The Collaborator

By Mirza Waheed

Publisher: Viking

Pages: 320

Price: 795

It is 1993. The setting is Nowgam, a tiny hamlet a bullet’s trajectory away from Pakistan, in Kashmir. As the Indian Army employs ever more draconian measures to quash the struggle for ‘Azaadi’, young men by the thousands trek across the Line of Control to be trained in Pakistani militant camps and to return to redress wrongs or be summarily executed and dumped in a blind gorge where yellow daisies push for survival amidst thousands of rotting corpses. Kashmir, the paradise on Earth, is fast becoming a ‘Jahannum’, where the macabre weaves its lunatic thread into the fabric of the commonplace.

The architect of this particular vale of horrors is Captain Kadian of the Indian Army, and he recruits the nameless narrator -- perhaps anonymous because he stands for the Kashmiri Everyman -- as his grim reaper, to collect identity cards that can eventually be used to demonstrate to the press Pakistan’s role in training the young men that will become cannon fodder and be left to rot in plain view of its hated army.

The 19-year old narrator is the son of the headman of Nowgam, a quiet, bookish young man whose four childhood friends -- Nassir, Mohammad, Ashfaque and Gul – think it expedient not to take him along on their trek across the border and whose demeanour encourages Kadian not only to make him do his grisly work  - "it is not easy, picking stuff off dead people" – but also to become a silent audience for his drunken tirades against all Kashmiris and Pakistanis – indeed, to become a silent spectator to the Indian Army’s brutalities.

The novel takes a long time to unloop, as the protagonist revisits his happy childhood with his four buddies and agonises about their absence and the fact that he was left behind. As it progresses, we realise that in these abnormal times the collaborator is not in fact the flamboyant, radicalised Everyman, but the cautious storyteller, the one who will witness rather than perform extraordinary acts, the sensitive son who will step back from the glory of the feat because he thinks of the atrocities that will be visited on his parents -- "Oh, they will kill my father and mother too, even rape Ma!"

The first part of the novel, though elegiac in parts, suffers from this repetitious soul-searching, but once the novel picks up pace, in the second and third parts, one almost forgets to exhale. There is no lack of gut-wrenching, heartbreaking action here. The internalised rhythm of the novel and the tortured keening of the narrator’s soul are turned inside out, the hallucinatory effect of stasis amidst the horror of the valley of death (and indeed the dead are also in stasis) recedes with the furious action that now unfolds. In the reader, melancholy gives way to anger.

The decapitated head of a militant’s brother is thrown into his parents’ yard. The villagers are made to cower while the hated governor of Kashmir lands in a helicopter and gives a speech in English for the benefit of his accompanying factotums. A band of women defy the curfew to beg milk for their starving children, as the entire village, nomadic Gujjars who have only settled down a few decades ago, take to the road again to escape the violence. The cruelty of the Indian army is countermanded by the brutality of the militants, who chop off the noses and tongues and arms of suspected informants.

In the end, the collaborator does not undertake the ultimate act of courage or sacrifice to redeem himself, but only that which his nature allows. It is enough that for him, it is a cathartic act and an act of mercy on the dead that he had pilfered for their identities. It might also bring about the same dreadful consequences for him that he has imagined for his brave friends.

In the end, the same holds true for the author, Mirza Waheed, a Kashmiri journalist who now lives in London. His hatred for the Indian Army might have made his narrative too personal, the musings of his protagonist perhaps make it too slow, while some journalistic vignettes are just that, vignettes. But his enormous contribution makes these observations trivial.

That contribution lies in the fact that like a few others, including the poet Agha Shahid Ali and the memoir writer Basharat Peer, he has added his very significant and moving voice to the heartbreaking story of Kashmir, as told by a Kashmiri. In his novel the tale told by the ‘Other’ has become, imperfectly but poignantly, the voice of the Subaltern.

The Garden of Solitude

By Siddhartha Gigoo

Publisher: Rupa & Co.

Pages: 246

Price: Indian Rs.195

During the last two decades, while the subsequent governments of India and Pakistan exploited the Kashmir issue for their political gains both at home and abroad, Kashmiris remained, for the most part, silent spectators. However, it is no longer the case. There is a growing awareness among Kashmiris to voice their concerns independent of any alignment either to Indian or Pakistani points of view.

