Between memory and hope

A simmering evocation of Kashmir’s history, Feroz Rather’s The Night of Broken Glass outlines the old festering wound that all Kashmiris carry within them. For those of us who lived in Kashmir through the 1990s, the characters and the situations described in the 13 interconnected short stories are disturbingly familiar.

As a Kashmiri, I shuddered at the glimpses of our beleaguered past, and the memory of our friends and lovers whose lives were destroyed by violence. The tone of the book is lyrical, brooding and contemplative. The characters, as well as the horrors they endure, resonate with us, blurring the lines between fiction and reality.

For example, in the story ‘A Rebel’s Return’, Inspector Masoodi returns home to find his 12-year-old son, Imran, missing. He frantically searches for the boy and later finds him facing the wall in the basement and mumbling something about Ilham, a young rebel whom Inspector Masoodi had strangled a few hours earlier.

Characters like Inspector Masoodi and Major S seek to enforce a brutal order while wrestling with their own demons. Delving into their interiority, Rather lends depth to both the oppressor and the oppressed. The interplay of power and powerlessness is evoked through a militarised landscape in which the powerful, like Inspector Masoodi and Major S, are also swept up in the consequences of their oppressive measures, where the horrors of the past return to haunt them.

Through his fiction, Rather interrogates how caste plays out in Kashmiri society and how it is used as a divisive, discriminatory tool to further divide a people who are at the receiving end of militarised violence. At one point in the story ‘Rosy’, the narrator speaks out without fear, questioning the oppressive binaries of caste that lay down rules he doesn’t want to comply with: “I want to burn down the edifice of the whole damn society who believes that your soul is black dirt because you are a Sheikh while mine is made of white and gold feathers because I am Syed.”

In another particularly terrifying story, ‘The Nightmares of Major S’, the tyrannies of caste are laid bare through the character of Syed Anzar Shah. While looking down upon people of lower castes in his everyday life, he also keeps a window open to ingratiate himself with powerful players in the government, hoping to seek special concessions. But his overtures and manoeuvres towards the ruling powers make no difference. The army major sees no difference between him and the ordinary Kashmiri.

In the end, Anzar Shah is used by the powers he sought to manipulate; his life is stripped of a false sense of power.

He not only doesn’t belong to any side, he is treated without sympathy, only ignominy. The author captures Shah’s uncertain future: “Syed Anzar Shah was the only man in town who was conscious of the magnitude of his power and expected the major to address him with the conviviality of a friend. However, he was denied even the acknowledgment of eye contact.”

Rather draws seemingly predictable characters with nuance. However, I felt the treatment of journalists in the book was rather inadequate and insufficiently drawn. Perhaps it is because of my own experience of being a Kashmiri journalist. Rather’s descriptions do not fully appreciate the power dynamics and the fraught working environment that defines journalism in Kashmir.

The violence unleashed by the state is always lurking around in the stories, ever-present even in its absence, threatening to shatter the fragile moments of peace in an otherwise idyllic natural landscape. Yet, despite the violence, the book points towards hope. The final story in the collection ends on a note of tenderness — with the embrace of a little girl who was waiting to be taken out for a walk before nightfall. The innocence of a young life — the promise of a new generation that can see a new dawn after a long night — is outlined in these tender acts and moments of love and affection, especially in the last story, which lends the book its title. The past lingers in the present, always threatening to break the promise of a better future: “…the past hung like a curtain of darkness, the memory an assault — jangling, perpetual and hurtful”.

The Night of Broken GlassFeroz RatherHarperCollins IndiaFiction₹399

The Night of Broken Glass is a promising, sincere debut that leaves the reader wanting more. In the book, the significance of memory cannot be overstated; it is brittle cloth, out of which these stories are cut and then sewn together. Rather gathers memories, and carefully assembles and renders them into stories of loss, endurance, courage, and love. As the German writer WG Sebald wrote in The Rings of Saturn : “Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life… And yet, what would we be without memory?”

Majid Maqbool is a journalist and writer based in Srinagar

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