Justine has written a feature review of Mirza Waheed’s first novel for The Times of London:

The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed

A Kashmiri novelist investigates the conflicted loyalties and brutal violence of his homeland

Review by Justine Hardy

Does conflict silence creativity? A loud “no” comes in answer — think of the poets of the First World War, voices such as Primo Levi’s, whole literary undergrounds churning beneath the oppressive regimes of the late 20th century.

There are times, however, when the nature of a conflict is so brutal that the human spirit would seem to fail. So it was in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, in northern India. For almost two decades, from the beginning of an armed revolt against India that spun out far beyond the borders of the exquisite Kashmir Valley, the collective poetic voice of the Kashmiri people was struck dumb by violence.

Their pain was expressed, almost solely, in the words of the late poet Agha Shahid Ali, aKashmiri in self-imposed exile in America. His verses have been carried in the pockets and wallets of thousands of Kashmiris as they searched for talismans in a world of checkpoints, bombs and crossfire.

During the second decade of the fighting the frozen silence gave way a little, with books such asThe Tiger Ladies, an elegant memoir of a Kashmiri childhood by another writer who had left the valley, Sudha Koul, and then, last year, with Curfewed Night, BasharatPeer’s hard-kicking record of growing up during the insurgency.

Mirza Waheed’s first novel, The Collaborator, brings down the last vestiges of the walls of silence. Like the delicate pashmina shawls of Kashmir, his story is woven tight with autobiographical detail. His narrator is a village headman’s son, a Gujjar from one of the region’s nomadic herding tribes, though his family, and others from the tribe, have “gone into the bricks”, as some Romany Gypsies describe those who have left the road and settled. This nameless boy-man tells his story, shifting between his past and a present that is the early 1990s, the worst years of fighting between the various separatist and pro-Pakistan militant groups, and the Indian security forces. The latter comprise the Indian Army, the various paramilitary and counterinsurgency forces, and the Jammu and Kashmir Police, a combination that, in real terms, amounts to approximately an armed member of these forces for every seven Kashmiris.

The narrator’s past is a place full of with the melancholia of a lost time, a sanctuary of tradition and tight geography. It is a softly buffered world that contains him and his four most-loved friends as they flex their pubescent personalities. In their hidden playground, the “Valley of Yellow Flowers”, Waheed sings a hurr (a wedding song, sung in mourning for those who die young), a memorial to all that Kashmiris feel they have lost over the past 20 years: peace, fecundity, beauty and innocence.

The beginning of what many Kashmiri Muslims call their Tahreek-e-Azadi, their freedom movement, enters this hidden valley on cloudy wisps of rumour, almost ignored at first. These are people already inured to the Pakistani and Indian checkpoints that have long ridden the Line of Control, the disputed border between the two countries, just above their valley and the surrounding forest.

The rumours gather and are intensified by Islamic radicalisation until, one by one, the four friends leave to “cross over” and train on the other side as militants. Their disappearance nudges the narrator towards his own crossing, though each time he resolves to go he is viscerally reminded of the devastation that his friends’ departures have caused to their families and then to the village as the army decides to make an example of the tiny hamlet. The punishment for nurturing militants is a crackdown. The army descends, en masse, ordering all the villagers out of their homes to sit in a nearby field, the men on one side, the women on the other, day after day.

It is winter, there is no respite from the sitting: “Late January is still the time of winter proper … the mornings hang heavy and frigid with chill and fog. People find it hard to smile. Sometimes the fog doesn’t clear all day; it just breathes over everything like a vast, over-bearing organism. Sometimes the sun may make a very small, coin-like appearance through a crevice in the blankets of fog.”

The crackdown empties the hamlet, leaving only the headman and his family to pretend that there is some continuity. It is a fraying normality, held together by the daily round that his parents cling to: his mother tending her beloved vegetable garden, his father sucking at his hookah as though it is a life-support machine.

From these frail semblances of life as it was, the narrator is drawn into becoming the collaborator of the title, working under a cartoonish Indian Army captain, a man soaked in whisky, foul language and a psychotic loathing of Pakistan. The boy’s new role is as a scavenger of corpses, his putrid job a device for portraying the abominable excesses of both the security forces and the militants. Waheed was raised in a mohalla of Srinagar, a downtown neighbourhood, and yet his familiarity with the country people of his home state gives him the licence to portray what must be the layers of his own life, growing up in conflict, using fiction to explore the nature of brutality.

It is through this kind of fiction that collective memories of violence can be given the freedom to breathe again, breaking free of the received wisdom of how an entire people’s story has been portrayed and manipulated in the media. With this liberation comes responsibility: to understand that even though the work is fiction, for many it will be read as documentary evidence. In this Waheed’s writing combines the elegance and gymnastics of another reinterpreter of recent wars and revolutions, Ryszard Kapuscinski, and of Waheed’s own friend, literary ally and author of the sublime Pakistani satire ACase of Exploding Mangoes, Mohammed Hanif. There are times when Waheed’s own use of satire slides towards crude cartoon, when portraying those he believes inflicted the deepest wounds on his home. It is an understandable use of this weapon and while his countrymen will applaud him for it, others will use it against him.

If this book were to be read in every contemporary literature class in Kashmir and India, some of the younger generation in Kashmir, who are now throwing stones in their version of an intifada, might begin to free themselves by writing their own stories, and many more in India might begin really to understand what happens to the human condition when it is bludgeoned through life by rifle butts.

The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed (Viking, £12.99; 320pp)
Justine Hardy is a journalist and novelist. She has written three books about Kashmir, where she lives and works

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