Book review: Zahid Rafiq’s debut captures Kashmir’s invisible trauma

The narrator of In Small Boxes, one of the 11 stories that make up Zahid Rafiq’s debut collection, The World with its Mouth Open, is a young city reporter, employed with a newspaper in Kashmir. Oppressed by the grim interiors of his office, he steps out on the slightest pretext every day. He hangs out with a group of underpaid reporters like him, drinking tea at a roadside kiosk, smoking and shooting the breeze.

As he tells the reader, “For hours every day we spoke, recounting stories that had not made it into the papers, the stories behind stories, stories so sad, so funny, so true, that there was no place for them in the papers, stories that in their telling and retelling became myths and belonged to no one and to everyone.”

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It wouldn’t be unfair to read this statement as a key to unlock the world Rafiq captures in this extraordinary book. The World with its Mouth Open bears witness to the scars that have been imprinted on the Kashmiri consciousness over decades. Without making the everyday violence in the region the singular focus of his narrative, Rafiq weaves in an undercurrent of menace, a sinister foreboding and dread that makes the stomach churn with apprehension, as in the opening story, The Bridge.

In Rafiq’s stories, people disappear in broad daylight. A refined businessman begins to lose his marbles, his mind poisoned by suspicion. A shopkeeper cannot forget the face of “a mourning mannequin,” even in the throes of passion. And except for a single graphic passage, the army appears only fleetingly, though the iron hand of the State hovers in the air, visible only to ordinary Kashmiris, like the ghostly dagger in Shakespeare’s Macbeth that manifested itself to Macbeth alone. These are stories that don’t make it to the news, these are the invisible legacies of generational trauma, accounts of oppression that stay hidden in the private chambers of memory.

Rafiq’s finesse of style—his economy of expression and enviable control over pace—is of a piece with the immense talent that writers from Kashmir have recently brought into the generally uninspiring world of English literary writing in India. Farah Bashir’s memoir, Rumours of Spring (2021), set the benchmark high for autobiographical writing, since the publication of Curfewed Night by Basharat Peer in 2010. In 2020, Shabir Ahmed Mir’s powerful debut novel, The Plague Upon Us, joined the ranks of Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator (2011) with its evocation of the troubled lives of a generation of young Kashmiris.

Rafiq’s work shines brightest among this constellation for his ability to wrest the most harrowing emotions out of passages of seemingly understated description—the art of ‘show not tell’ at its most sophisticated. In Crows, for instance, the story from which the title of the volume is taken, an errant schoolboy endures unrelenting torture at the hands of his tutor. Rafiq provides a blow-by-blow account of the child’s habitual misdemeanours, hinting all the time at the terrifying consequences of his failure to pass the exams. As waves of panic crash through his young mind, the reader is left on tenterhooks, praying for amnesty. It’s a scene of Dickensian cruelty, a microcosm for the horrendous wrongs done to Kashmir, a state where the passage of time is counted, with utmost casualness, in terms of the number of dead.

“Ten people must have been killed in the city since you left,” as the teacher shouts at the boy, scolding him for dilly-dallying when he had been sent out to fetch sticks with which he could be caned as punishment. Ushering in a moment of sadistic high that belongs more properly to the world of dictators and fascists, the victim is forced to choose the tool of his own retribution. As the beating ends, the teacher erupts. “Do you know what is waiting out there? The world… with its mouth open,” he yells. “You hear me? With its mouth open.”

Even as Rafiq conjures up an imagery that belongs to the realm of old wives’ tales and fairy stories, retold by generations of parents and caregivers to discipline children into obedience, he manages to touch a nerve in grown-ups, too. The fear of the monster under the bed that will swallow us whole if we don’t behave isn’t merely a figment of the child’s imagination. It is as much of a threat in the adult psyche, which must navigate the treacherous rules of the world “out there”, especially in a place like Kashmir, where missing a step in the tightrope walk of each new day can have fatal consequences.

The narrator of Bare Feet is hit by a whiplash of such a primal fear as he is returning home after a futile search for the home of a dead stranger, who had urged him in a dream to seek out his family and pass a message to them. It feels inevitable that the intensity of his quest had to reach a crescendo and return to the realm of soldiers and guns, from the rarefied sphere of grieving humans and abject spirits. In Beauty, Rafiq traces a similar arc, but in a starkly different context, where three hormonal teenagers grappling with puberty and illicit pleasures are emptied of all excitement by an abrupt turn of events.

The tragic consciousness of The World with its Mouth Open doesn’t always manifest in the form of death or destruction of the materiality of the body. Rather, it infects the mind, splinters coherence and reasoning into shards, as the laws of humanity are turned upside down. The final story, Frog in the Mouth, harks to a familiar trope of a deranged man uttering a soliloquy—like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, or Vishal Bharadwaj’s Haider, if you will—where the world is disintegrating into anarchy before his eyes. As the mirror is shattered, it lets loose a torrent of words—like a prolonged sigh of despair that echoes through this anguished collection.

“How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense,” Rafiq begins the volume with this epigraph from The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. As readers know, and Kafka’s protagonist Gregor Samsa eventually finds out, no amount of seeking out oblivion, no fervent hope of escapism, can undo certain nightmares. It’s the fate of humans to keep waking up into these horrors forever.

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