Mirza Waheed
THE BIG FISH
FISHING was forbidden. Only rough kids did it, or those who were in want, or tourists in pursuit of freshwater trout that wasn’t really freshwater trout, and in any case, it was probably illegal to fish in the lake nearby. The ‘probably’ was key, because it allowed the elders sufficient ambiguity behind which to hide their unjust disapproval and invoked just enough fear of the mythical guard from the fisheries department to make the children think hard, or at least exercise extreme caution in choosing their spot.
But I caught a large fish once. It was startling to see a fluttering, shining, probably cursing, creature appear from the willow-covered channel by the houseboat in the Nigeen Lake near our ancestral house in Srinagar. We had been angling for some time, with prayers on lips and dough balls the size of rat droppings for bait, mostly hooking in baby fish not much bigger than adolescent tadpoles but also medium-sized, edible fish every half an hour or so. We deposited the catch in a water-filled polythene bag, occasionally distracted but also reassured, perhaps even pleased, by the writhing little creatures. Back then, that this might be cruel, or just ordinary, didn’t enter the discussion, because there wasn’t a discussion.
I was probably twelve or thirteen, I don’t remember. It remains unclear why this activity was expressly proscribed not just by my parents but by the entire elder corps at home. We simply weren’t allowed to go fishing like some of the neighbours did, but, clearly, there was more to the ‘ban’. People who lived around the lake had for centuries depended on it for their livelihood, growing vegetables and flowers on near-magical floating gardens, and harvesting the lake for lotus stems or weeds with which to weave straw carpets, and, most importantly, for fish that they then sold by the ghat of the marble shrine at Hazratbal on the western shore of the larger Dal Lake. And yet, I had heard it was a crime to fish in the adjacent little jewel of Nigeen Lake favoured by foreign tourists, their backs shining swatches of flesh on the sun decks of the houseboats. They too were like fish. Carp perhaps. (As a matter of historical fact, carp were artificially introduced in the lake in the 1950s.) I suspect this was a highly successful rumour disseminated by the houseboat owners. How could they have pesky little locals disturb the siesta of Western tourists?
My partner in crime was a boy named B, the Tailor Master’s son. Being younger, B was both a friend and sidekick. When the little beast shot out of the water, it didn’t feel like a threat at first, its enormous weight still not subject to gravity. When the line had suddenly tightened we just yanked at it in surprise. I also cried out B’s name aloud. Now it landed on the mouldy muddy grass – there may have been a rose bush by the side too – and began to dance with a vehemence I’d not thought fish capable of. Instinctively, we brought down the improvised fishing rod on her – what kind of early gender politics in men makes you think all fish are her, she? – and pressed all our weight on it, B clasping hard at the other end. When we felt it may still escape, overthrowing us, we beat it with the willow rod. Eventually, it calmed down, passed out or died, and we put it in the bag, which smelled of fish breath, I thought, and then put another bag on top because its tail, protruding out, must have felt like evidence of murder.
This was the catch of my life, a prize worthy of a parade home. But I couldn’t give it to my mother with the wilfully understated man-triumph that all hunter-gatherers must feel. For a moment I thought it was perhaps time to confess to the dark art of secret fishing and list all my achievements in the field.
In the end I settled for the fifteen minutes of glory of walking home with the bulging bag in one hand and fishing rod in the other. B carried the other bag containing the also-catches. In the little market square, I walked slowly and said prolonged salaams to the few people who always sat by the shops. These were the boys and men with whom I wasn’t allowed to socialize. These were the boys and men who chose not to come to our aid when my grandmother died.
