Guardian Review

Annie Zaidi was already a writer of renown in Mumbai when, in 2019, she submitted a 3,000-word essay to the Nine Dots Prize, an international competition lavishly sponsored by investment banker Peter Kadas, and won $100,000 as well as a book deal. Bread, Cement, Cactus, her haunting evocation of belonging and dislocation in contemporary India, is the fruit of that endeavour, delivering Zaidi on to an international platform for the first time in her decade-long career. The brief was to say something new about "home" - a concept that Zaidi quickly establishes has always evaded her. "I never lived," she tells us, "in the city of my birth ¿ (Allahabad, now Prayagraj, in Uttar Pradesh). Leaving us with her parents [in Lucknow] while she went back to university, my mother quit a bad marriage." Later, she found a job and moved to a remote industrial township in Rajasthan where "the need for bread, and milk for the children, overrode her unease at being so far from everything familiar". Each chapter is a standalone essay, as Zaidi looks back to the successive settings of an itinerant past, successfully dovetailing personal reflection with political analysis so that, in each location, intimate memories work as jumping-off points for research and investigation into the macro-trends that are shaping contemporary India. In that Rajasthani township, JK Puram, for example, Zaidi's recollection of youthful discontent plays into a reckoning with the horror of tribal dispossession as stories from her childhood of "Bhil tribesmen ¿ who could relieve kids of their valuables" are slowly recast. She gets to grips with histories, embedded in "folk tales and genealogies" that "describe the overthrow of indigenous chiefs" by ancient Hindu warriors. She connects this past to the environmental degradation of the surrounding landscape and the knock-on health impacts on the indigenous community. She taps an age-old story of "losing power, then losing ground". The child of a mixed Hindu-Muslim marriage, Zaidi grapples, too, with the legacy of partition, and provides a critique of the ongoing Hinduisation of India's once secular democracy but, crucially, it's the issue of gender that always frames her reflections as she probes the story of her mother's dispossession and her own as rooted in a reality where marriage is the biggest cause of internal migration in India and in which women (98.4% of all internal migrants according to the census of 2011) are the mass displaced. Zaidi self-identifies as one of the "lucky 5%" - "financially independent women" who can choose who to marry - but she writes that, even for her, the "biggest emotional negotiations" continue to reflect an enduring ambivalence about female autonomy. So that, as Zaidi works through successive pathways of her potential belonging, what she finds instead is a sequence of dead ends - a national project persistently hostile, often violently so, to every aspect of her identity as a successful, unmarried, Muslim, Indian woman. In the end, the architecture of the book attempts to lead us towards a counter-resolution that will establish home instead in the paradise of personal experience - in "the morning mist" for example - but this is never as convincing as the lasting sense of indignation and injustice that Zaidi evokes. "What belongs to whom?" she asks. "Who pays the costs of what is taken and cannot be returned?" These are questions perhaps more powerful than the answers Zaidi can provide, but it's through questions such as these that she points towards the deeper mysteries of our human condition.