Author Zahid Rafiq spent years as a journalist covering Kashmir, one of the world’s most militarized zones. He made the switch to fiction, completing his MFA at Cornell. In his first book, The World With Its Mouth Open, Rafiq explores the lives of contemporary, everyday Kashmiris. In 11 riveting short stories, his taut but knowing prose forces us to see and hear from characters whose voices are rarely included in the geopolitical discussions around the conflict-ridden region.
Rafiq spoke to me recently over Zoom from Srinagar, Kashmir’s capital. He was sandwiched between rows of bookshelves on either side of him. He insists that accepting one’s own foolishness is key as a writer. In developing his own voice, he’s looked to Chekhov, Kafka, and “lots of Russians,” as well as the chatter of shopkeepers and autorickshaw drivers from his youth.
This discussion was organized by the Yale South Asian Studies Council and has been edited and condensed.
Nafeesa Syeed (NS): In your book, in scenes with taxi passengers, a female fishmonger, or a grave digger, I felt like I could hear the dialogue in Kashmiri, though it’s written in English. You capture the cadence, sarcasm, gestures. Not that one has to be familiar with the language to enjoy it. But tell me about how you think about language and rhythm, and how you approach it in your own writing.
Zahid Rafiq (ZR): It is language, predominantly. It is a sentence after a sentence, after a sentence—that is writing to me. Often, a sentence that slowly angles for its latter half. I never know how it would end itself in a way, leaving it open where a comma would come, where a period would come, where a semicolon would come. That is one part of it; the language as sentences.
Another is the language of writing in English. English is the language I know best, which doesn’t mean I know it greatly. I speak Kashmiri very well, but I can’t read it very well. All the literature I have read is in the English language.
Kashmiri is a language that all these characters speak. So, when I was writing the dialogue, especially, I was very aware that I did not want to put words in their mouth that did not belong to them. I somehow wanted to bring their voices into English, the cadences, which is why the sentences are often slower, sometimes even at the cost of appearing a little messy. There are sentences that I could sharpen, but once I sharpen them, they become sentences that do not come from that spoken language, that culture, and I wanted to keep that.
There was a choice there that I made, that I wanted to stay closer—almost my one ear was attuned to the tone of the language, the rhythm of the language, the Kashmiri language. Language also means how people speak, what they believe in—what is the sea that one swims in? And language almost always gives us a sense of how people live.
For example, in the first story, “The Bridge,” a man and a woman meet after many years, and he asks her a question. If I was writing in English, I would write, “Did you have a child?” But in Kashmiri people say, Khudayan ma suznay kenh? “Did God send you anything?” It was not about romanticizing the language that I want to use that sentence. But because the moment I say, “Did God send you anything?” it gives a sense of the world they live in and the contours of this world.
NS: There is decidedly a lack of physical description, of the topography. This contrasts with centuries of romanticization of Kashmir: from colonial travelogues, extolling the verdant valley, and the Bollywood backdrops of pine forests and bubbling brooks, to now the endless Instagram posts of tourist holidays in Kashmir. In your stories, we almost see Srinagar as this gritty city of bunkers with a trash-filled river and scum-covered lake. It’s such a different perception from someone actually living there, than just the awe of an outsider or an aching diasporic.
Was this a conscious decision to leave out the dramatic Himalayan landscape?
ZR: What ends up in the writing is what the characters see, and what they see is determined by how they feel.
Those who come to look for mountains, they look at the mountains; the people don’t exist. People are a blur, and you look past them.
But these are people who won’t describe their own market. Why should they describe something unless there is something there? The boys in the story “Crows” look at the orchards, and it’s a moment of quiet repose, for the boy who has been beaten up by the teacher, and it is a moment of repose for the trees also who are going into winter. So, there is that kind of looking.
But then there is this grand backdrop of Kashmir, as the fantasy, the beautiful landscape of fantasy. That could have come in with another character who has that kind of gaze, but not with me. I’m interested in what my characters are interested in.
Also, when beauty becomes a pursuit in itself, it leaves out the brutality that lies at the heart of that beauty.
NS: What do you mean by the pursuit of beauty?
ZR: When you come to look for something, and you single-mindedly look for it: You want the mountains. You look at the mountains, you see the mountains become larger than they are, and they become these things for a picture. Kashmir has become this beautiful landscape. It’s pictures, videos, songs, all of it, and the descriptions, even in other works of writing and poetry and it leaves out the people. It leaves out the people who live there and who see it.