By the time we were closer home I had made my decision. As B began to curve towards the by-lane that went to his house, I handed him my big bag and said with some paternalistic pride, ‘B, give it your father and mother’. He looked up at me, then at the bags in his hands, and left. I don’t know why I didn’t just say mother. The proverbially phlegmatic Tailor Master was the most visible face in the neighbourhood, seated as he was every day behind the large glass panel in his boss’s seat at the business he ran in front of his house. Before him, it had been his father, who, I remembered, didn’t do any tailoring but sat all day in the shop, looking at passers-by, holding forth on any topic – a legendary tobacconist who knew the recipe for perfectly consistent wet tobacco, how communism was the only way towards a casteless society … – and sometimes cursing between minor coughing fits, as he dragged on the shop hookah. When the old man died, I sneaked through unknown legs and watched his body on a wooden plank when the men atop those legs gave him his last bath. He looked like a large shrivelled white bird.
The next day or the day after, Tailor Master waved at me as I passed his workshop. I had made sure he saw me. ‘That was some good booty, Junior Mirza, why don’t you fish more often, and also teach B how to catch the big items … The little ones don’t make for good dinner,’ he said as I sat down. Kashmiris are inveterate carnivores, but for many families with limited incomes it is often only a once-a-week luxury. To have a midweek bonanza – even if it was only fish and not the usual lamb or mutton – compelled the tailor, a man at least five times my age, to express gratitude, albeit in his own way. I was proud of myself and resolved to catch even bigger fish when I was older, stronger.
FLASH BOY
In the absence of too many modern entertainment avenues, the lake was almost always our best bet. You sat by it to watch the sun dip and turn the world vermillion. You played cricket, fished and swam. You indulged in crushing bouts of self-pity over unrequited love, unaware that teenage love isn’t love unless it’s unrequited at least a couple of times.
There were also the occasional races. The Holy Grail was, of course, crossing the lake. I crossed to the other side the first and the only time when I was in the eighth grade, but I had to beg two boatmen to take me back, as my arms began to wilt because of acute fatigue. I had been trying to hide this from my friends.
By the Bahrar shore where I grew up was our perfect patch: a sloping tail of land – and it was literally called that, the tail – that glided into the water, but not before leaving behind a cluster of quince trees that shone in spring. Moored on stretches of water between these tongues of land were small and large, low and high-end, houseboats, favoured by Japanese tourists. I could never see what went on inside, covered as they were by heavy curtains or dark wire-mesh windows. It wasn’t until my thirties when I actually lived in one when, perhaps to compensate for a long deprivation, friends arranged for my wife and me to spend a day in a houseboat where George Harrison, Ravi Shankar and Yehudi Menuhin had once stayed. I signed the guest book too.
On the slope that went down to the shore, there were old walnut trees, and if I remember clearly, an orchard of corn with a vegetable patch in the middle, fenced by poplars that had cucumber and bottle gourd vines creeping up to the pinnacles. It was all too glorious, given this was still the city environs, and you could see the striking, all-white hotel Dar es Salaam on the other side of the lake from here. I wondered why the hotelier had chosen the Tanzanian city to name what I later learnt was the only boutique hotel in the land. Of course, I also learnt that Dar es Salaam simply means Residence of Peace. Back in the day, the hotel represented unattainable luxury, or something you might see in a Mumbai-made romance, a place where VIPs or tourists or film stars went and sipped mysterious drinks. A few years earlier, when we used to take a boat to visit my aunt who lived literally in the middle of the lake – in the interiors of the muddy peninsula of Nandpora – we would pass within a few feet of the hotel and marvel at its manicured garden, which was accessible from the water through a gate fashioned out of arched hedges. Once, I also saw Dar es Salaam in the snow. It looked ghostly, haunted, with only its rims and chimneys visible. Now, the hotel is star-rated on TripAdvisor.
Memory can be a wholly unreliable but fascinating muse. Years later, the strolls and the swims and the sun-soaks came back in flashes at the most unlikely of places. I was at the Vallombrosa Abbey in Tuscany, where Milton saw enough, or conjured up without ever setting foot, to write ‘His Legions, angel forms, who lay entranced/ Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks /In Vallombrosa …’, and I began to think of felled almond trees and the leaf-like fish that used to swarm by the shore of my lake. We had driven up to the eleventh-century abbey from The Writers’ Foundation at Santa Maddalena where I was working on my second novel. It was probably because of the surreal light that filtered through the firs, or the fish ponds nearby, so high up in the Apennines, I thought of the hazy image of hotel Dar es Salaam, which doesn’t resemble the abbey but is certainly stately and white or off-white like it. I cannot commit.
