The Night of Broken Glass : Featured July 2018
About the book:
Over the last three decades, Kashmir has become one’s worst imagination of hell. While reams have been written on the war – 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 has 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.
About the author:
Feroz Rather is currently a doctoral student of Creative
Writing at Florida State University and his work has appeared
in The Millions, The Rumpus, The Southeast Review, Caravan,
Warscapes, Berfrois, and Himal. His most recent essay, ‘Poet
in Srinagar’, appeared in the anthology Mad Heart, Be Brave:
On the Poetry of Agha Shahid Ali. The Night of Broken Glass
is his first book.
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