The World with its Mouth Open by Zahid Rafiq, Hamish Hamilton, pp. 192, Rs 499

Zahid Rafiq’s collection of stories conjures vanished souls, fading memories, and everyday occurrences in the streets and houses of Srinagar, where reality blurs into myth, and past remains alive


In a short story from Zahid Rafiq’s The World with its Mouth Open (Hamish Hamilton), a young reporter in Srinagar periodically escapes the dull environs of his office to sit with colleagues in a small tea shop. They speak for hours every day, he tells us, recounting stories that had not made it into the papers: “the stories behind the stories, stories so sad, so funny, so true, that there was no place for them in the papers, stories that in their telling and retelling became myths and belonged to no one and to everyone”.

Rafiq’s debut collection offers precisely these “stories behind the stories” — layered glimpses into seemingly ordinary lives, marked by quiet tragedies, surreal moments, and endings that resist closure. In these 11 Chekhovian tales, he dwells on the complexities of everyday occurrences, focusing on moments of realisation, small changes, or unresolved tensions. There are no sweeping plots; as the critic Vivian Gornick has written in another context, the situation is the story. These are folks grappling with internal struggles, trying to find agency in an environment that is familiar and hostile by turns.

The weight of the past

Chekhov isn’t the only parallel, though. In many stories, Rafiq gracefully walks a tightrope between the real and the unreal. A pregnant woman leaving a clinic after a check-up runs into a friend’s brother after ages and starts to wonder if he is actually present. A US-based professor returning to his childhood home comes across a shadowy presence who implores him to inform his family of his death. A jobless salesman who keeps noticing a mysterious stranger carrying a suitcase decides to follow him, feeling as though he is in “the doorway between two dreams”.

In another wry and beautifully balanced story, a shop owner needs to figure out what to do when he notices a look of anguish on a new mannequin’s face. “Even when he moved a step back, and then another, the face remained as it was, filled with agony, sorrow.” Such narratives remain rooted in daily life, yet, as with the experience of so many of Kafka’s characters, they erase the lines between reality and fantasy.

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In this world of Rafiq’s creation, the weight of the past hangs heavy on the present, intruding in resonant and sometimes ominous ways. A construction worker from Riyadh searches for the resting place of a loved one in a corner of Srinagar, where a graveyard caretaker tells him: “War is a thousand plagues put together, picking the young, leaving the old to bury them.” A reporter begins a tenuous friendship with the owner of an antiques store, only to find that the latter is becoming increasingly paranoid. A labourer digging at a house site comes across “thin grimy finger bones [that] lay limp on the end of the spade, and just above was a tattered rag that might once have been a palm”.

Vanished souls, fading memories

The setting of these stories is the streets and houses of Srinagar, devoid of tourists and brought to life with a few deft strokes. We read of corrugated roofs on old houses, of dark smoke rising from a baker’s shop, and “two old magnolias whose hundreds of purple flowers appeared like birds about to take off from the branches”. Indoors, garlands of dried tomatoes and turnips hang alongside clothes on long iron nails in the walls of a ramshackle home — one among many haphazard dwellings in various stages of construction and reconstruction tucked away in narrow lanes away from the main road.

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Always, the menacing presence of the state lurks in the background, a reminder of an alienated environment. Soldiers in motorcycle helmets stand with their guns pointing at the street; when it rains, they appear in full-length raincoats with barrels poking out through the collars; and their dark eyes watch from sandbag bunkers dressed in loops of barbed wire. Yet another presence is that of the disappeared. These vanished souls live on in fading memories and artefacts, darkening the lives of small businessmen, students, husbands, wives, and even stray dogs, who are given a story of their own.

The title of the collection comes from a story about a distracted schoolboy. Everything “carries him elsewhere,” we’re told, be it “a sound, a song, a fight at home, the shape of a cloud, cows grazing in the field, the rain sliding down the glass pane”. Lost in daydreams, he is set upon by a brutal tutor, who jerks him to attention. “Do you know what is waiting out there?” the tutor yells. “The world,” he goes on. “With its mouth open. You hear me? With its mouth open.” In these stories, the world’s open mouth can be read as a symbol of unyielding circumstances that demand attention, action, and survival.

In this and other ways, the stories have a universal resonance, presenting us with dreams, ambitions, and frailties that transcend boundaries. Undramatic yet filled with depth, this is a memorable and haunting collection.

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