Title: The world with its mouth open, stories
Author: Zahid Rafiq
Published by Penguin
Pp177
“…Stories that had not made it into the papers, the stories behind the stories, stories so sad, so funny, so true that there was no place for them in the papers.”
Deftly pre-empting the question of why he chose fiction for his debut as an author, eminent journalist Zahid Rafiq, demonstrates how his creative, imaginative forays into story telling become such a potent weapon. It enables reflections on his people and the land “where truth is hard and offers no solace.”
“Truth” is a particularly loaded term in the complex, layered political and moral landscape of Kashmir, especially in recent times.
Like several authors who used various forms of the postmodern genre and what one can loosely term as magical realism, Rafiq’s stories are rooted in the detailed verisimilitude of his city, Srinagar, but they defy absolute meaning.
Personal and Political
There is ambiguity, there is a fragmentation. The imbrications of fantasy, myth, the fantastic, the bizarre, metaphor and enigma enable the merging of the personal and the political.
Emotions are evoked to convey not just the chaos of his land but, also the paradox of the postmodern world. The microcosm of Kashmir that he captures can also be transcended to portray universal themes - of loss, grief, violence, longing and injustice.
In Small Boxes, the story from which the lines are quoted, comes closest to bearing a semi-autobiographical touch. The protagonist, like the author, is a reporter. He speaks of his attempts to slip in a line or two of beauty in his reports on gunfights and killings. “But they never make it to the page.”
At one level this is the theme of this story - trying to make sense of Kashmir’s “terrible beauty.” (The words come from WB Yeats Easter 1916.)
Delving into realms of dark humour and playing with truth, the story is also an exploration of what journalism is all about.
A “fake” death has taken place, a false obituary of Mr. Hussain, a shop owner who possesses “objects of sheer beauty,” has been placed in the newspaper. What kind of mistake or “sick prank” is this? Or at a higher level is this a playing out of absurdist theatre? Is it a questioning of the act of reporting from a place where actual killings are often denied, fake encounters never acknowledged?
Wit and Humour
Sardonic wit, satire, macabre humour and irony pop up in many stories, something that strikes me as manifestation of a very quintessential Kashmiri trait.
It is a reflection on how people living through decades of conflict and turmoil combat the bizarre reality of their times.
“Is this a place for jokes?” demands Mr. Hussain. And then the wry reflection: “It is no joke to tell someone’s story. To tell the truth.”
In Crows, a savage and yet also tender account of childhood, there are “lessons” on the tyranny of education and occupation. Irony abounds with a young boy hoping desperately the soldiers will rescue him from a beating by the teacher.
“Soldiers who would normally strike terror, barging in with their boots, turning everything upside down, poking even school bags with the long guns.” But, “even the bastard soldiers wouldn’t come today.”
The malleable flow of narrative in all Rafiq’s stories, almost like the bends in a meandering river, allow events and incidents to take their own course, often veering into musings, longings, dreams, or fragmented reality. In the process, conversations, dialogue and observations become as important as the storyline.
Besides the characters, the landscape, animals, birds, flowers, even earthworms assume significance and connotations. Flowers from a dog is a great example of this amalgamation.
A man has come back home from abroad and seeks the grave of a woman he loved. He is at first impatient there is no one to guide him in the graveyard.
A City of Graveyards
“Has the whole city died,” he wonders? Here then is the collective grief and mourning of Kashmir for the violence of the nineties summed up in a succinct, simple sentence, even as the protagonist discovers a grave of a 23 year-old youth, killed in the spring of ’96.
Spring is associated with flowers that here become metaphors. White roses brought by the man and whose smell he associates with the dead woman, have already turned misshapen and limp in his arms. But, in the graveyard, he also discovers purple irises that have sprung up among the graves.
I recall how Kashmiri poetry is replete with allusions to flowers and especially the yaemberzal in a graveyard which suggests beauty and sadness, the inevitable fading away of all things.
Transience and a more lasting sense of rootedness, of continuance, is suggested with the protagonist observing the presence of “two enormous Chinar trees large and lush belonging to some other time.”
Bare Feet begins with a dream. A man, back home from America, is haunted by the shadow of what he has “seen” - a young boy who wants him to seek out his home and console his parents on his untimely death.
The man who had hoped to dream of his dead mother in “this memory of a home,” dreams instead of a stranger.
He goes on a search for the elusive home, a search that in vivid sequence brings home hard truths he had only heard about in his absence.
Rusty shop shutters, cratered walls, “the silence of empty streets grieving a massacre.”
“Desolation.” The word that was made famous by Agha Shahid Ali is regurgitated with Rafiq’s own description of a city many years later.
“Neighbourhood after neighbourhood, desolation. Nothing but bunkers made of sandbags with loops of barbed wire wound around, and from little holes in the bunkers, dark eyes watch you with pointed barrels.”
The story has a dramatic enigmatic ending. Has dream turned to reality, to a living nightmare? Who is the shadow? The unsettledness, uncertainty keeps the reader teetering on the edge.
It is similar to the pastiche in The Bridge. Rafiq brings gender sensitivity with two main elements. A pregnant woman is visiting a hakim after miscarriages and is troubled and worried. And then there is the mystery behind the disappearance of Rajaji, the brother of a friend whom she has just met again on the street, after years.
There are tantalizing questions? Why has this man she knew from the past simply disappeared leaving her in a yoghurt shop? His absence sparks off the fears that persist even in seeming normalcy. Have the soldiers taken him away? What about his business? Why did he not get married?
The tension is palpable as Rafiq masterfully captures up the ordinary. “The sounds, smells, the traffic on the roads and the strange noise of so many voices and vehicles rising together as if everything were fused, everything together, going somewhere, going everywhere, going nowhere at the same time.”
“Going nowhere” encapsulates the anxiety of expectant women. But there are other women who also wait - the wives and mothers of men who had disappeared, whose fate is still unknown. (Some 8,000 people are estimated to have suffered an enforced disappearance in Kashmir.)
‘Going everywhere, going nowhere’ too aptly describes this collection of amazing stories.
Rafiq has been reticent, reluctant to discuss his stories. It is as if the complexity of experiences cannot be defined or contained to a solitary one. As the Mexican critic Luis Leal said: “if you can explain it, then it’s not magical realism.”
These ominous stories then demand not just one reading but several ones even as the world is waiting out there. The world. With its mouth open.
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