The World With Its Mouth Open - Zahid Rafiq - ★★★

AUTHOR: Zahid Rafiq

GENRE: Short Story Collection

PUBLICATION DATE: December 3, 2024

RATING: 3 stars.

In a Nutshell: An OwnVoices debut story collection focussing on the lives of ordinary citizens in Kashmir. Good stories, but none made me go “Wow!” in any way. Barebones in description but great in character sketches. Slice of life in every way, so if this writing style doesn’t work for you, the book might not.

This debut collection of eleven stories focusses on the lives of ordinary people in Kashmir, a conflicted territory ever since the Indo-Pak partition with both nations fighting over its “ownership”. Most stories that are set in this region focus on terrorism, soldier brutalities, religious discrimination, or rebellion. This book is one of the rare ones that focusses only on common people and common problems without forcing in aggression and uncertainty into every scene. As the author is from Srinagar (the summer capital of Kashmir), I had been looking forward to getting a genuine glimpse of Kashmiri lives without getting more of the same religious/political agenda.

Does the book deliver? Well, the results are mixed for various reasons.

There is no author’s note, but the blurb states the stories to be weaving in “larger, devastating themes of loss, grief, violence, longing, and injustice with the threads of smaller, everyday realities that confront the characters’ lives in profound ways.” This is a somewhat ambitious declaration, methinks.

The location should have been the primary factor in this collection. However, in focusing on the “ordinary”, the focus is so removed from the setting that most of the stories could have been based anywhere. There is absolutely nothing about the place, be it the scenery or the weather or the lifestyle or the insurgency. Barring a few passing mentions of soldiers or guns in a couple of the stories, there is nothing to suggest that the location is under strife. In fact, the writing is so generic that the same stories could have been transposed to any contentious location anywhere in the world without any edits. This was a big disappointment to me; while I did want an agenda-free book, I didn’t want a Kashmir-free book. But I just didn’t *feel* Kashmir herein.

The writing style is clearly slice-of-life, with each story focussing on an event in the life of the primary character rather than having a neat start-middle-end progression. Slice of life is a hit-or-miss style with me, with my satisfaction heavily dependent on how the stories phase out. In this collection, most stories didn’t offer me a satisfying closure. They are not complete, and not even abrupt or open-ended; there’s just the end of a scene and then nothing! I felt like I was watching a play where the curtains came down before the final act. In most cases, I was left wondering about the point of the story.

The content is quite character-oriented, as is common with slice-of-life. But the characters do uphold the strength of the book. Each character (whenever human; one story has only dogs as characters) is a relatable person, with hopes and struggles we can identify with even though we don’t live under similar circumstances. The challenges they face are from routine life and nothing to do with the political turmoil. This aspect was a plus for me.

As always, I rated the stories individually. Of the eleven entries, most earned 3-3.5 stars from me. If I had enjoyed the slice-of-life writing style more, some of these might have earned more points. But the main reason for my lower satisfaction was not the writing but the endings. The only two stories that went to 4 stars were ‘Flowers From a Dog‘ and ‘The Mannequin‘, both poignant tales of regret and yet quite dissimilar from each other in tone and impact.

All in all, I wouldn’t recommend this as a story collection showing you the true Kashmir. But I would certainly recommend it as an OwnVoices work showing you how humans take solace in the ordinary even in darker times. It would help if you enjoy slice-of-life writing and character-oriented storytelling.

3 stars, based on the average of my ratings for each tale.

My thanks to Tin House for providing the DRC of “The World With Its Mouth Open” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.