The Permitted Hours (memoir) Portland, ME
The Permitted Hours is a memoir by an Indian American Muslim journalist about witnessing one of the most violent episodes in Indian history, the 2002 Gujarat riots. A decade later, he returns to India, only to find it more exclusionary and violent than before. The result is a book that reflects on home—on finding it and being rejected by it.
Zahir Janmohamed is a visiting assistant professor of English at Bowdoin college. He received his MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan where he received awards in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and playwriting. In 2019, the podcast he co-founded about food, race, gender, and class called Racist Sandwich was nominated for a James Beard Award. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Guernica, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Newsweek, and many other publications. Prior to beginning his writing career, he worked at Amnesty International and in the US Congress.