how the best-laid plans of ordinary people go bust, overtaken by cataclysmic events over which they have no control. They are just helpless and hapless witnesses.

A life less ordinary

Dixit’s protagonist is Syeda and her life story is startling. Upended first by reforms of the early 1990s that ensured home-spun intricately woven Banarasi sarees lose much of their commercial lustre, and then by the riots that followed the Babri Masjid demolition, Syeda and her family of four — husband Akmal, two sons and a daughter — fall victims to the fissures that tear apart the social fabric.

They seek to run away. Initially, they thought about going to Lucknow to rebuild their ordinary lives. Instead, on the spur of the moment, while waiting for a train at the railway station, they board a train to Delhi and arrive in the capital city in 1995, virtually penniless. What unfolds thereafter is nothing short of a gripping roller-coaster ride.

The cast of characters that Syeda and her family encounters expands exponentially. From the rickshaw-puller who accosts them at the New Delhi railway station and dies in a blast a few years later to a dairy-owning Gujjar who brooked no opposition to any threat to his comparatively higher social status, the book then races through one episode after another as Syeda and her family desperately seek to stay afloat in a world that seemingly has little concern for them. Tragically, life comes full circle for Syeda in a haunting and ‘grotesque’ way when she faces yet another devastating blow during the Delhi riots of 2020. It leaves her with little more than shattered dreams and a profound sense of loss.

The Many Lives of Syeda X is a difficult book to write. Researched and reported over nine years, it has a surfeit of layers and myriad characters. The situations that unfold, and the attempts made by Syeda’s family to rebuild what they think could be their little island of happiness, are also incessant and varied. For one, Syeda tries her hand at financially securing her family by doing odd jobs — from helping to stitch jeans to frying namkeens (snacks) and shelling almonds. Having worked in 50 odd jobs in the past thirty years, she is still at it — hopping from one job to another but mostly earning a pittance for her back-breaking labour.

An engrossing tale

The beauty of Dixit’s book is that it keeps the readers enthralled, despite telling us what we most likely already know. Haven’t we heard of the thulla — the pot-bellied paan-chewing police — always on the lookout to extort from people who have very little to give? Or the propensity of law-keepers to lock up Muslim boys and men at the very first opportunity? Syeda’s story is an engrossing tale of all that blights our society today — from endless exploitation to the scourge of ‘love jihad’. One of her two sons was forced to elope after marrying a Hindu girl. He has not returned. The other died after a mosque dome fell on him. The disconsolate family got a few thousand rupees as compensation to keep quiet and silently bury their grief.

Dixit’s book is proof that ordinary lives of ordinary migrants could make for an extraordinary reading. What she narrates — reportedly braving threats of personal harm to self and her family from people who didn’t wish details of what goes on in the underbelly of our cities to be written about — is a pleasant reminder of what solid old-fashioned reportage is and always should be.

The praise for Dixit’s work has been fulsome. In blurbs written for the back cover of the 300-page book, Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes that Dixit “rescues the lives of ordinary Indians from invisibility...” Reading the book, “we come to acquire a deeper understanding of religious majoritarianism and the darker side of India’s much trumpeted growth story,” points out Ramachandra Guha. On finishing the unputdownable book, you would agree as well that the accolade coming Dixit’s way is all too deserving.