The Man from Kashmir – Muddasir Ramzan

Description

In a packed mosque, a woman gives birth to a boy while the hiding village watches. His first cry brings uniformed men to their doors.

A foul forest witch drags a man back to her forest cave, holding him hostage, until a boy and his uncle stumble across his lair.

In the far future, a bomb breaks the city of bunkers, and a man loses his life. His mother, a spiritual leader of the community, is to choose if she can still believe in God.

Told through episodic, interconnected vignettes that tightly unfold through characters of a sprawling family across generations in a fictional town of Poshmarg, Muddasir Ramzan brings alive the fragmented texture of life in Kashmir in this powerful novella.

From an atavistic folk-myth to a modern-day portrait of the allure of militancy, Muddasir’s unbridled imagination crafts stories about ordinary people of a living dystopia. With a rare forensic economy of language, he writes of mothers, lovers and others making uneasy choices in order to survive the day, navigating a present that constantly needs to rewrite the past, even as it confronts a fractured future that allows for more death than hope.