Author Mirza Waheed: Violence and nostalgia in Kashmir

Author discusses his work of fiction, ‘The Collaborator’ and the banality of violence.

KARACHI:

It’s interesting to read about Kashmir, a place that’s become almost unreal to most people because of the space it occupies in political rhetoric, said moderator Kamila Shamsie while introducing author and journalist Mirza Waheed.

Waheed, who was raised in Srinagar, is the author of the fictional work ‘The Collaborator’, set in Indian Kashmir. While the writer touches on some dark topics, he humourously said during his session that he was feeling a bit ‘wrecked’ and it wasn’t helped by the music at the festival.

Waheed read from his book, and Shamsie pointed out a specific line: “I just cannot remove my eyes from this landscape,” as well as other imagery in the book. He said it was ‘inevitable’ for him to write about how Kashmir used to be. “The pastoral bits are in the past because that’s what life was like.”

“When you grew up in Kashmir in the ‘90s as a teenager you see all this stuff,” Waheed said, recalling how he began writing the book. “There’s nothing tragic about it, this is ordinary. It’s quite banal. One image stuck in my mind as a teenager, which was in my neighbourhood, an encounter between the army and the boys, as we called them. The next day we were taken to an ID parade where you have to walk in a straight line. We were taken to an open ground and there were bodies lying around there – and one of them wasn’t dead. He wanted water. That image stayed in my head, and I asked: “How did this place become like this?”

Speaking of the difficulty of writing on such a topic, he said he couldn’t write about it for a long time until it came back to him and he just kept writing.He highlighted that Kashmir had a long tradition of writing on the area but because his and Peer’s book was in English, it got more coverage.

When asked about a solution to Kashmir, Waheed had a blunt answer to offer: “Everything else has been tried and hasn’t worked”.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 12^th, 2012.