As long as there has been war, there have been poets and writers, translating the debris and loss of the battlefield into a romantic inspiration. From novels like Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, Ernst Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, or the surreal depiction of on-field trauma and suffering in Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, war has been a cardinal theme that has inspired one of the best in the world of literature.
Those who survive the struggle are left with exhausting feelings and a survivor’s guilt, brought about by the destruction of familiar worlds – cities, cultures and families. A collective trauma, engendered by shared suffering and social fragmentation, creates unique human experiences, sometimes fostering strong bonds of empathy while at times eroding emotional cohesion. The literature that describes these human experiences doesn’t just recount the battles but canvases invisible wounds etched into the minds, relationships and entire societies.
Life in Kashmir
The World With Its Mouth Open is a collection of eleven stories by Kashmiri writer Zahid Rafiq that ponder on the lives of the people of Kashmir as they walk the uncertain terrains of their days, fractured from years of war.
Rafiq creates explicit detail to fine imaginative imagery with his vivid descriptions, transporting the reader beyond the literary text. His details of the mundane crafted over the background of catastrophe, portray a fresco of tension done against a constant barren and excruciating political plaster, exploring how individuals navigate conflict and identity; engaged in a tug of war between personal desires, societal pressures and psychological dilemmas.
Like a master storyteller, the author makes the reader connect with the book with his strong sense of place and setting, emotional depth and cultural references, at times as seemingly trivial as a woman saying “hosshhhh” while throwing out a pail of water on the path in a great swish or “black radio in a leather cover with the familiar circle of pinpricks”. The connection is not only of cultural semblance but also of anxiety where the narrator constructs situations and crafts melancholies that evoke a stark sense of anticipation, uncertainty and consternation in the reader. An agonising claustrophobia is palpable right at your throat, you can’t swallow. Yes! You can’t swallow when you are reading the book.
The characters are in a perpetual state of overwhelming emotional confusion; marred by conflicting desires and values, often disconnected from oneself, and mostly numb. The stories give a peek into the contradictory motivations of the protagonists because they have been constantly forced to make choices without any sense of certainty. Nusrat is married and doesn’t want to be seen with Rajaji but at the same time goes out looking for him, desperately, in the marketplace once he takes too long to return. She wants to ask him about his life but at the same time doesn’t want to ask anything; similar dilemmas continue until the characters disappear in uncertain roads of the pallid city.
Despite the war
The book is the work of a skilled raconteur who makes every story feel like the reader’s story. The author taps into emotional quandaries that align with the reader’s own, mirroring the uncomfortable choices that he has faced and the crossroads he has stood at. The book leaves characters in peril at chapter breaks, creating cliffhanger situations.
“Earlier he had shouted at his mother that it made no sense to wait outside, to ask every passerby if things were fine in the city; …and if he, too, had to die, her standing at the gate wouldn’t save him.”
The book very subtly alludes to the looming presence of an armed conflict around the characters, emphasising how human relations, feelings and even the mundane continue despite the war. The presence of war shapes each of them in unique ways: sometimes interpenetrating them with a sense of cynicism and other times with the struggle to reconcile.
A boy who is taking an exam that he didn’t prepare for, wishes for an escape with “the soldiers are barge(ing) in again in their big boots, turning everything upside down, poking into their schoolbags with the long guns”, pointing to his de-sensitisation to the chaos of war, a result of growing up in a conflict zone. The boy feels less threatened by the disruption of stability and order brought about by violence and more threatened by a small class test. The boy could represent each one of the readers who grew up in a landscape where external disruptions often worked as a release from the unconscious trauma and where violence was internalised so much so that it seemed manageable as compared to mundane day-to-day challenges and tasks.
Two boys indulge in an act of voyeurism, a middle-aged man struggles to locate the grave of his lover, a shopkeeper is caught in his delusions of persecution until they become a reality, dogs who walk at the edge of the road, a newspaper that prints the obituary of a man who is still alive; the book gnaws at the deepest and darkest attributes of humanity with comedy and poise.
The author often tries to evoke a sense of uncanny humour in mundane, contemplating everyday ordinary experiences with grand philosophical reflections that create either comedic tension or sheer absurdity. Isn’t that how we actually live in a state of perpetual adversity? Laughing at life’s frustrations to make them more bearable, our humour becomes a rebellious response to mthe eaninglessness of the world (with its mouth wide open).
And then the book laments with a twang, “I mean you read the news and the world seems to be on the brink of shutting shop, but then you look at the advertisements and everything is in place” – a place that is falling apart yet manages to put up a facade of lucidity.
In a chapter which narrates the story of a young journalist, which I believe could be a portrayal of the author’s own self, a line reads:
“Sometimes the first page to the last page is nothing but obituaries.”
The author probably alludes to his own ghosts working as a young reporter with his everyday interactions with the ordinary and extraordinary and how his stories had more impact, either as despair or defiant hope, on his own self rather than the ones he had intended to write them for. When you write tragedy, trauma and injustice; they carve into the soul and leave marks that never fade away. They leave you wary, flinching at shadows that others don’t see, trust becomes fragile and joy elusive, compelling you to stand when others remain silent.
“In the grave of a tea shop, trapped in these chairs, reading the news of our death, choosing between coffee and tea…”
Some stories present an “allegory of loss” hinting at a metaphor of struggle without ends. In some battles, survival itself is an accomplishment and victory often loses its meaning. Such struggles invariably leave fragments of longing for those who have been taken away by the chaos of violence. In such chaos a journalist becomes both the witness and the weaver, building stories from shadows as a desperate attempt at resurrecting what war turned into whispers.
Writers are the keepers of a collective memory, reconstructing lives from ruins and ashes.
The World With Its Mouth Open, Zahid Rafiq, Penguin India.