Siddhartha Gigoo is a Kashmiri Pandit who migrated to India during the early 1990s because of the political turmoil and the rise of militancy in Kashmir. The Garden of Solitude is his début novel and deals with the plight of Kashmiri Pandits who had to abandon their homes and migrate when Kashmiri Muslims started the struggle for an independent Kashmir.

Sridar, the protagonist, is living a peaceful life in his ancestral home in Kashmir. As a teenager he loves reading and writing poetry and short stories. Then all of a sudden, militancy erupts and the Kashmiri Pandits are given notices to leave their homes and migrate. Although initially reluctant, Lasa, Sridar’s father, decides to migrate to Jammu with his family and elderly father Mahanandju. The state of Jammu accommodates the migrants in refugee camps. Sridar grows up in these camps and attends a camp school. After completing the school he goes to Delhi and tries to get an admission in a film school. But luck does not favour him and he decides to take up a part-time job with a film-maker. In the Delhi migrant camp he befriends Lenin, a part-time assistant to a film-maker, who encourages him to participate in an essay writing competition. Sridar’s essay wins a consolation prize of twenty-five thousand rupees and a two-week stay in Ladakh. After Ladakh, Sridar goes to see his grandfather who has, by now, lost most of his memory. Saddened, he comes back to Delhi and joins a travel and tourism website. He is sent for a one-year deputation to America where he starts collecting the stories of the displaced Pandits. After getting back from America he decides to visit Kashmir and his old family home in which now a Muslim family lives. The novel ends with the launch of Sridar’s book The Book of Ancestors.

For Pakistanis who think only Kashmiri Muslims have suffered the hardships of Indian rule, this novel is a must read. I remember growing up reading magazines which glorified the struggle for an independent Kashmir and ridiculed and resented the presence of the Indian army there. The point of view of a vast majority of Pakistanis is too simplistic and one-dimensional in this regard. To them, only Kashmiri Muslims are suffering at the hands of the Indian government and there is never any mention of Kashmiri Pandits. This novel will help them understand, though to a limited extent, the complex social ambiance, religious milieu, political developments, and cultural make-up of Kashmir.

The novel starts in a tale-telling style. The first half of the novel focuses on the problems and hardships the displaced Pandits had to face while the second half concentrates on Sridar’s nostalgia for Kashmir while he is working in Delhi. There seems to be a lot of autobiographical details in the novel. The protagonist like the author has a penchant for reading and writing poetry (Gigoo has published two poetry books) and leaves Kashmir during his mid-teens (Gigoo was fifteen when he left Kashmir). Jonathan Franzen commented on autobiographical-fiction that "the most purely autobiographical-fiction requires pure invention." Although Gigoo’s attempt is in accordance with the prevalent writing dictum, write what you know, it is the "pure invention" which is missing here. It is because of this lack of pure invention that the novel neither challenges its reader nor shakes their assumptions.

Highlighting the importance of suspense in a story, E. M. Forster writes in Aspects of the Novel, "We are all like Scheherazade’s husband, in that we want to know what happens next. That is universal." Gigoo’s narrative lacks this important aspect of a novel, becomes too predictable, and leaves the reader labouring. At times, one feels it has been overwritten.

Given the fact that he is not a native speaker of English, Gigoo has a reasonable command over the language but the prose is not very fluent and it appears he lacks facility with the language. A couple of rounds of dispassionate editing after it had, in Ernest Hemingway’s words, cooled off well would have kneaded the prose well.

Gigoo’s description of human emotions, and the subsequent thought-processes triggered by them, lacks complexity and richness. He does not capture the volatility and capriciousness of human emotions which makes his characters too simplistic and one-dimensional. Rather than exploring the contradictions in and irrationality of emotions which make the characters interesting and intriguing the author has simplified them. The paradoxes in the social and cultural milieu of Kashmir have also been neatened by the narrative.

Having said that, the novel should be read to have an idea of the predicament of the Kashmiri Pandits who were forced to abandon their homes and, more importantly, their homeland.