HT reviewer Pranavi Sharma picks her favourite read of 2025
A debut collection of 11 short stories framed by the nondescript lives of Kashmiris that are rooted wholly in the place they are written from
Very few books about Kashmir have Kashmiris at the centre as individuals with lives and voices of their own. More often, they are rendered only as political subjects who are important solely for advancing an argument. Such writing inevitably alienates the community. Then follows the reader’s surprise when a marginalised human simply behaves like a human, despite the expectation that they must somehow be different. Critics, too, approach books on Kashmir with preset lenses. We look for familiar motifs, for victims, for scapegoats, for boxes to fit people in.
The World With Its Mouth Open by Zahid Rafiq is a debut collection of 11 short stories framed by the nondescript lives of Kashmiris and the unfortunate normalisation of grief and violence. These stories are rooted so wholly in the place they are written from that the author does not mention Kashmir even once. Yet, the conflict reveals itself through its characters.
The title is inviting, but soon reveals its deception. This book challenges you to not read it through the habitual insider-outsider binary. Zahid subverts this tendency. He overturns the reductive ways Kashmiris appear in headlines, as stone pelters, inherently violent figures, parents of children who will become militants etc. The stories are so ordinary that their very ordinariness reverses the dehumanisation. Perhaps not because Zahid sets out to do so, but because mundanity itself restores humanity in a way.
The reader might even feel that the author is making the point that Kashmiris are expected to be ever resilient in face of violence. But they are not politically exceptional in a way they are often made out to be. They, too, are entangled in the same dilemmas, shames, angers, and myriad emotions as any other human. There is nothing uniquely “Kashmiri” about Nusrat’s fear of being seen with Rajaji, nor anything exotic about a woman’s marital dissatisfaction. This is not to say that the community lacks its own idiosyncrasies. Of course, those exist, but here they surface in the most natural, unforced ways, never as alien curiosities.
His characters are consumed by their daily lives: a shopkeeper’s dismay at a mannequin’s sad expression, teenage boys fantasising about girls, schoolboys being beaten for forgetting lessons. In one story, dogs speak like humans. It is perhaps the most telling story of all. If the territory is conflicted, why would animals be exempt in an ecosystem warped by militarisation? However, they also feel like mouthpieces for what is forbidden for humans to speak. A Kashmiri journalist once told me they had witnessed a protest where dogs stood amid protesters and police. When gunshots rang out, dogs and men had run together, in the same direction.
Human stories cannot always be explained through a simple metaphor. When the marginalised suffer, their pain is often turned into theatre, but Zahid’s characters refuse to be its actors. They seem to live independent of any scripted narrative. There is no overt allegory at play here. Keywords lead nowhere; they defy any circumstance. The stories lure you towards a climax only to betray a clean denouement.
Reading this book was demanding in that I had to rinse my mind of the sediment it had accumulated from listening to stories of Kashmir told by those who had only ever skimmed the surface.
In Bare Feet, a man dreams of an apparition who urges him to deliver a message to grieving parents that will ease their pain. As he and a companion make their way to the young man’s house “through the viewfinder of a gun,” they are frisked, intimidated, interrogated. Daily humiliation is captured terrifically. The conflict reveals itself only under the covers because that is how it is lived. Violence is part of collective memory in the region. The protagonist is frustrated that he sees not his dead mother in his dreams but a stranger. He feels unmoored.
In Small Boxes, the constant suspicion with which Kashmiris view both outsiders and their own people shows how mistrust, too, has become a daily inheritance. The final story ‘Frog in the Mouth’ is a descent into a madness of contradictions. A monologue confesses the absurdity of it all; the senseless, irrational, and contradictory nature of conflict.
The language draws you in, the images are potent. Words appear without italics, without footnotes, without the impulse to explain Kashmir to an imagined audience. In this sense, this book feels like hieroglyphics left by people simply living their lives. This is storytelling at its best.
Pranavi Sharma writes on books and culture. She lives in New Delhi.