Among the many boyhood frivolities by the water, what seems to have acquired a significant place in my narrative memory is how one of my closest friends chose to respond to that old waterside trick – stolen clothes – often seen in films or mythologicals where a playful god is allowed to steal anyone’s clothes. As we had finished another late-afternoon swim and perhaps a few rounds of frisbee, K found his clothes had been taken. There were words, giggles and sworn statements. After the initial mirth and protestations, it was clear this was a crisis. How would K, a fully-grown teenager with Tom Sellick’s chest hair, go home? (That was the whole point of the prank, wasn’t it, but you have to remember we are not at a promenade on the French Riviera but in a traditional, somewhat conservative mohalla where the only people allowed to walk in underpants are toddlers or foreign tourists.) Soon, however, K smiled, lounged on the grassy slope for a short while, his shuteyes inflicting some torment on the perpetrators. What might he do? Was he very angry?
In the end it was K who led the party back home, a near-naked tall man with just his wet briefs to save him (or the spectators?) from complete ignominy, strutting in front as we cowered behind. At the little market square, I didn’t look up at all, as there were a few boos or there was bemused silence. Someone called him a tourist, deploying that colonial stereotype ‘brown sahib’. A couple of old men hurled taunts, ‘And these city folks call themselves civilized, huh! Oi, angrez, don’t you have sisters and mothers at home?’ [I thought about this last comment later and didn’t quite grasp what K’s decision to showcase his hirsute body in public had to do with his sisters and mothers.]
But he had decided to walk near-naked through the bazaar, so he held his head high and perhaps hummed a tune too. Later, he said he didn’t know who it was, and that I was one of the suspects too, but whoever it was he simply didn’t want to give them any satisfaction. It is not known how K entered home in that state. Did he scrape through a gap in the back gate and wait behind the hedges for it to get dark? Or did he extend his stay in that slightly unsettling spunk state, enter through the main door and walk straight up to his room, casually answering his mother, ‘Oh, someone stole my clothes at the lake,’ or better still, ‘I gave them to a very poor boy I met today’…? One of these days, I will ask him.
THE VEGETABLE HUNT
In 2014, when as Israel was firebombing Gaza with thousands of tonnes of explosives, killing scores of children and babies every day, I became possessed by the idea of how the people of Gaza must survive in what’s clearly the worst siege of a people since Sarajevo. How must Gazans cope with life under a punitive blockade that essentially outlaws breathing freely? I tried to write about it but in the end I chose to talk about the dead children of Gaza instead, how Israel treats all Palestinian children as potential terrorists, thereby arriving at a moral–legal framework within which to rationalize the murder of children. I had once lived through a somewhat similar siege, albeit, gratefully, with no air-force bombers on the prowl in the skies waiting to incinerate children playing on the beach or on a rooftop. When we were teens, the Indian armed forces killed the young in street battles or in plain massacres.
During one the worst sieges of the 1990s (the euphemism ‘crackdown’, used by the Indian state and its apparatchiks in sections of the media, and adopted by the victims too, has over the years felt inadequate to describe the long curfews designed to lock, suffocate and punish an entire people), we began to run out of food. We were fast using up the stored pulses and dried vegetables that all Kashmiri households have festooned up in the balconies or the attic, and the few gourds and greens that grew in the uncle’s vegetable garden next door. It was time to hunt. Or was it because a festival day approached and we had to cook something special on the day? In either case, where else could we boys go but into the folds of the faithful old lover?
