Paradise Lost
The word Kashmir no longer brings to mind beautiful snow-capped hills,
or houseboats over Dal Lake; the romantic place where Bollywood stars sang
romantic songs; today Kashmir is associated with conflict, militancy, army
excesses, stone-pelting youth, pellet-shooting soldiers. This is the Kashmir
Feroz Rather captures in poignant, unsettling detail.
Rather’s debut book, The Night Of
Broken Glass--takes its title from Kristallnacht, the
night of anti-Jewish pogrom by the Nazis in Germany in 1938, the crystals
referring to the shards of broken glass on the streets after homes and shop
windows had been smashed.
His book of connected short stories, is about the rage, fear,
suspicion and mourning that afflicts both the people of Kashmir and the armymen
stationed there to enforce order. The people are angry because of the cruelty
of the soldiers, who torture, kill and rape; the soldiers are jittery because
they do not know when they will be ambushed by insurgents, or where the next
stone, bomb of bullet will come from. In the midst of all this trauma, ordinary
people strive to get by—the student, baker, cobbler, imam, the young men and
women in love, the families that are not sure their loved one will return in
the evening. A young man seeing his cousin home, is shot because his car stalls
at the wrong place; another is made to clean graffiti on the rough wall of his
shop with his tongue. Is it possible to live with the constant threat of
violence—the people just trying to stay alive are caught between the devil and
the deep sea—which is the militant and which the military is hard to tell.
The Night Of Broken
Glass
By Feroz Rather
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 232
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