I was aware of my family's pain but had never fully realised that our loss in Gujarat’s communal riots was only a minor footnote in a vast library of rewritten lives.

The author was 13 when he was plucked out from class before 9/11 was announced in his school. And then, within months, he had to confront another crisis when his grandfather, ex-MP Ahsan Jafri, was one of the many who were brutally murdered in the 20