One of the older boys from the immediate neighbourhood had declared he will procure the boat, and he did. As soon as we reached the shore – another tail of land that went down steeply into the water was thought to be the safest route – Akhtar pointed to a pond-moss-covered channel by a garden that already seemed exhausted of produce. The boat was narrow. Soon we were rowing away with the help of one oar and probably a cricket bat or a plank of wood. What I do clearly remember was all of us helped row so that we could cover ground quickly. From inland waterway to another, from the floating vegetable gardens to the grocery shops on stilts in the interiors of the lake, we searched for food. Aubergines, potatoes, tomatoes, lotus stems … anything that could be had with the Kashmiri staple of rice, was a prize. A part of the consciousness tells me I must have been somewhat emaciated in those days because everyone had been eating rationed amounts of food, even as we ate all meals. Another part says I was perfectly fine, reedy as ever. Some families whose livelihood depended on daily wages from the father’s shop, stall or mobile kiosk, had been struggling. Donations of rice and cooking oil and pulses had been collected, it was said, and distributed among those on the brink of starvation.
What had made everyday life worse was the long strike by government employees because it meant no salaries were forthcoming. As a result, there was much less cash floating around. This meant even if some shops were open in the labyrinths of the old city or if some shopkeepers sold groceries from home or from under the shutter, or when there was a relaxation in the curfew, many didn’t have the means to buy essentials. Of course, people helped each other; grocers who could afford to offer credit did so. But even so, a city in complete shutdown and under curfew for weeks, surrounded and surveilled by thousands of soldiers, is a city in starvation. Even if mother somehow managed to scrape together regular lunch and dinner every day, it was hard to breathe. This is no way to live, you heard yourself saying at night. One of the many ways a repressive state aims to suppress and control people is to first make them powerless, then show, dramatize, their powerlessness by subjecting them to daily indignities.
Each of us returned with something from the lake. A bunch of lotus stems. A kilo of wilted spinach. Not fully ripe tomatoes. Radish. I remember entering through the doors with a sense of victory. Scouring the lake for food in a little boat had made us all heroes in our mind. I had even stood up occasionally, in case I spotted a full and laden floating garden, with a pumpkin shining through the foliage and dirt, or if a lakeside farmer decided to be kind. It may sometimes seem as romantic as it was then, but the fact is our youthful adventure into the entrails of the lake was but a flimsy camouflage for an otherwise dire situation. We knew.
A few years ago, I read The Cellist of Sarajevo and I simply couldn’t read it as a thriller.1 The book has virtues – great pace, a sense of place and some riveting set pieces that portray a besieged city – but you wouldn’t exactly call it a great literary text. And yet, I read it as a document, a monograph, with disquieting parallels to my own youth, growing up as I did during the most brutal phase of Kashmir’s war against India. Even before the armed rebellion that sprouted in 1989, there had been reminders of the historical ruptures in the body politic. You would ask an elder about a movement, a toppled government or a curfew (that bane of our childhood, youth and old age) and you’d get an overwhelming primer on history. Thirty years later, you’re at a literary festival and you are once again asked that tedious and simplistic question about the role of politics in fiction, your mind goes back to the primer.
When I was nine or ten, I was ordered by a soldier to climb down from the chinar tree in our garden. The soldiers were, well, staging a flag march in a truck. I often used to sit on the branches of the little, forever pruned, maple. I remember getting down quietly but the idea that I was ordered to get off our tree, my tree, in my own home, stayed in my head for years. The colonized space makes the mind instinctively, almost pathologically, naysay any kind of prescription, let alone oppression.