NS: Like you said, the people are a blur.
It’s very hard to tell what is past, what is future, what is memory. … The past and the future seem, sometimes, to be coming from the same door.
ZR: Who’s doing the looking? Who’s doing the telling? For example, if there was a tourist guide in one of these stories—there is not but I did actually start a story and left it midway—then that guy would be talking about the beauty, not because he’s attuned to the beauty, but because he has to sell the beauty. It is a commodity that he must sell to the right people at the right price. Take them there, and so that he makes his money. But it’s not something he’s talking about.
People in Kashmir don’t go speaking like, “Oh, this is beautiful, that’s beautiful.” It is beautiful. They speak about it for a moment, and then they move to life. So, in that sense this is life.
NS: Even the characters’ features, what they look like, is restrained. I wondered why.
ZR: Physical descriptions, I wanted to avoid, partly, because people are also situated elsewhere. They are in their bodies, but they are also situated beyond the space of their bodies, after a while. Once you live long enough in the world, you’re not situated in the body. Of course, you are there, but there is so much that is happening somewhere inside the body, as if there is a laboratory inside us, at the back of which everything happens. And it was that I was more interested in.
NS: These stories are very rooted in Srinagar. You don’t name neighborhoods or landmarks. But we’re with the characters in those alleyways and chai stalls. Srinagar is a city that’s undergoing so much change. There are new malls, construction, flyovers, population growth, demographic changes. So much is being taken down, being put up. How does Srinagar as a city influence your work?
ZR: I love the city. I wasted more than half of my life in that city, and I intend to lose the rest of it in that city. It’s very important for these stories. Srinagar is, in a way, an enormous infinite city, because there are houses after houses, and people after people within each of them—something is changing every moment. So, it is almost the world. When I was writing this book, nothing existed outside of Srinagar. Srinagar is Srinagar, and it is the world at the same time, because everything that happens in the hearts and minds and souls of people anywhere happens in this city.
NS: In the story “In Small Boxes,” a young journalist talks about the stories that do and don’t get told in the newspaper. How did you decide what stories you wanted to tell? And what about the burden of everyone having a story?
ZR: It was very difficult. The hardest part was to take off all burden of representation, to take off all burden that I speak for Srinagar or Kashmir, or the violence that has happened here, or anything. That was the hardest part: to arrive at a certain degree of freedom in the writing of it, and to realize that, and to accept that, I’m going to write these small, very fragile stories of very little meaning in the backdrop of all the immense violence and life that is out there.
After that, it is easier because I don’t represent anything, anyone. So, what I am responsible for are the stories themselves, not for anything outside of it.
Why did I write these stories? It was like you almost put your own hand inside your heart or in your mind, and what you pull out you did not choose, because you could not see, you pulled it out in the dark.
NS: Do you think fiction is truer than nonfiction?
ZR: I can only speak for myself. My nonfiction was a newspaper nonfiction or a magazine nonfiction, where I wrote features. Of course, the fiction is far truer, even though it’s based on no facts. Simply because in the fiction, I must peel layer after layer after layer. In nonfiction, I’m not supposed to be bringing any, for example, self-awareness. Here, I must bring in self-awareness.
NS: Was it difficult to make that transition from nonfiction to fiction?
ZR: The representation part; the part of being afraid where I, for example, created an image, and I was not sure what that image meant. That was an ambiguous image. It could be read in many ways. I was not sure; what do I do now? Because I loved the image. But what does it mean? So, to allow myself to say that it doesn’t mean anything. I am not in the business of making sense of it, and no empires are going to stay or fall, and nothing is going to happen by my book. I must just write my little images.
With fiction, one has to really fight hard to accept and believe in one’s foolishness. It’s a whole lot of foolishness on the page. Stupidity and profundity are almost next to each other. It’s half the time hard to tell between the two. It’s almost childish to write fiction, in some ways. You’re creating a world. You’re creating a character. You’re talking about something. You’re going on a long sentence somewhere and it’s different from nonfiction.
NS: In your story “The House,” a family is building a home, and while digging the workers discover a severed hand, and they’re all figuring out what to do with it. And elsewhere in your book, we also hear about broken limbs. I couldn’t help but think of the feminist scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian. She uses the framing of ashlaa’, an Arabic word, to understand Gaza. It means body parts. She speaks about Palestinians collecting and unifying the ashlaa’, the scattered limbs of their loved ones, as an act of remembrance and what she calls “epistemic reunification.” How do you think about memory?
