The Night of Broken Glass

Over the last three decades Kashmir has been ravaged by insurgency. While reams have been written on it - in human rights documents academic theses non-fiction accounts of the turmoil and government and military reports - the effects of the violence on its inhabitants have rarely been rendered in fiction. Feroz Rather''s The Night of Broken Glass corrects that anomaly. Through a series of interconnected stories within which the same characters move in and out the author weaves a tapestry of the horror Kashmir has come to represent. His visceral imagery explores the psychological impact of the turmoil on its natives - Showkat who is made to wipe off graffiti on the wall of his shop with his tongue; Rosy a progressive jeans-wearing ''upper-caste'' girl who is in love with ''lower-caste'' Jamshid; Jamshid''s father Gulam a cobbler by profession who never finds his son''s bullet-riddled body; the ineffectual Nadim ''Pasture'' who proclaims himself a full-fledged rebel; even the barbaric and tyrannical Major S who has to contend with his own nightmares. Grappling with a society brutalized by the oppression of the state and fissured by the tensions of caste and gender Feroz Rather''s remarkable debut is as much a paean to the beauty of Kashmir and the courage of its people as it is a dirge to a paradise lost.