Book Review: Zahid Rafiq’s Short Stories on Life in Kashmir | The World with its Mouth Open

One of the characters in Zahid Rafiq’s collection of 11 short stories set in Kashmir, The World with its Mouth Open, is a young boy who fails at the tasks set by his tutor: to draw parts of the human anatomy or solve complex mathematical puzzles. As he struggles with it, his mind wanders off, alighting on memories of playing football with his friends or of wrestling with his cousins.

As a result, when the time comes to present the answer script, he submits a nearly blank sheet, infuriating the tutor, who decides to cane him. The boy himself is asked to fetch the tool of punishment from somewhere outside. He returns with a little twig that would not so much as tickle him. The tutor bursts into anger, remembering the boy’s mother who had brought him to his door one day with tearful eyes, imploring him to make the child study at all costs, even if that meant skinning him. The teacher grabs a stinging nettle and pursues the boy as he runs round and round the room. “Don’t you know what is waiting out there?” he shouts, reminding the boy of the fate of those who miss out on education. “The world… with its mouth open.”

Although the stories here straddle different themes, they all have at their core this sense of disquiet and uncertainty with which Kashmir is all too familiar. Rafiq brings it out with a lyrical flair that is rare, I would say unknown, to fiction-writing from the Valley.

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The narratives are built up through conversations among people as they discuss the mundane issues of living. Rafiq creates a sense of the everyday with finely textured imagery, which is hard-hitting and heart-warming at the same time. As a Kashmiri, I could hear echoes of the anecdotes that are bandied about in the lanes and markets, in the homes and neighbourhoods of the Valley. The book gestures at a society so small and close-knit that people from various areas of life would have gone through the same set of experiences.

In the first story, Nusrat, a forlorn woman who has miscarried, asks an acquaintance: “How is Saira’s daughter? Did God send her anything more?” Shopping for essentials in the market, she haggles over fish. “First you see,” the seller says, holding aloft a giant carp, with its mouth puckering and tail wagging from side to side. “Seeing is for free. Then we can talk money. I won’t, God forbid, steal from you.”

Quirks and complexities of life

In another story, a boy collecting bus fare is sure that natural calamities in Kashmir are a kind retribution for boys and girls sharing the same space in his bus. Elsewhere, a person who craves a lake-side barbeque snack desists thinking that it would delay the time of his dinner, and he cannot let that happen because electricity will be switched off at 8:30 pm. Scenes like these capture the quirks and complexities of ordinary life in Kashmir that tend to get overshadowed by the larger narrative of conflict.

Rafiq paints a Kashmir beyond the dispute, a Kashmir that is all too relatable not just for residents of the Valley but also for outsiders. In their unsettling depth, the stories reminded me of great works of literature like Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations or J. Meade Falkner’s Moonfleet. In all these works, reality acquires a surreal quality as it gets enmeshed with the protagonists’ individual experiences.

The World with its Mouth Open is a collection of 11 short stories set in Kashmir.  
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By Special Arrangement

Reading the book, I had the feeling that from childhood onwards, Rafiq has kept a secret diary recording the nitty-gritty of life. And then one day in his adulthood, he decided to fictionalise the memories, creating a simulacrum that feels more real than the original.

With their liberal use of aphorisms, the conversations are exactly like daily chit-chats heard on the streets. Take this line, for example: “A human being, after all, cannot be trusted until he is in the grave.” Or, “When your fate turns upside down, it becomes your fate to be toyed with by everyone”; “When you go to sell, it fetches nothing, and when you go to buy, it costs everything”; and this sharp reminder delivered by a character when a flood warning is issued, instructing people to move to the upper stories of their homes for safety: “The rich will climb on their upper floors where will the poor go? God of the poor is poor himself.”

Powerful emotions

These conversations not only direct us to the abundance of powerful emotions hiding in plain sight but also to the pathos of lived life in Kashmir. They reveal a society where hope is ephemeral and despair permanent. The conversations whip you out of your comfort zone.

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Rafiq avoids giving his stories definite conclusions, leaving readers to construct their own versions. The story of Beauty in the eponymous piece is chilling precisely because the reasons behind her profound distress remain unclear. Two neighbourhood boys spy on her as she bathes at night. She lets out a cry that startles the boys, making them run away. Does her grief stem from the inner turmoil that had been hinted at earlier or did she notice the strangers watching her? Although Rafiq does not engage directly with the messy politics of the Valley, a number of events hint at them, expressed through the anguish of the people.

If you are a downtowner like me who walks around Srinagar every day, noticing how the civic projects intended to restore “normalcy” and a sense of “prosperity” have robbed the city of the intimate histories that anchor citizens to the place, you will also exclaim, like one of the characters: “Oh, you are an engineer. Wonderful! Please forgive my asking, but have you engineers decided to turn this city into a nightmare?”

Shakir Mir is a journalist and book critic from Srinagar.