ZR: In a place like Kashmir, and in the writing of this book, there were always the people who are alive, the people who are not alive, the people who might be alive or the people who could be alive. So, it’s all of those people coming together. There are people who were forcibly removed off the stage and something of their absence remains on the stage, and that absence, too, insists on returning. That absence, too, insists on being seen, being spoken. So, it’s not merely memory, one has to think back to a past. That past, for a long time, has been trying to rise through the present, just like the hand rises in this story. You want to create a future on this present, but the past also wants to be unburied. The past wants to be taken into consideration.
There are places like that that have too much of history. Like the mouth is choked with too much of history, too much of past, too much of present, too much of future.
NS: So, when hearing a story in the present, it sounds like then you must interrogate it and figure out how to integrate it into the present.
ZR: That’s also how the future works.
NS: How so?
ZR: It simply enters, like there is a bit of news that could simply arrive through my phone. I will have to accommodate it in the present. It might destroy my present. This moment that I am having, it could be like a simple bomb might fall on this moment of my life and shatter it all. And that will arrive, not from the past, maybe from the past, but from the future. It’s very hard to tell what is past, what is future, what is memory, in that sense. Because the future also arrives unannounced. From the darkness it rises; one seems to rise from the behind, one from the ahead. And in some ways in these stories, it is not only the memory that is coming, it’s not the past, it is also the future. The past and the future seem, sometimes, to be coming from the same door.
NS: The title of the book appears in the story “Crows,” where a teacher beats a daydreaming student. There’s also the threat of soldiers barging in. External and internal threats of violence, and a sense of paranoia or gaze upon you fill many stories. The teacher tells the boy the world, with its mouth open, awaits. What is childhood like for these kids?
ZR: Childhood is difficult, but it’s also great fun. It’s painful. There’s a lot of beating. But like in this story, beatings are something that happen, and then they are over. Then life again resumes, and then beating comes tomorrow. So, it is almost a life that happens between beatings. And what must one do in a life between beatings? Would one mourn the last beating and be dreading the one that is coming? Or should one just live as one can between the beatings.
It’s the teacher’s own fear also of the world as a monster, almost of the world as something terrible, that can swallow you, and you wouldn’t know where you have arrived where you would lose your sense of location.
You can be eaten. You can be swallowed. You can be simply disappeared inside this thing, for the teacher. And it wouldn’t take very much. So, the teacher and the boy’s mother almost share the same anxiety that—if you don’t hold on to something, if you don’t have the right papers, if you don’t have the right clothes, if you don’t have the right something—you’re going to be eaten up.
It might not be the truth, but for them, they cannot see beyond that. They think if you grow a little bigger the mouth can’t swallow you.
NS: Violence isn’t explicitly recounted here, but there are subtle references to things having happened, or that are going to happen. One character, for instance, reads a headline about his brother’s death, “Man Killed by Government Forces.” In another story, we wonder what happened to a woman. Why was it important to write about loss itself, not the incident?
ZR: I tried writing about the silences. I tried to fill the silences when I started writing this book, because that seemed the right thing to do. That’s what story is. A story sets up something, and then it answers it. Then it says what is contained inside it. But every time I tried it seemed fake. So, I had to almost remove all of it till there was an emptiness in it, and I could still feel it was real.
I realized that story after story, I was leaving emptinesses behind. And at first, I was very afraid of them. When I was reading my own stories, I would often sink in these emptinesses, and I was like, this is a shitload of emptiness. What am I going to do? But then I realized that they were true in some sense to me, that I could read them from the first sentence to last sentence without feeling that I have written something false, which involved taking out lots of the central stories, which to me did not sound real.
NS: I found myself having to fill in those gaps, then gasping. In a way, it’s still there, even in the absence.
ZR: I had to learn in a way, in the writing of these stories, to live with that ambiguity; to live with the absence of that information. I would have liked to ideally have it, pour it in, and get done with it. But that’s not what was true. So, to live with so many ambiguities as one does in the world, you simply do not know what the other person thinks about you, and you live with them, and you might die with them. But you have absolutely no idea, despite what they tell you, of what they actually think.
Who are they carrying in their head? What is in their head? What are their secret fears? They won’t tell. 
Featured image: Photograph of Zahid Rafiq © Muzamil Mattoo.