PROFILE OF THE WEEK
With a beautifully penned lyrical narrative and a deeply unsettling exploration of Kashmir as the subject, Feroz Rather is all set to make his remarkable debut in the literary landscape of India with his book, The Night of Broken Glass. While he is currently a doctoral student of Creative Writing at Florida State University, he is already a very well-known name in the world of writing as his work has appeared in The Millions, The Rumpus, The Southeast Review, Caravan, Warscapes, Berfrois, Himal, Kenyon Review and Ploughshares. His most recent essay, Poet in Srinagar, appeared in the anthology Mad Heart, Be Brave: On the Poetry of Agha Shahid Ali. He shared his views about his work and Kashmir in a conversation with us.
How did your relationship with writing begin and how has that relationship been so far?
Memory is as exact as it is evasive. I wonder whether it is possible to capture all the aspects, temporal and spatial, auditory and visual, of the moment when it dawned on me that writing was my only and true vocation. But I’ll try to answer your question. In my village in Kashmir, there once lived a timid, little boy who slept by his father’s side. In the quiet hour before dawn, fearing loneliness and boredom, the boy woke up. He nudged his father’s shoulder. The father opened his eyes, and the boy demanded that the father tell him a story. Once upon a time, the father began, there was a young man who saw an apple floating down a stream. The young man knelt on the bank and gathered the apple. He raised it to his mouth. But the moment he bit into it, he lamented: “What have I done?” The young man, the father continued, walked upstream until he reached an apple orchard. He looked around, meandering through the trees until finally he found the owner.
“I am guilt of eating your apple,” the young man pleaded.
“Why did you eat my apple?” the old, grey-bearded man asked.
“It was a mistake,” the young man said.
“Since you’ve committed a mistake, you must be punished,” the old man said.
“I will bear any punishment you ordain,” the young man said.
They argued for a while until the old man ordered: “You will have to marry my daughter.”
“But I do not know her. I have never seen her,” the young man said.
“You just said you will do anything to compensate for eating my apple.”
The young man reluctantly followed the old man to his house. The girl was so beautiful, my father told me, the young man was astonished. It was one of the first stories that I ever listened to and I think my listening was a success. In the thrill of moral victory, of wisdom rewarding honesty, I hugged my father. It was then my fascination with storytelling began.
My relationship with writing has changed over time. The story, a moral fable probably inspired by the Qur’an, is striped of the details of the setting. Over the years, I have come to imagine the setting to be a real stream that flows through my own village, Bumthan, by an actual apple orchard that my father inherited. I often picture the young man leaning on the bank covered with dry brown chestnut leaves. I picture the enigmatic face of the girl, the color of her eyes, the scent of her skin, etc., etc.
My relationship with writing has changed in the sense that I’ve situated the plot in my own setting. And I have populated the setting with the characters as I see and invent them. Also—thanks to dear Doris Lessing—I imagine the version of the story written from the daughter’s point of view as radically different than other male versions.
Can you tell us about the writers who have influenced you and your work and in what ways?
I am drawn to, and I think influenced by, writers who came into the English language from outside. Conrad and Nabokov are two thirsty wanderers who sought refuge in a foreign sea. They achieved a lot because even after mooring themselves steadfastly, their canoes shuddered and their flags fluttered. My own relationship with the English language, despite the years of deepening, remains tenuous. But what I enjoy is (the prospect of) wreaking this sort of creative violence, the joy of rendering a reality that is not-so-English into English. The process, through inflexion and juxtaposition, displacement and loss, creates opportunities for large swathes of prose of quaint, nostalgic beauty.
For your debut novel, The Night of Broken Glass, you chose a subject as heavy and complicated as Kashmir. Why did you choose the subject and what was your creative process behind dealing with it?
I chose to write about Kashmir only as much Kashmir chose to write itself through me. When you witness violence closely, when you grow up with the fear of losing your brothers and sisters, with the fear of your father you deeply love and respect being slapped in the marketplace, with the fear that an entire people’s life and dignity is in danger, it registers. One might live in places as far away as one could get from Kashmir, but the memory of the desire for freedom remains. The hurt remains. The darkness remains. The bruises and the shards remain. Writing is remembrance. Writing is mourning. Writing is composing endless inventories of grief.
The characters of your book are very well-rounded and almost emerge as alive from the pages of your book. Were there any specific real life inspirations behind the characters?
When I began writing many years before, it did begin that way. But in The Night of Broken Glass I went away from the people I knew in real life. The nameless narrator of “The Old Man in the Cottage” fascinated me because writing him was arriving at a completely unknown region that I knew only as I created it. In other instances like Tariq in “The Miscreant,” I might have retained impressions of the real people but the aim was ultimately to transform every single person and see them in the capacity of what role they had to play in the fiction real. The process was challenging but also very liberating.
You have dedicated this book to your father. Would you tell us why?
I came to the United States for the first time in the fall of 2010. A few days after landing in Fresno, my father called me from Kashmir. He asked me whether there were poor people in the neighborhood where I was renting a room. In that case he wanted to wire me some extra money—from Kashmir to California—so that I could distribute it among them. I cannot ask for more.
When you researched for this book, were there any instances that you personally found had a big impact on you?
I did not do a whole lot of research. It was more of exhuming my own past, going through the archives of my own memory.
As a writer, do you find the subject of your work to be more important or the way it is written?
I lean towards stylists. The form is as important to me as the content. If the sound of the sentences is rhythmic, it gives me pleasure.
You also write essays and have been published in some prominent publications, do you enjoy writing fiction or non-fiction more?
For me, fiction is the hardest thing to write but it also more solemn.
Perhaps your book will be one of the firsts to begin a canon of literature based on Kashmir, do you think you will continue to further this canon by writing more on Kashmir or would you explore other subjects in your work?
It is very humbling to hear that. Kashmir is not only a place for me. Kashmir is a sensibility. That means even if I am writing a novel about a balding literary critic living in Upstate New York, my sense of being a Kashmiri will reflect in the way I conceive the critic. It will also reflect in how he looks at the world and the text.
Lastly, are there any new writing projects you are working on?
A novel about memory and revenge set in Srinagar and the Central Valley of California.
Text Nidhi Verma