Description

In Moazzamabad, UP, too large to be a town and too backward to be a city, a
young man stabs a police inspector and is beaten to death. The last words he
speaks are, ‘My name is Jimmy the Terrorist.’ Journalists descend upon the
town ‘like shrill birds’, and a long-time resident decides to tell a story that
none of them will know.
Jimmy was once Jamaal, son of Rafiq Ansari of Rasoolpur Mohalla, a Muslim
neighbourhood in a Hindu town. And his story goes back a long way: to the
time when Moazzamabad was named, after Aurangzeb’s son; when Rafiq
was seduced by the wealth and refinements of Shabbir Manzil and married
Shaista; when the Hanuman temple grew ten storeys high and the head
priest was elected mayor; when Shaista died, a mosque was brought down in
Ayodhya and Rafiq became a mullah. As Jamaal grows up, watching both his
father and his neighbourhood change and curfew reach Moazzamabad, he is
changed himself. He becomes Jimmy, one among the countless marginalized
trying to find a place in the world, dimly aware that the choices that shape
their lives are being made in distant places, where they have no influence.
Spare, compelling, and as intimate as it is political, Jimmy the Terrorist
reaffirms Omair Ahmad’s reputation as one of the most distinctive voices
in Indian fiction.