In his magnificent personal history of Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk talks about the four Istanbuli writers (memoirist Sinasi Hisar, poet Yehya Kemal, novelist Ahmet Tapinar and historian Resat Kocu) in whose works he found the essential mnemonic architecture of the city, and of his own relationship with the city and its past. Pamuk talks about how these writers – influenced by French art and literature, by modernists such as Mallarme and Proust – were trying to forge an authentic voice, which was possible ‘… only if they looked to their city’s past and wrote of the melancholy it inspired. When they recalled the splendor of old Istanbul, when their eyes lit on a dead beauty lying on the wayside, when they wrote about the ruins that surrounded them, they gave the past a poetic grandeur.’ He suggests these writers, and by implication perhaps him too, weren’t just looking at the past for the purposes of re-enactment à la the ‘time and memory games suited to the Bergsonian fashions of the era [that] could evoke the fleeting illusion that, as an aesthetic pleasure at least, the past was still alive …’ but to create something anew from the ruins of the empire. For Pamuk, his ‘four melancholic writers conjured old Istanbul out of its ruins’ and they present this illusion as a ‘game that merges pain and death with beauty. But their starting point is that beauties of the past are lost for ever.’2
In my imagining of the two cities I visit when I go to Srinagar as a somewhat homeless émigré, I look for ways to construct a narrative that includes both, the city of my past – idyllic, befitting such encomiums as Jewel in the Crown and that larger regal honorific, Paradise on Earth – and the one I visit now – colonized, brutalized, decaying and self-destructive too. For me, perhaps the only way to achieve this is via remembrance, both a historical one and one that is often assaulted by the everyday, the present. Do you keep the everyday offhand, not let it impinge on the more substantial, ‘larger’ project that in the purist’s mind may belong to art, or do you also choose to heed the interventionist sentiment probably best echoed by Doris Lessing: If I didn’t write about it people will think it never happened? Or was it someone else?
The bits of food we retrieved from the flanks of the lake perhaps made full my connection with the city where I was born and made. The lake had always been a special place, of sport, beauty, glamour and carefree adolescent languor. Now it was something more; I may have felt a certain rootedness, a connection that stretched from the depths of the lake to the family hearth. But the scraps of food also revealed a moment of great rupture, the beginning of the tragedy that postmodern conflict engenders. A reasonably well-to-do family had almost been reduced to foodlessness – what might have happened to those who couldn’t afford to stockpile rice and pulses and oil and dried vegetables, I wondered? I wouldn’t find the answer until nearly two decades later when I learnt that my uncle, Mirza Fida Hussain, helps run a charity that quietly provides for the needy: donations of food, clothes and fees for the bright daughter or son who might improve the family’s fortunes. There are more than a few such small and large charities in places like Kashmir. Perhaps the idea was born in that autumn or during yet another back-breaking ‘crackdown’: that when everything is shut, movement criminalized, food and medicine treated as though they are contraband, and access to the larger city or the countryside from where a lot of the food supplies came, blocked by jackboot, there must be some local resource to help the very needy, a pragmatist might have said.
WE WERE ALL HUDDLED IN THE DARK HALLWAY
We would do this if earthquake tremors woke us at night; from here the elders would quickly decide whether to stay put or run out to the garden. We would do this if we heard gunshots or explosions outside, sometimes far, sometimes near, sometimes the ping of a misfired bullet that pierced a neighbour’s tin roof ringing all the way down. The hallway was spacious, its floor a faux lapis pattern of deep green and crimson painted into the polished cement. Grandfather’s red-brick-and-wood house was fronted by evergreen hedges whose spines bent and broke every few years under the weight of snow quilts breaking free from the roof. The nightly thuds were necessary music. I used to imagine the hedges as a defence against invaders, a line between us and the hostile world outside, which until now mostly meant a local bully or boys I had fought with on the cricket field or on occasion the guard who had nearly caught us stealing apples from a neighbour’s orchard.
The hallway, behind the evergreen-covered porch and buttressed by rooms on either side, was therefore a perfect cocoon. If it was earthquake resistant at all, I couldn’t be sure. On this particular night, not everyone woke from the sound of gunfire, quotidian as it had become since the beginning of the rebellion. I think my father and both my uncles woke up, my sisters and my cousin too, and of course my ever-vigilant, ever-anxious mother. Soon it was decided that this wasn’t an incident in the neighbourhood, therefore not a portent for a cordon-and-search operation in the area the next day. We were wrong.
