Bread, Cement, Cactus: A Memoir of Belonging and Dislocation

Author: Zaidi, Anne
In this exploration of the meaning of home, Annie Zaidi reflects on the places in India
from which she derives her sense of identity. She looks back on the now renamed city of
her birth and the impossibility of belonging in the industrial township where she grew 
up. From her ancestral village, in a region notorious for its gangsters, to the mega-
city where she now lives, Zaidi provides a nuanced perspective on forging a sense of 
belonging as a minority and a migrant in places where other communities consider you an 
outsider, and of the fragility of home left behind and changed beyond recognition. Zaidi is 
the 2019/ 2020 winner of the Nine Dots Prize for creative thinking that tackles 
contemporary social issues.