‘The Night Of Broken Glass’, An Intimate Portrait Of Kashmir Via Short Stories
Being a voice for the voiceless who don’t have the agency, opportunity or ability to speak for themselves is something perhaps every writer and/or journalist has contemplated in their career. It seems like a righteous path to travel down, but it can often turn into something more self-congratulatory and serving than being true to what you set out to do. Speaking about someone, speaking for them with authority will always be an incomplete account of reality, especially when their own narrative has been taken away from them, quashed and silenced for far too long. “We know of course that there’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard,” said Arundhati Roy in her Sydney Peace Prize lecture in 2004, something that rings true for me, at least, when it comes to writing about Kashmir.
A cloud of darkness has loomed over the conflict-ridden state since 1947 when India gained independence from colonial rule and a newly freed country was torn into pieces. Kashmir is often referred to as a paradise, but it’s a paradise lost for many. It’s true, the landscape is stunning, the views picturesque as can possibly be in the thumbnails you get to see in a Google image search. The other side of the scale is also spoken about monumentally – war, terror, violence, bloodshed. With a rise in insurgents, Army presence, conflict between nations has left thousands of lives torn, constantly hindered and even moulded around being either a victim/survivor of violence, a part of the rebellion against both sparring countries or just a common person fighting to get through each day where coming across bullet casings on a walk home, army patrols and curfews are a part of daily life.
As a third-party outsider, it’s not easy to put into words the experiences of Kashmiris but as is the case with most such political upheavals the world over, many of the locals have taken it upon themselves to tell their own stories, through activism and art. There are journeys to one’s own past, visions of forming a peaceful future; to recreate an identity and sense of self that’s often been fractured by violence and displacement.
Feroz Rather is among the Kashmiri folk that tell their own tales, of survival, happiness, victory, celebration, defeat, loss and ambition – of life in Kashmir in his book titled ‘The Night of Broken Glass’.
More than a book of short stories, ‘The Night of Broken Glass’ comprises of interconnected narratives that once strung together paint a very vivid picture. You can’t help but visualise Rather’s words as you read – you see the landscape that he beautifully paints using his words. Cover your eyes from the glisten of the empty bullet shells reflecting the sunlight. You can almost smell the shirmals and even feel the tweezers grinding into the flesh of Ishfaq’s shoulder. These stay with you long after the story is over. That’s probably because they aren’t just stories, but ground realities that have happened, happen, and continue to happen.
The question that remains is just how far or close are they to everyday reality? “Fiction measures the impact of violence as it is experienced in war. And I believe every physical blow discharged creates a corresponding psychological impression. The book is an attempt at creating an inventory of acts of physical violence but also what that means more intimately—by gathering the impressions. ‘The Night of Broken Glass’ is about the perpetual nightmare of violence we are made to experience in Kashmir,” says Rather.
In his book, Rather gives us insight and a glimpse into the daily lives of Kashmiri people, of the courage that it often takes to simply step out of the house and carry on with your day. These narratives weave a tapestry that illustrates the horror of living with a dense military presence and the violence inflicted on not just the land but also the psyche of people, however close or far away they try to steer clear of it. You get a look at the tyranny of those that misuse positions of power, the abuse at the hands of people who feign to be protectors.
Currently a Doctoral student of Creative Writing at Florida State University, Rather’s is a familiar name in the literary world. He’s been writing fiction for about a decade now and has had work appear in The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Millions, The Rumpus, The Southeast Review, Caravan, Warscapes, Berfrois, and Himal. His most recent essay, ‘Poet in Srinagar’, appeared in the anthology Mad Heart, Be Brave: On the Poetry of Agha Shahid Ali.
He worked from 2015 to 2017 on ‘The Night of Broken Glass’. “I kept writing and re-writing and cutting out a lot of pages. I felt it would be difficult but I guess I have become more used to the ways of publishing–one always has to let go one’s favourite–those fantastic and weird–passages,” he explains.
Your experiences shape who you are. They seep into your understanding of who you are, how you see the world, your behaviour and your identity. I was once posed a question by a friend about whether as a female writer in India, did I feel as though I ‘just had to write about feminism and violence against women’ – a question I find quite problematic and still cannot succinctly respond to. I posed something similar to Rather. Did he feel a sense of responsibility to write about Kashmir and its people? To represent them, being one of their own, and Rather’s response perhaps comes closest to what I would say to my friend as well.
“I believe that the place you grow up in constitutes you. The language—Kashmiri in my case—determines the ways I look at the world. So I would not say that I chose to write about Kashmir because that makes the whole thing simplistic. Kashmir determines the very ways I think and exist. I write about Kashmir as much Kashmir writes itself through me and it will be stupid to segregate the aesthetic from the political, the subject from the writer.
I feel strongly about every single incident of injustice and oppression that we have experienced in Kashmir. And I think writing seventy thousand words about those incidents needs a lot of patience and courage and willingness to broach unexamined realms of darkness,” he says.
The allusions to caste and its politics caught me off-guard across the book, too. When you sit down knowing in your mind you’re going to be reading a book about Kashmir, caste is not what you expect to encounter among the social commentary. My surprise mostly speaks to my own presumption (and perhaps that of others as well) about Kashmiri society, or more my ignorance and privilege to be able to be unaware/untouched of such occurrences so far.
Rather recalls an instance from his own childhood answering a question I asked about the caste realities of Kashmir. “The novel performs the role of delineating the lives of the characters in the milieu they inhabit. I do not think I was doing anything unusual. Only my political education heightened the lens of caste. I was very young when one of my teachers— an upper caste Mr. Shah who often beat me in class for no good reason—stopped my mother on the road, taunting her, ‘O your son stands first in the class.’ This was very ironic. Over the years I have thought about it. Over the years I have understood that one line uttered by a man not only reveals his character but can also reveal the configuration of the entire power structure that enables him to speak the way he speaks. That gives him the sense of entitlement and the power that he abuses at will.”
When confronting a writer’s block I’m always told to tap into something personal – try and find a connection between what you’re writing about to your own experience to make it easier, make it more relatable. While this trick has served me well at times, there are others when looking into in past negativity and traumas that can become haunting experiences. What do you do when you struggle to balance between the heavy and light? How do you appreciate the beauty of a region when it has overrun with the darkness of violence?
It’s a difficult undertaking, but something you go through especially when the story needs to be told. That is how Rather got through it. “I was so determined to write that I wanted the narrative to triumph. It was very difficult, and I suffered. Every morning I had to go to my writing space with the feeling of a pit in my stomach. I forced myself to confront my own misery and the misery of people. I wrote and wrote until I finished because I did not want to betray my subject,” he shares. When asked about inspiration, he tells me that he had waited for this book to come to him for many many years, so at this stage all he needed was the basics – “ A quiet room, some food, some books, a few friends, a basic stipend, and a lot of time. I am not looking for inspiration but time and opportunity.” Though, there is one thing that he says never fails to inspire him–water.
Hailed by its publisher Harper Collins India as their “lead literary fiction debut of the year”, ‘The Night of Broken Glass’ is a difficult book to get through but equally hard to put down. Rather’s poetic in his writing and the narratives leave you unsettled, but that’s just what good literature and art do, make you think.
‘The Night of Broken Glass’ is available for purchase online and at bookstores near you.
Feature image credit: Facebook via Scroll.in.
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