Early morning the next day, we heard that familiar sinister announcement from the loudspeaker in the mosque asking all men to gather in an open space, in our case a ground by the hospital for leprosy patients on the shore of the Nigeen Lake. You clung to the duvet, but the voice hung in the room, in the world.
The Bahrar Leprosy Colony and Hospital, built by British missionaries in 1891 with aid from the then maharaja of independent Kashmir, had always appeared to me a mystery-filled patch. The colonial architecture of the main building, the barracks-style wards, the tall pines and poplars that no one seemed to have ever disturbed, the clay walls and the rose and ivy that hung on them here and there, all created a peculiar melancholic ambience.
I had once been told off, perhaps even given a gentle slap or two, for sharing my meals with a leprosy survivor – same plate, how could you! – who now worked as a labourer and was helping with some construction or gardening work in the house. Previously, I had also been told off for sharing my meals with Rakhu, our huge Alsatian – same plate, how could you! – who was later killed by poison, it was suspected, by neighbours who didn’t approve of the dog’s barking. Prejudice exists in so many forms that you sometimes forget its proper name. The supreme sense of privilege that allows you to stigmatize a people, who have suffered a crippling disease, must rank among the worst. It was perfectly alright to have a ‘leper’ break his sweat over your gladioli row but he had to eat from a quarantined plate and drink from a scratched aluminium tumbler.
We arrived at the compound, or rather, hounded by the voice on the loudspeaker, converged on it with scores of other boys and men, and formed an orderly queue to be seated in what was to be our open-air prison for the day. Or two. When I say seated I mean on your haunches or with your legs crossed on the rough ground. In those days, there were still big almond trees in the ground that gradually falls into a shallow gorge through which a stream from the lake flows out. Cutting through adjoining areas it eventually disappears into another dying lake, Anchar, on the other side of the city.
During the peak of the uprising in the early 1990s, the Indian army and paramilitaries would conduct ‘operations’ almost every day. Every neighbourhood saw at least one. In many neighbourhoods the soldiers were very frequent visitors. In others, they were permanent residents, occupying schools, post offices, cinemas … (One day, I intend to write about my own little cinema paradiso, Firdous Cinema, where I watched my first big-screen film after bunking school and which was soon, and continues to be, occupied by Indian paramilitaries.) We would compare notes, compete even: whose crackdown was longer, harsher …? Have you seen a mortar gun? They used a multi-barrel rocket launcher to demolish our neighbour’s house. Did you know the militants have stingers now?
After you had been summoned to a field, a school, the roadside, or a hospital compound in our case, a masked informer sat in a military vehicle and we had to parade in front of it, so that he could ‘ID’ you. If there’s anything that approximates how sheep led to the butcher’s pen must feel it was that thirty-second walk towards the military vehicle. All it took was a nod from Informant Zorro and you were whisked away. A lot of the young disappeared like that – on some occasions, innocent men. And many of those who came back were impaired, some for life. Torture, that old tool of war, has been so ubiquitous in the place I call home that documents accessed by investigative journalist Cathy Scott-Clark for the Guardian suggest that one in every six Kashmiris has suffered some form of it.3
I was sixteen at the time of what I sometimes remember as the almond crackdown (I remember signalling my vain defiance by leaning against an almond trunk and reading a book I had carried with me.) As we were walking in file, my eyes suddenly fell on some bodies lying on the ground, like discarded logs of wood. One of them was still alive and I think he asked for water. It is possible I may have added, imagined this last bit, over the years but equally, his lips may have uttered the words. But I could not stop. How do we arrive at a situation when we see corpses a few feet away but we cannot do anything about it? In that banalized act, I witnessed how a military power devises a system of identification, detention and punishment so elaborate, so methodical, that you begin to accept it as inevitable, as normative. These things must happen, a part of the process.
