INTERVIEW: Mirza Waheed

As a writer holding personal memories, telling the Kashmir story must have been challenging. How did you fictionalise this experience? When there is frequent violence, it affects you, but when you're young you don't know how to process it. You play cricket with friends, read books and then suddenly when 40 people living in your neighbourhood are killed, you enter another state of mind. At the peak of the militant movement, I was possessed with questions: why are they [young Kashmiri boys in the 90s] killed and what happens [to their families] when they remain unaccounted for after they cross the Line of Control (LoC). In every war you know of people who go to the other side for different reasons and then disappear. I was thinking of this premise for more than eight years. It was so compelling that I had to write a story. One night in December 2006, I wrote a draft story about what happened when young Kashmiris disappeared in the 90s. I always knew in many ways I wanted to do fiction. I had written unpublished short stories, apart from one, and I wrote in college. I always did small sketches and carried notes, stories, with me from Srinagar to Delhi and then to London. I worked on these stories for a long time. These were six stories I thought I'd polish up some day. Then I wrote one big story in December 2007, showed it to [Mohammed] Hanif and when he said it could be turned into a novel, it was a great endorsement from my former boss and mentor. I had stayed silent for 20 years, it was time to write. What are the dangers of fictionalising real events because it's impossible for fiction to turn away from political events of the time? If you do reality in fiction the danger is that you can turn your work into a history lesson. I want to read a novel for its themes and literary merit but some writing needs the right amount of context. There will always be some who will read it as history and contest your view. The problem rises if you start with a historical premise. It should happen the other way. If you weave politics into the novel, it's acceptable. In this bizarre age we live in, we will see novels that make reality more real. Fiction deepens your understanding and goes into areas that non-fiction doesn't. And then there's the imagination. How does imagination work for you when it meets memory and historical context? The central premise of the novel is fiction. I obliquely fictionalise a real life massacre but I don't dramatise it, allowing the narrator space for his reaction. It happened in 1990 in Srinagar. The village in the novel is also imagined. You can't go to the LoC so you imagine it. I imagined the boys lying dead, their corpses in the fields. The driving impulse was to imagine what it is like to kill like that and die like that. Conversations between the narrator and the ruthless Captain Kadian of the Indian army cull sympathy for the latter, questioning why the narrator is passive, almost weak-willed. Is this intentional? I didn't deliberately humanise Kadian. When people are assigned brutal tasks they don't have a life or a job, but an assignment, which is a small part of Kadian's life. This is what the narrator sees of the Captain. His life is at home in India and he's a completely demonic man trapped in his own job. Why is the narrator passive? He's someone who is detached and at the centre of events but not involved. He sees everything and is forced to collaborate with the security machine. He says in the novel that he's trapped in a "militarised wilderness" seeing such horror. The lack of global media intervention meant the world knew little, beyond the numbers dead, about what really went on in the valley during the 90s: torture, fake encounters. How has the militant conflict changed? The situation has changed dramatically in the last 20 years and the militant uprising is almost over. In the early 90s we saw militant protests, young boys crossing over and returning home heroes. Today the separatist movement has transformed into a civilian-led protest but conditions haven't changed. Lengthy curfews, sieges and lack of food and medicine remain a problem. In the summer of 2010, security forces fired at and killed young protestors. What followed were funerals, more protests and more killing with men and women out on the streets throwing stones. The 90s were a dark, brutal decade with horrific levels of violence and nothing traveled to the outside world with PTV reporting the conflict as jihad and Indian television reporting it as a law and order problem. Is this story close to real events with real people you might have known? I know friends and acquaintances, who studied with the same tutor I did as teenagers in Srinagar, who later crossed the LoC, and were arrested there. Some came back and gave up the gun. These were people from your street, from your mohalla, cousins, neighbours who were celebrated heroes and garlanded when they came back. Or they never returned. Initially these boys were frustrated and saw no hope so they went to training camps in Pakistan. The terrorist narrative comes later. We know all kinds of people join a guerilla war for various reasons. In the novel, the role of women is limited to the narrator's mother and others who have accepted loss as their destiny. How difficult is it for women to deal with constant death? Kashmiri women are the bravest in the world. They suffer more than one can imagine and are left behind to deal with the wreckage. There are thousands of "half-widows" who don't know if their husbands are dead. Ten thousand men have disappeared since the armed militancy began. There is no justice for these women and the government fudges the figures. In the theatre of war, the only woman who is left is the narrator's mother. She is not forced to stay back in the village but is resilient, making her own choice. Is there a solution to a conflict that, if not resolved, will devastate the lives of Kashmir's new generation as it has done through past decades of militancy? I want a solution which recognises the centrality of the Kashmiri narrative, and if that isn't the case, there can't be a solution. India and Pakistan have their entrenched positions governed by their policies and are not sincere about the Kashmir issue. Indian security services say 500 militants remain in the valley which implies the armed militant uprising is virtually over so you're dealing with a civilian resistance. You either address civilian concerns or kill civilians as we saw happen last summer and in previous years. One hundred and eleven people have died since the end of last summer. A small issue can spark a protest. For instance, in 2009, it was the Shopian rape and double murder that caused protests and killings. The governments on both sides will have to address the concerns of Kashmiris, and that takes a moment of leadership. — Razeshta Sethna