Aashna Jamal reviews The World With Its Mouth Open by Zahid Rafiq
The World With Its Mouth Open
Zahid Rafiq
ISBN 9781959030850
Reviewed by AASHNA JAMAL
The men are restrained and evasive, the women are waiting for something that never arrives. A sense of resignation pervades the eleven short stories in Zahid Rafiq’s debut short story book collection, The World With Its Mouth Open published by Tin House. “He hadn’t lowered the memory of his brother into the earth, and I couldn’t shoulder his grief.”(‘Bare Feet’, p.58). Zahid’s characters are grounded in their own narratives, but Kashmir, Srinagar, with its majestic vistas are ever present, in stark contrast to stories, taut and simple, lived in a land where indigenous political aspirations are muted.
Zahid’s collection does away with what is expected of a writer from a region of conflict. His stories are not about the gun; no one other than Kashmiris take the limelight and in their labour of living, the reader becomes an unwieldy witness, for once we have seen, we cannot look away. One of Zahid’s influences is Flannery O’Connor and much like her celebrated short story collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge, Zahid’s primary characters do not want to yield sympathy, but in the face of difficult well-drawn situations, they cannot help but engage, often losing a part of themselves in the process. People might protect themselves, defences up, but it’s in their relations with others that they flounder till they are completely ensnared. In ‘The Man with the Suitcase’ a son stops fighting with his mother who is waiting for her other dead son. Afterall, he too looks for signs everywhere, following a man he has never seen or spoken to before.
The collection explores the stillness and acceleration of Kashmir, taking us through narrow alleyways which Zahid seems to know well. His stories are a gradual unravelling of different kinds of lives all drawn from the same spool. Deft sentences bring uncanny sight to the reader. The city is a character, its bylaws, its people, their eyes, the sounds, even crows and dogs. The characters know them intimately – a journalist browsing a papier-mâché shop in ‘Small Boxes’, a boy looking at descending birds in ‘Crows’ – and by the end of the collection, the reader starts beginning to understand how people are placed on this vast canvas. Only just. Zahid’s work is an injunction for those who try to distil Kashmir into a singular experience, a unitary problem. Readers are not promised full comprehension. That’s their homework on their own time.
Zahid is excellent at drawing inner monologues. Thoughts gather, circumambulate, meander and then keep returning to the central worry of the character, building like a crescendo, often ending in futility, as his writing keeps showing so much is out of our hands in a place like Kashmir, where individual wants are tempered by the limits of spatiality.
‘Drops of water slipped down the tall glass, just as they had on those Pepsi bottles …She had never understood where the water came from, believing for a long time that it oozed from the inside, but then she knew better, and yet she had never found out where it really came from.’
(‘The Bridge’, p.14.)
Themes of fear and want go hand in hand in all the stories. People persist in what they desire, exulting in the scariness of not knowing and going in headfirst anyway. They all want more than is given to them, political or material: Nusrat, a woman seeking a hakeem after multiple miscarriages; a boy who fears his tuition teacher; an inquisitive young man swept by the thoughts of the neighbour’s daughter; Mansoor, a shopkeeper whose new mannequin looks sad; Mr. Hussain, a refined store owner who becomes paranoid about death and mothers and brothers who wait for those who will not come back. Zahid moves the needle away from pedantic headlines about Kashmir to a spotlight on its restive veins – blue, maroon and pink, its people, vesting them with unabashed agency:
‘a little earthworm had been torn into two. ‘They will both live,’ she said. ‘Now there will be two of them.’
(‘Flowers from a Dog’, p.85.)
The women are often referred to by their social standing in association with a man – ‘Sham Saeb’s wife’ in ‘Flowers from a Dog’, ‘the owner’s wife’ in ‘The House’, ‘his wife’ in ‘The Mannequin’. But I liked these nameless I especially like Zahid’s women, precisely because they understand their place in the system and subvert it:
‘In my husband’s absence?’ She stared at him. ‘Is that possi-ble? I am a woman, after all. I can’t decide on my own.’
(‘The House’, p.106.)
‘The owner’s wife’ acts obtuse when the labourer Manzoor asks decisions of her she does not want to make. Wives ask their husbands to solve things for them but the only way out of quagmires is for them to claw at the seams. Menfolk are ill-equipped to imagine what women really want. In ‘Flowers from a Dog’, a man longs for a dead woman, who has long left him. But in her leaving, she chose what she wanted; dead or alive, she was not his to own, as much he mourns her. The women are often referred
In a recent interview, Zahid says ‘the best stories make us inhabit another life and thereby somehow our own, more fully, more consciously’. If there is a pervasive universal truth, his stories repeat it again and again to the reader, and you’re left longing for, and shuddering at his characters. Do we want to be them? No. Can we look away? No. Readers want to solve, to apply salve, but Zahid will not give them an opportunity:
‘… why look into its eyes, useless, to bring a dead thing to life. The dead are for the dead.’
(‘Dogs’, p.124. )
His writing is confrontational in the simplest ways, by repeating the truth again and again, across different stories, so love, grief, malice, jealousy, paranoia, all come together and we are left with an indelible feeling of what being human is.
Having grown up in Kashmir, and then not having lived there for a long time, I felt a sense of nostalgia as well as guilt. Therein, lies our hubris, as readers and altruists who want to solve Kashmir for its people. If the conflict is a constant in Kashmir, what changes? Its people. They change. They do things differently, each time, till in all timelines, they cannot be pinned down, only observed. They will save themselves if need be; by living their lives fully, as characters in stories both fictional and nonfictional, and perhaps in the real world as well.
Citations
1. 5 Questions for Rafid Jafiq, with Michelle Johnson. World Literature Today, January 2025
AASHNA JAMAL is a writer from Kashmir. Her stories appear in Fountain Ink, Muse India, Caravan, Inverse Journal, The diplomat, and Bebaak Jigar- Of Dry Tongues and Hearts, a print anthology of Indian fiction. She is a 2024 Sangam House writer resident and a 2022 South Asia Speaks Fellow. She is working on her debut novel. She is currently an economic advisor to the government in Somalia.