I sat there, trying to make sense of the image of wounded, dying or dead men a short distance from me. Did they wet the grass? Behind us lay a tiny valley [with the stream in the middle], across which rises a knoll that joins up with the mid-city hill, Hari Parbat or Koh-i-Maran, on top of which stands the stark Afghan-era fort. In the space between the river bed and the slope on the other side, there used to be dense almond groves. In spring, this would look like a terraced, pink cotton-wool park. In the pockmarked but bristling map of memory, this river, stream, connects to another from a few years earlier, in childhood proper, when we briefly lived in the quiet idyll of Verinag in the south, home to the spring from which the big river Jhelum, Hydaspes to the ancient Greeks, emerges … On the curve of this stream, there was a little school where I studied from the third to fifth grade – it is without doubt the finest primary school in the world. Set back from the opposite bank was the house of school friends Rajesh and Sunil from whom I haven’t heard in more than thirty years.
Four years ago, I went back to my childhood school for the first time in three decades, sat in the classroom I had sat in then, studied the scrawls on the ceiling in vain, and touched the door to the office of the principal who, years later, lent her name and elegant sartorial manner to a character Shanta Koul, in my second novel The Book of Gold Leaves. From the school balcony, I looked at the dilapidated house across the river and I think I recognized the front columns of a porch, damaged and forgotten. Rajesh and Sunil may have left Kashmir in the exodus that took away Kashmiri Pandits (Hindus) into exile in the dark 1990s, or earlier, I don’t know. Some Kashmiri Pandits were targeted, killed, by militants and in the ensuing climate of fear and loathing, they abandoned their homes and had to start new, hard lives in the hot and alien plains of India. I can’t find Rajesh and Sunil on Facebook.
The three or four dead men were eventually loaded into a truck and driven away. For a fraction I thought this might be corrected soon. The dead boys were in fact not dead and they may be returned. I learnt over twenty years that they were, in effect, discarded logs of wood. I don’t know who they were: combatants, innocent victims of extrajudicial killing, or militants who died fighting for a revolutionary cause, and who may or may not have committed atrocities themselves? I suppose they must remain nameless, less of identity. Then again, in that moment of seeing, the soldiers who killed them were nameless too. But they stood, because they had power. The wide gap between power and violence, and the ‘power behind the violence’, as Hannah Arendt demonstrates in ‘Reflections of Violence’, couldn’t have appeared in a starker embodiment as in the image of the dead lying on the ground.4
In the winter of 2006, I sat down by the desk I’m sitting by now in my adopted home in London and tried to write an uninterrupted fictional tract on what it might mean to be a dead boy forgotten and unburied in the mountains. By next year, it had become a draft of my first novel, The Collaborator, the story of a young man forced to rummage through corpses in a hidden gorge, in search of identity cards and weapons. Each day he waits, dreading that, he may spot his childhood friends among the dead. Nearby, snaking through the meadow is a small green river.
Mirza Waheed’s debut novel, The Collaborator, was an international bestseller, was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award and the Shakti Bhat Prize, and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. It was also a book of the year for The Telegraph, New Statesman, Financial Times, Business Standard and Telegraph India, among others. His second novel, The Book of Gold Leaves, was published in 2014 to critical acclaim. It was shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2016, longlisted for the Folio Prize, and was a finalist for the 2015 Tata Literature Live! Book of the Year (Fiction). Mirza has written for the BBC, the Guardian, Granta, Guernica, Al Jazeera English and The New York Times. His third book Tell Her Everything was released in early 2019.
NOTES
1Galloway, Steven. The Cellist of Sarajevo, Toronto: Random House Canada, 2008.
2Pamuk, Orhan, Istanbul: Memories of a City, London: Faber and Faber, 2005.
3Scott-Clark, Cathy, ‘The Mass Graves of Kashmir.’ The Guardian, 9 July 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jul/09/mass-graves-of-kashmir (accessed on 14 November 2018).
4Arendt, Hannah, On Violence, San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970.