Book review: A snapshot of Kashmir with a time and date stamp

The reluctant theme of Kashmiri-based writer Shahnaz Bashir’s second book is that the political dominates the personal in a war-torn land. Scattered Souls is a collection of 13 short stories that vividly describe the lives of everyday people in Kashmir of 1990s. These are first and third person fictionalised accounts of the localised histories of people most often told by an omniscient narrator, or a sympathetic neighbour. Richly visualised, Bashir’s varied characters live colourfully within the world of their stories, and their hopes, challenges, successes, and disappointments reflect the universal human struggle that is the subject of fiction. When viewed together, however, the metanarrative adds up to a pessimistic narrative; there is no escaping tragedy for the ordinary inhabitants of Kashmir.

It could easily be heavy going in that sense, and there is enough material here to overwhelm a less skilled writer. Fortunately, Bashir sidesteps melodrama by keeping his prose resilient and encouraging, even as his focus remains authentic. The story titled, “A Photo with Barack Obama”, opens as follows, “The First time Biul became indifferent to his social stigma was when a policeman called him haramzaada, bastard, and kicked him exactly 10 times in the ribs.” The narrator lists the horrific manner in which the 13-year-old stone thrower is tortured in illegal police custody; thrashed, denied use of the lavatory, and detained for three days, until there is little left to the imagination. “Flashes of the policeman’s dark hairy groin, clanking of the dangling, glinting steel buckle of his police belt…”

Yet, Bashir brings us quickly back to the concerns of the current day, with a kind of matter-of-fact brusqueness. “That was all a year ago. But now, US President Barack Obama was visiting India and stone-pelting in Kashmir would invite his attention. He could just say something about the resolution of the Kashmir issue, something the Indian state didn’t want to hear… The big boys of the neighbourhood discussed Obama nonstop these days. Biul listened to them, rapt.”

Interestingly, Bashir’s stories often run into each other, until one is left with the true taste of a communal life, a neighbourhood where characters might clash, conspire, tattle tale on each other, or get along. So Biul’s story and his status as a bastard child gains borrowed resonance because the stories preceding it tell us of the gangrape of his mother Sakeena by the Indian Army troops who take her husband away to an interrogation centre.

The same psychiatrist Dr Imtiyaz, who treats the raving Sakeena after the event, is the one who petitions for her son Biul’s release from jail a few stories down. This device of connecting characters and events, allows Bashir to keep the stories alive, until they play themselves out over several decades. By letting them run through each other and forwards some generations, the author establishes that the torments of the region are not mere flashes in the pan; they are an inescapable way of life.

Replete with ironies, and touching a variety of experience, the stories explore the different ways that class or gender can define identity and fate.

True generosity lies in the way the narrator’s judgement is suspended in a world where people are being constantly tried and tortured, or murdered, for no good reason. In the opening story, “Transistor”, a silly misunderstanding is enough to end the blameless life of a supporter of the freedom movement. Death comes arbitrarily and accidentally to a much beloved housewife in “The House”.

Whereas, in “Psychosis”, and “Ex-Militant”, both policeman and revolutionary struggle with the consequences of their immoderate violence against the innocent.

In “Gravestone” the paradox of a father struggling with his conscience so that he can claim compensation from the same government that killed his son, blossoms at the end of the story: His attempts to scratch out the word “martyr” on his son’s gravestone result in him accidentally removing his son’s name.

Even minor characters within a story such as the friendly neighbourhood shopkeeper who relates the happenings in “The Woman Who Became Her Own Husband” pulse with vibrant and relatable concerns.

Kashmiri affairs are never off the newspaper for long. However, it is a welcome thing to be drawn into a collection of stories that voices the concerns of everyday Kashmiris. Native writers like Akthar Mohi-ud-Din, Hari Krishan Kaul, Amin Kamil, and Hirday Kaul Bharati have all developed the tradition of the regional short story. Yet their impact remains small in translation, meanwhile, the current generation of writers in English, like Bashir, attest to difficulties in getting their fiction published by mainstream publishers. This is a situation that needs to change soon because if the writers and poets and artists who can carry forth the honest lived realities that the senselessness of statistics and the shock-value of television reportage cannot faithfully translate for the outsider.

With Bashir’s writing there is a sense that the stories tell themselves, such is the intimacy and familiarity he shows with the collective consciousness of his hometown. There are easy comparisons with Manto in the often-shocking glibness with which Bashir lays bare a character’s innermost feelings, or with Chekov in the rootedness of the characters to their circumstances. What he shares most with such illustrious predecessors however is the way his stories feel authentic and historical, every one in the collection a snapshot with a time and date stamp.

Karishma Attari is the author of I See You and Don’t Look Down