We are proud to present Somnath Zutshi’s short story “When the Light Dawned” excerpted from The Greatest Kashmiri Short Stories Ever Told (Aleph, 2022) selected and translated by Neerja Mattoo. Inverse Journal has independently curated a visual bibliography of links relevant to the book and its author. Special thanks to Majid Maqbool for sourcing this excerpt.
lina was hungry. She was not in the mood to listen to the integer homework that the Math teacher wanted the very next day. As the bell rang for close of school, her stomach chimed along with it. She needed to eat soon but had nothing at hand. She...
I he Book of Memories was not a single bound volume. It was a collection of diaries stored in a steel trunk in a room in Karamat Ali Khan’s house that was situated in his village on the Mountain Side. II veryone...
Mother Tongue — A Short Story by Muzaffar Karim“There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity.” —Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand PlateausYeran chai kuni sonras te kharas, won dui ath...
abar Khan closes the old, wooden door of his shop. It groans loudly and dogs start barking at a distance. His hands tremble and the key falls to the floor. He puts his hands in the warm pockets of his pheran and starts walking away. There is a...
ow is it to be said? I am from K******, non-integral and occupied. The shape of the word embodies its own history. The K — a cleft, tugged at by two narcissistic V’s. The furrow between two ‘We-Sayers’ who want to make our ‘Us’ into ‘We'. Not a...
In this third instalment of the Karamat Ali Khan series, O. Kashmiri brings us the fictional account of how the Mountain Side, along with the entire Valley, was sold without the consent of Karamat’s people, and without a means to contest such a ludicrous sale. With all faith exasperated, a miracle within the natural order of things restores what was taken—from the land of the people to the hope seeded deep within its soil. Read on to find out how the snow becomes the medium of that miracle to remedy such a forced mass dispossession.
Nageen Rather returns to Inverse with a new short story where a “paradox of quantum superposition” like Schrödinger’s cat, both dead and alive, involves the case of a cow lost and found. In both states of loss and re-encounter, the theft of the cow and its supposed return are a burden for the house it belongs to. The nuances of Kashmiri culture, its hospitality and its ways prove to be cumbersome while in the background an indefinite curfew rages on to make things worse in an unfortunate pairing of propriety and misery.
In this second story from the “Karamat Ali Khan” series, the anonymous O. Kashmiri returns with a dark tale involving Karamat and his four sons who reside on the Mountainside in a fictitious valley where trees are cut, earth is flattened, and roads are paved so soldiers can march with greater ease.
Arif Ayaz Parrey presents a short story revolving around an unconventional father-daughter relationship that, in its greater reaches, encompasses the blunt reality of Kashmir. This piece of fiction comes with a resourceful glossary for those unfamiliar with certain terms and vocabulary in other languages. Parental Advisory: due to the mature content within this short story, reader discretion is advised.
We are proud to present an excerpt from Nitasha Kaul’s latest novel, Future Tense (Harper Collins, 2020), a much awaited literary text following the release of her debut novel, Residue. We have included an official description of the book along with relevant links to familiarize readers with the extensive work of its author.
In the first from a series, O. Kashmiri brings us the short story of a land and its people told through the story of a man and his struggle, as both are inevitably interlinked and bound by grief, despair and hopelessness.