The stories behind the stories of Kashmir

Zahid Rafiq's powerful debut, 'The World with its Mouth Open,' bears witness to the decades-long damage suffered by Kashmiris across ages

- Somak Ghoshal

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."

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