COVER STORY: Death in the valley of yellow flowers

MAKING political writing an art is difficult when there are no good stories to tell in a world of checkpoints, crossfire, bombs and mass graves, and when much of that is depressingly familiar. The 90s saw a decade of brutality and torture in Kashmir as disappearances and death gave way to an armed insurgency after the disputed 1987 elections provoked protests. At the time — pawns in a larger political conflict — hundreds of Kashmiri boys crossed the Line of Control (LoC), trekked through rugged terrain, trained as fighters in allegedly Pakistan-run camps, and then crossed back into Kashmiri territory to fight the Indian forces. According to the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, more than 70,000 people have been killed in Kashmir since 1989 and more than 8,000 are registered as missing. When fiction is created from history, with strong political overtones, sculpturing prose and carving a storyline, there is dangerous middle territory given the choice of artistic license versus depicting 'reality'. Interestingly, many Arab and Latin American writers have crossed the divide over decades and continue to do so, like contemporary Libyan novelist, Hisham Matar. Kashmiri journalist Mirza Waheed documents the gun-battles, hopelessness, loss, brutality and torture, narrated by an unnamed 17-year old in a remote village. The village, Nowgam, is high in the mountains in the precincts of the border passes thundering with crossfire. Kashmir is likened to bloody fields with saddened yellow flowers silently covering rotting corpses of young people, no longer the paradise of grand valleys and fields. The narrator is the son of the village headman who plays cricket and swims with his four childhood friends before they all slowly disappear to cross the border, leaving him alone to question this unbearable loss and vulnerability. Recruited by the Indian army as a corpse-manager, he spends hours alone in the green fields, amid long-stalked flowers, peering through damaged skulls and mutilated limbs identifying dead fighters and collecting their belongings, apprehensive that he will find his friends among the remains. With a known storyline and certain characters unexplored beyond a few mentions — which is perhaps Waheed's only literary weakness — the narrator's solitude and hopelessness is so poignant and mesmerising that from start to finish you don't expect any grand or outlandish plot. Captain Kadian, the head of the local Indian forces, is the narrator's brute, abusive and drunken boss, and their often one-sided exchanges lend the story a more human face from the 'other' side. Kadian is like a hound dog pursuing his victims to a bloody end, staging encounters that are photographed for the Indian press to show how the insurgency is being effectively contained. Waheed, who doesn't fully explore the Indian perspective or even what happens across the LoC, evokes a strange sympathy for Kadian, even if that's not deliberate. Like the narrator's close friend Hussain — whose disappearance causes him to climb the most dangerous slopes in search for clues — Kadian listens to the singer Rafi, drinks whiskey like water and curses "sala garib Kashmir… all they do is complain. Can you tell me why one has to do such things in the line of duty?" Yes, the narrator despises Kadian but listens to him ramble for hours, perhaps out of need to understand his grand, brutal schemes. Kadian offers explanations for torturing young men who have crossed back to fight the Indian army and perhaps it's the narrator's fear of being killed and his guilt at having not left the valley that he works as a collaborator, foolishly plotting to kill the Indian captain after gaining his confidence. The passive narrator has a deep-set anger which seems to have no reprieve. The narrative moves through memories of better times, of playing games of cricket and listening to classical songs, of green fields secure under silent skies and then delves deep into the present where the word tears appears with such frequency that one cannot help but wonder what it was like to grow up with such loss and death. Where there is a marked density of despair, melancholy and deathly silences, Waheed's ability to use lyrical prose is excellent: "All of us knew that sometimes the Army whisked you off for the flimsiest of excuses, sometimes just because you couldn't speak quickly enough when a soldier placed his hand on your chest and asked you why your heart beat so fast." As a journalist he may have reported on the conflict but the writing here is not reportage; it is an account of fearsome change, of curfews, staged encounters and mass exodus charting the beginning of the freedom movement in one tiny hamlet the army descends on, punishing families for nurturing militants: "The street changed, almost overnight. Faces changed… Posters appeared everywhere. Out of nowhere. Azadi. Azadi! Freedom." As the crackdown empties the village, leaving the stubborn headman and his suffering wife to hold fort, the narrator appears weakened by the violence and by his role as a scavenger of corpses. He debates whether he should disappear into the night, join the insurgency and let it be understood that he will also become yet another body count: "Was this the result of a skirmish in the morning? Was it some big militant, a famous commander…? Was it him, Hussain's father the musical muezzin, who lay before us like this? Or was it Hussain himself?" What is awfully redeeming where fiction meets history in this novel, comes right towards the epilogue, when the politics of the work is snuffed out and strong whiffs of artistic mastery overwhelm: out of putrid fate Waheed carves a story. A character in Matar's novel said, "you can't live outside of history." Fiction writers do use their own silent pathway to freedom. The reviewer is a senior assistant editor, monthly Herald The Collaborator (NOVEL) By Mirza Waheed Penguin Books, UK ISBN 9780670918959 320pp. Rs795