Book: The plague upon us
Author: Shabir Ahmad Mir
Publisher: Hatchette India
inam ul rehman
Anyone familiar with the writing as a craft, not as a talent, will vouch that writing is spine bending work. You give up your cherished things for the craft of writing. But what matters for all writers is how public receives their product.
“The plague upon us”, a debut novel of Shabir Ahmad Mir, is a complex story of Kashmiri characters. It is as complex as the Kashmir situation is in itself. An average reader has to have his attention span stretched to understand this book. It is a thinking man’s book where the author lets his readers to form their own opinions, and judge the characters on their own experiences.
Set in the 90s when Kashmir saw massive armed uprising against the Indian state, all the characters in the book go through many transformations. Be it Oubaid–the narrator of stories– an intriguing person who goes through phases as the conflict eggs on, Muzaffar who wants to introspect things in a new way, Latief Zaeldar who wants to reclaim the feudal glory that was taken away by the “lion of mountains”, or Sabia’s conundrum love story.
Conflict shapes characters, and this conflict although segregates them, but the complexity of the conflict gravitate each other’s path although everyone takes decisions in its own interests. Whenever any conflict drags on it tests the character of people. Longer the conflict murkier it becomes. There is no one shade which defines the character of people, in fact, it is thousand shades acquired in the conflict that shapes people living in the conflict.
The author shows how the gun made downtrodden powerful, and at times baleful as well as leashing power on the wealthy, rich, and the poor people. There is undercurrent of caste, inter religious marriage, love between two unequals, and the conflict becoming a corporation for most people. The author has fascinatingly told a complex tale of rich people playing to gallery on both sides, and their vulnerability, at times, exploited by both the sides. It is not an average book where you can decipher things easily. The confluence of four different stories and characters get engulfed in a plague that is the bane of Kashmir.
The state, in the novel, is represented by Major Gurvinderpal. The latter’s motto is: “I don’t need people out there to like us, I just need them to need us.” In fact, Major Gurapal is omnipresent in all stories
The author reserves the best lines to sagacious Ashfaq, a college teacher. Ashfaq has friends who have become militants, he does not endorse their methods, but maintains his friendship. “In our history,” says Ashfaq to a perplexed Muzaffar when he questions his stance on azaadi, and militants, “we have been made to take so many turns, so many byroads that we have created a labyrinth of our own. (E)veryone who is here wants to get out of the labyrinth: everyone who is here wants azaadi–but everyone does not necessarily want to end up at the same place.” He monologues on: “My azaadi is not to replace one labyrinth with another; it is a place outside all labyrinths. (W)here I have the freedom to decide whether I want to recreate the boundaries or redraw them, or not to do either, or even to have no boundaries at all. Where others have the same freedom as I do––to choose and to decide for themselves.”
Then he questions his own notion of idealistic azaadi: “Those with a practical achievable and workable azaadi, don’t they deserve to have it?”
Before he parts, he leaves Muzaffar with some thoughts to ponder on: “What if the act that was supposed to be a means to something becomes an end it itself? What if the metaphor undermines the meaning? That is when, quite unwittingly, a rebel becomes a proxy for some geopolitical rivalry that he had nothing to do when he started his rebellion.”
But the life of sages in Kashmir conflict is short. Before he is killed in a protest against the state, Ashfaq sifts the fog of political and moral clarity which has engulfed Muzaffar. The latter, on the death of his mentor, picks up the gun. A dissent which his mentor didn’t like but the one which Muzaffar finds irresistible. And here is added another shade to his character. Muzaffar later realises, “No matter what you do, there are always regrets.”
The author has created characters which are the creation of a ruptured society where everyone fiddles with murkiness. There are no conclusions only complexities that the conflict creates in human nature where survival at times means to kill the other just to breathe a few more hours.
I have learned over the years not to compare books or authors, but I thing I cannot shrug off after reading the book: it feels as if I am watching the movie Haider! But it takes nothing away that it is one of the better fiction books on the Kashmir conflict. But as mentioned earlier an average reader will find it difficult to read.
I have noticed one thing among Kashmiri writers that their imagination remains fixed within a certain geography in Kashmir. I haven’t come across any Kashmiri writer who has based his story in Chenab Valley, or Jammu! A south Indian writer, Madhuri Vijay, in her debut novel “The far field” bases her story in Kishtwar, Kashmir. Our writers are yet to think in terms of nation.
*Shabir Ahmad Mir was never a journalist. My apologies for it.
