In the political discourse of Kashmir, the 1990s was a watershed period that set asunder the concept of Kashmir as a ‘pirvear’ by torn-apart centuries old social fabric and put in place a corrugated order of permanent disturbance. It was a period, when the conflict started entering the lives of ordinary Kashmiri’s, fracturing their idea of home and punctuating their days and nights with curfews. In the decade since the beginning of that elusive peace, the memories of the 1990s are so intense and so difficult to forget that every single uprising of the yesteryears began terrifying the Kashmiris the way it did in that darkest period.
Over the years, however, we have seen some marvelous attempts by some young Kashmiris to reframe the human costs of the conflict through art works, caricatures, writings and most importantly through fiction. Among the new realms of resistance, fiction emerges as the most sophisticated tool of narrating the painful stories that conflict leaves behind in its aggressive intrusion into human life. The names which immediately strikes one’s mind are Mirza Waheed, Basharat Peer, Siddhartha Gigoo, Nitasha Kaul, Zamrooda Habib to name a few. These creative writers used fiction to narrate the onset of war and the tale of conflicting lives left behind by the brutality of that war. Among the new generation fiction writers of Kashmir, Shahnaz Bashir emerges as one of the most talented and master-artists of modern fiction that contemporary Kashmir produces. His debut novel, The Half Mother, which won The Muse India Young Writer Award 2015, was a tour-de-force of urgent political observation which narrated one mother, like thousands of other Kashmiri’s, terrible loss and her flailing journey into Kashmir’s missing void.
The Scattered Souls is Shahnaz Bashir’s second novel which takes us into the destroyed Kashmir by telling the gory tales of people whose lives have been afflicted by the oppression of the conflict. Set in the background of the destructive 1990, Scattered Souls is a beautifully crafted and painfully written literary adventure into Kashmir’s violent trajectory with the oppression. By taking ordinary people as his protagonists, Shahnaz Bashir wrote with wit and anger, hope and despair, and a great sympathy for his people. The stories in this beautiful collection speak of a writer with great artistic skill and a clear understanding of the political discourse which defines the everyday lives of the people. The thirteen heart-wrenching stories are intermingled and are closely interrelated to one another.
This seminal collection begins with the tragic tale of Mohammad Yusuf Dar of Daddgaam village, whose suspicious activities cost him his life in an atmosphere of ‘war of all against all’. Though an ardent believer in Kashmir’s Independence from India, Yusuf was mistakenly considered as a police informer, whose life was a living portrait of thousands of Kashmiris who fell victim to the all-around war launched to quell a massive rebellion. Another story is about a graveyard, a place of haunting memories and a constant reminder of Kashmir’s terrible loss. Muhammad Sultan, whose son Mushtaq Ahmad was killed by the security forces, living a precarious life whose personal and political often vie heavily on his existence in the valley full of garish violence.
There is that ex-militant whose past continues to stalk his present. A life riven by nightmare and trauma, a living reality with which thousands of Kashmir’s were living even today. His daily life is a recount of that horrific period when he underwent a severe torture in different jails of the state. Ghulam Mohiuddeen, the ex-militant, portrayed a tragic tale which is now the fate of thousands of former militants who have long distanced themselves from the active militancy but have been continuously haunted by the nightmares they have of their past life.
The Psychosis is a heart-wrenching tale of a woman who was raped by the armed forces and eventually became a depression patient. Sakeena is a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder patient, a severe psychological disorder so frequent among the conflict-ridden people of the valley. Her fate, like thousands of other Kashmiri’s, remains a ghost of her sinful past.
Sakeena’s son, Buil, a sinful stone-pelter, was a constant reminder of that sinful act which continuously haunts her even after the fading of the memories.
Theft, another moving story, is about a 10-year-old girl who became a thief only to feed her little brother in the absence of the father and her mother’s differential treatment to his brother because of Buil’s illegal sinful birth. Insha, the protagonist of the story, is a daughter of ex-militant Ghulam Mohiuddeen who is missing/disappeared/dead, the fate is unknown, is one among a vast sway of children who have been orphaned by the oppression and who are being called the children of conflict.
A Photo With Barack Obama is one stone-pelters unrelenting obsession with Barack Obama’s India visit. This ferocious stone-pelter, the sinful son of Sakeena, wanted the most powerful president on earth to mention the ‘K’ word but felt disappointed when Mr president praised everything without uttering that now a voguish word. Here, Bashir describes the helplessness of the people of Kashmir and the failure of the International community in supporting a cause for which countless sacrifices have been made.
In Oil and Roses, we saw a father, a gardener, who many years after the death of his only foster son to a stray bullet, who remain pernickety, bruised and reticent.Gul Baaghwaan, a head gardener at one of the terraced Mughal gardens in the Zabarwan hills in Srinagar, was a mourning father among the blooming flowers whose life is a testimonial of how conflict leaving behind traumatised, horrific and almost destroyed lives in its descent into human life.
The other stories, like The Country Capital, Shabaan Kaka’s death, The House, Some Small Things I Couldn’t Tell You, The Silent Bullet, and The Woman Who Became Her Own Husband, are equipped with the same narration, agony and conflicting lives the author drawn beautifully in the other stories.
These are the stories which describe the daily lives of people in war ravaged Kashmir. They are both haunting and haunted. These stories are full of paranoia, trauma, sin and agony. The stories are about the historical injustices committed by the oppressive state in full display of its stealth naked power. Even though many stories have been published before or anthologized elsewhere, the collection, however, is a terrific read which engages the reader from the beginning until the end. Spanning irony, moral crises, vengeance, violence and the troubles of love, loss, betrayal and uncertainty, Scattered Souls is a high level comprehensive literary leap from Kashmir.
Impossible to resist, Scattered Souls is a devastating piece of storytelling whose message is quite disturbing and alarming.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Bilal Gani is a Research Scholar at Central University of Kashmir and writes regularly on Kashmir conflict and human rights.
