There is a long tradition of journalists successfully turning to fiction: Dickens, Twain, Hemingway; and among contemporary writers, Ken Kalfus and Taffy Brodesser-Akner come to mind. Add to that list Zahid Rafiq, who spent ten years as a journalist in his native Kashmir and has just released his first collection of stories, The World With Its Mouth Open.
Rafiq is a natural storyteller with a sharp eye for detail and character. The stories are exercises in quiet noticing, many of them closer to sketches or vignettes than what we may think of as a traditional story. There are no denouements or epiphanies in these fictions. That is not to say that they are plotless or meandering. Through keenness of observation, Rafiq keeps the action rising and the tension building. This tension is heightened by the specter of death and violence that haunts the stories, which are set in Kashmir, the troubled territory that is the center of the India-Pakistan conflict. Soldiers are ubiquitous in the stories, usually silent and vaguely menacing, but occasionally randomly cruel.
A recurrent character is the impractical dreamer, ripe for being swallowed by a heartless world. In one story, a student caught up in reveries is beaten by a teacher for being unprepared for a test. The sadistic teacher pronounces the warning that gives the book its title: “‘Do you know what is waiting out there?’ he said… ‘The world,’ the teacher yelled. ‘With its mouth open. You hear me? With its mouth open.’” In another story, a poet and academic who has returned from America to visit his father is humiliated and menaced by a group of soldiers. A salesman who has been laid off due to his inattentiveness to customers is issued a similar warning by an older acquaintance: “You are sleeping … and it won’t do. You are not a child, Salim.”
The people who populate these stories often respond to the baffling world that confronts them by grasping at seemingly illogical solutions that provide brief moments of purpose or solace. When a woman whose companion leaves to get bread in a nearby bakery doesn’t return, the woman tells herself that she will close her eyes and by the count of ten her companion will be back. A luggage salesman who has lost his job pursues a stranger carrying a suitcase through the city as if the stranger possesses the remedy to his unemployment.
There is a both literal and metaphorical motion to the stories. The protagonists walk through the city, getting lost, searching for a house they never find, following strangers, or waiting for people who never arrive. “Dogs” follows two ailing dogs on a trek across the city to visit an old dog that has a reputation as a healer. Two men, one who moves to America and the other to Saudi Arabia, return to visit only to be assaulted by the harshness of Kashmiri reality. When not in physical motion the characters ponder fleeing. In “Crows,” the boy who has been beaten by his teacher becomes fascinated by the crows flying overhead and cannot fathom why they return to their nests when they could just continue flying.
In “Bare Feet,” the narrator and his friend Hassan set out on an expedition prompted by a nighttime visit from a ghost who pleads with the narrator to inform his family that he has been killed. The narrator’s description of Hassan could serve as a summary of the heartache that pervades the collection: “Hassan knows this city, better than me, better than anyone I know, but I am wondering if this is the same Hassan. He seems silenced—by grief, by war, by loss, by something I can sense but not see—and in his eyes is this quiet searching gaze, searching for what I don’t know… Funny Hassan, full of jokes and anecdotes, not so funny anymore, carrying his dead brother in him, and carrying maybe the dying country too.” Sorrow embeds itself even into the inanimate. In one strange but moving story, a shop owner is deeply disturbed by a mannequin’s face that he perceives as being “filled with agony, sorrow.”
Although there is a starkness to the stories (as reflected in their simple titles: “Dogs,” “Beauty,” “The House,” “The Mannequin”), one ebullient, delightful story stands out as an example of the author’s versatility. “Frog in the Mouth” is a long stream-of-consciousness monologue directed to a stranger who is sitting next to the speaker at a restaurant. What begins as a comment on the uncomfortableness of the restaurant’s chairs (“It is not you my friend, that is all I want to say, it is not you. It is the chair. Time to accept that!”) morphs into a discourse on the state of the world, the futility of life, and the speaker’s insistence that he is a fool who is unable to stop talking (“And please forgive me, my friend, if I have talked too much. Please don’t think I don’t realize it, no one realizes it more painfully, but I cannot help it. It is my disease”). Part of the joy and humor of the story lies in the speaker’s world-weary pronouncements being interspersed with his rapturous anticipation of the arrival of the fried lamb’s testicles that he has ordered:
”This is the world, my friend, and I can’t make head or tail of it, and that is the beauty of God, that the whole thing makes no sense at all. And lo and behold! Here comes our angel. All conversation must cease!… Do you smell the cumin? And the whiff of the shallot? And the coriander? And the testicles themselves! Ah, the color. On my life, look! May this lamb be grazing in the pastures of heaven right now.”
This is not the only story where colorful dialogue enlivens the action. Rafiq is a master of capturing character through speech. In “The Bridge,” a woman selling fish urges buyers to come back and spit in her face if the fish they bought from her isn’t delicious. From another story, a mother exasperated with a child’s misbehavior: “‘Will you make me hang myself?’ she yelled. ‘By God and the prophet, I will jump into this river.’” In this regard, Rafiq reminds me of Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose characters fling Yiddish proverbs, aphorisms, and curses at each other.
There is no higher compliment to be paid to these stories than to say they have the ring of truth. Like life, they are messy, sometimes incomprehensible, replete with questions to which no answers are provided. Although it could be said that these stories are neither perfectly crafted nor beautifully told, dialogue from “In Small Boxes,” the sole story to feature a journalist as a character, would serve as a fitting rejoinder to such a criticism: “‘It is not a small thing. It is no joke. To tell somebody’s story. To write the truth… Truth is hard… Offers no solace. I prefer beauty myself. But you, a journalist, in this war, how long can you hide in beauty?’”
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