Faiz is a young artist and illustrator who to support his large extended family, paints papier maché pencil boxes for tourism merchandise in the city of Srinagar, in the Kashmir valley. In the meantime, he works privately at his own cherished painting inhis large rickety family home.
A young Shia girl, Rooha is captivated by a night-time sighting of Raiz whom she vaguely remembers from their childhood. Messages are exchanged and they begin to meet in secret underneath the balcony of a Sufi shrine.
Inevitably, there will be a touch of Romeo and Juliet about the match, although there are no warring families in question. Tolerance for difference in faith and ethnicity abides in this quarter, at least, of Srinagar, a sense of mutual respect but also a certain necessary detachment.
Shia/Sunni distinctions become secondary, as the city’s Muslim citizens deal with brutal occupation by the Indian army and complex operations are directed from a local girls’ school. The aim is to imprison and torture those with militant tendencies, or, more accurately, the young men who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, as occurs in a key incident in the novel. Public demonstrations for independence are also to be curbed.
After an army atrocity shocks him to the core, Raiz leaves for Pakistan to train as a Kashmiri miltant, although he is not in fact typical freedom fighter material, being an artist and something of a dreamer.
Waheed paints the city vividly and ratchets up the tension as Srinagar endures a kind of siege. The novelist was himself born and brought up in Kashmir, but currently resides in London. He won the Guardian’s First Book award for his debut novel, The Collaborator.
Somewhat akin to another UK-based writer Nadeen Aslam – who has indeed acclaimed him – Mirza Waheed has a similar furtive, somdtimes almost reticent narrative approiach. He can be gently suggestive with an innate poetic sensibility, despite the necessary thriller elements in his engaging saga.
Paddy Kehoe
