The brilliant W.G. Sebald, whose literary craft was shaped by the Holocaust’s extraordinary horrors, remarked that memories bind us to life “in a strange way”. In the groundbreaking If This a Man, Primo Levi, a Holocaust survivor, labels memory a “strange instrument”. It’s there when it isn’t, really.
Kashmiri writer and former journalist Zahid Rafiq’s The World With Its Mouth Open uses the “instrument” of memory to paint absurd, poignant and, most importantly, ordinary depictions of life in Kashmir with an extraordinary literary flair.
The World With Its Mouth Open’s breathtaking and lyrical prose, and cunning eye for detail, showcases tiny slices and nuggets of life in Kashmir with exquisite empathy.
Zahid Rafiq
The World With Its Mouth Open
Penguin, 2025
The book is a collection of 11 short stories emanating with the familiar undercurrents of life in the troubled valley which have been written by the author over five years. The characters are stock Kashmiris and the author lends them a compassionate heart with a discerning eye for detail.
It opens with ‘The Bridge’, which narrates a day in the life of Nusrat, a young Kashmiri woman carrying the scars of two miscarriages and her encounter with Rajaji, a forgotten friend’s forgotten brother, who briefly walks into her troubled life near a bridge over Jhelum and then ‘disappears’ without trace.
The mysterious disappearance revives bad memories of war, leaving the reader with a heavy heart aching both for the disappeared and Nusrat’s troubled life. She has turned to faith when the world around her is falling apart, like many Kashmiri men and women do.
‘Beauty’, the fifth story, is a classic adventure in the life of four Kashmiri teenagers who try to elbow each other out in the familiar game of impressing a new girl in the neighbourhood. The story and the dialogues flow like a calm river, carrying with it in a perfect literary rhythm the silly obsessions, comic events and teenage fetishes of young boys.
The funny story of “men who will do love” devolves into a tragedy which leaves the reader with a deep sense of guilt and shame for following the teenage eyes under the door of a bathroom where the girl, naked, is beseeching God to explain: “What had I done to you?”
Zahid Rafiq.
‘The Mannequin’ stands out as a remarkable work for the sheer depth which the author has plunged to transform the ordinary story of a “beautiful woman” of a mannequin standing before a Kashmiri shop into a face “filled with sorrow, agony”, a “weeping doll”, which makes the shopkeeper almost cry too.
As Mansoor sets out to return the ‘masterpiece’ to its maker, a group of neighbourhood boys make merry at his expense, carrying the “dead woman” who has “left behind three children” in a procession as if like a corpse, breaking the mannequin in two. But Mansoor is not happy with himself, having beaten up one of the kids. He wants to apologise, even though the child had participated in the mannequin carnage.
In ‘Crows’, an unnamed boy, caught in the struggle to memorise “fission and fusion” and “isotopes and isobars”, waits for soldiers to “barge in again in their big boots” to disrupt his class and save him from a certain beating from the tutor whose “hand is itching”. The story depicts the constant struggles of many Kashmiris who, under the shadow of war, are trapped between the expectations of their parents and their own ambitions.
Conflict forms an essential backdrop of the stories. In ‘Bare Feet’, Hassan who is “carrying the dying country” in him meets up with a friend to make sense of his friend’s dream in which a dead man beseeches him to do “something” to ease the pain of his bereaved family.
We don’t know how the man was killed, but we can feel the monster of war looming throughout the story. As the two friends embark on the journey to find the man’s family, the author is “haunted by ghosts….by war, by loss, by something I can feel but cannot see”. A feeling which most Kashmiris experience.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said that “literature is nothing but carpentry”. But carpenters require tools to construct their art. For the writers of fiction, memory is one such tool, a harmless weapon against the science of forgetfulness and a silent rebellion against the extermination of history.
The World With Its Mouth Open is a terrific attempt at memorialising Kashmir. The stories bring together familiar characters and relatable memories of life in the troubled valley and each one of them is woven with a great literary eloquence. The book leaves the reader with a void, a sense of guilt, of something one “can feel but cannot see”.
