ERIC DEGGANS, HOST:
In a new short story collection titled "The World With Its Mouth Open," characters live very precarious yet ordinary lives in modern day Kashmir. It's an area in the Indian subcontinent that's seen decades of conflict between India, Pakistan and China. A pregnant woman goes in search of fresh fish for dinner. A unemployed son looks for a job during a downpour. A shopkeeper tries to return a new mannequin that looks like it's in mourning. A work crew digging a foundation unearths a severed hand. It's a powerful collection of tales, and Zahid Rafiq, a journalist turned author, is here to talk about it. Thank you so much for joining us.
ZAHID RAFIQ: Thank you for having me, Eric.
DEGGANS: Your language in these stories - the - it just paints such vivid pictures. I was hoping that you could read a passage from the story called Bare Feet, where a native of Kashmir who's lived outside the country for years returns and then travels the streets with a friend. Could you read that passage for us?
RAFIQ: Sure, I can read it.
(Reading) I have never seen the streets like this, the city like this. For a moment, it occurs to me that this is not my city but some other unfortunate city, packs of angry dogs and littered corners, birds perched on electric wires, a faint stench of rotting meat. In the windows of houses are silhouettes, brief apparitions peering out at empty roads. Neighborhood after neighborhood, desolation - nothing but bunkers made of sandbags with loops of barbed wire wound around. And from little holes in the bunkers, dark eyes watch you with pointed barrels. They are everywhere - the bunkers, the blind eyes, the searching muzzles. I had heard all this in my absence. But to see it is another thing.
DEGGANS: Those details - I was wondering, is that your journalist eye at work there?
RAFIQ: That was a mix. That was a mix of the journalist eye, of the writer's eye, of the eye of a person who has to live here every day and also retrieve those images from the blur of normality that you begin to see, and then it becomes so normal, all of this, that you no longer see it. So it was almost like returning oneself the sense of sight.
DEGGANS: Right. And listeners may sense it's tough for me to talk about the specifics of these stories without giving too much away because the way you construct them is that you're slowly kind revealing the scope and nature of the story as the reader goes through the pieces. And I was interested in that storytelling approach as well. How did you sort of light on this way of revealing the stories to the people who read them?
RAFIQ: Because that is how the stories are revealed to me, because I don't know the story when I sit down to write it - that is a necessity for me. I must not know what the story is. That's the only reason I can keep going. If I plan the story ahead, if I think it through, then it's - the pleasure of it is done for me. So I sit down. I'll take a sentence. I have a vague sense of where I want to go. Then somebody else might come - a character comes up, and he says something. I don't plan him, but I allow him to say what he wants to say, if he feels real, if he feels true. So in the way the details slowly gather together, people come together - that is how it is revealed to me, as well. And I want to preserve that originality, in some sense, that authenticity of something gathering together, of a story coming together.
DEGGANS: I want to talk to you about The House, the story about workers who find the severed hand while they're digging a home's foundation. The wife of the homeowner is very practical. She just wants that hand out of there.
RAFIQ: Yeah.
(LAUGHTER)
DEGGANS: And one of the laborers, Manzoor - he seems like the only one who's committed to figuring out if there's more remains there and how does - dispose of this, you know, sort of correctly. Given how you work, how did you start that story? Like, what gave you the idea, and how did you sort of progress through it?
RAFIQ: I think the idea came from really - with the desire to have a small place of my own. The desire also for a house came amid all this violence that was in my head. It was almost - the mind is a graveyard. The mind is a place of - where terrible things happen. It came out of a single sentence that a man comes running out and says, I've found something. And when they look, there is a hand on the spade. And then the rest of the writing was a natural progression, trying to make sense of what can possibly happen.
Manzoor, the laborer - he kind of spoke his own lines, really. He was this young guy, younger guy, who is the only one, in a way, who is still idealistic in some sense saying, what should we do? What is it that we owe somebody? And everybody else played themselves. So it comes out of the desire to have a house in a graveyard.
DEGGANS: Well, I was wondering if you were saying that in Kashmir in particular, it's tough to build something new without building it on the bones of something that's already been there.
RAFIQ: In a way, it is the building of a future on the - on a terrible, terrible past and when many characters react very differently to that kind of building, to that kind of a construction. And yet, we see that life goes on.
DEGGANS: I was blown away by the way you put sentences together, the way you describe things. You are discovering what you want to say as you're writing it. It's like starting on a trip and you don't even know where the destination is, which is awesome.
RAFIQ: No way. I - the - if I know where the destination is, I can never set out. I'm a person like that. Like, if I go travel somewhere, I'll never book the return tickets, never. When I went to America to Berkeley to study and I realized that people have made plans for the next week, it was astounding.
DEGGANS: I wonder if that's sort of an outgrowth of your upbringing in Kashmir. You talked about people living on the edge in a way?
RAFIQ: Because you live in the moment, the future is very dark, very uncertain. Tomorrow is very dark. So all you have is this today. What is the point of planning if you don't know what it's going to be like tomorrow? I think the only people who plan really are the people who are secure that they have a weak. And then there's going to be Thursday. And Thursday will look like Wednesday. Wednesday will look like Tuesday.
DEGGANS: Yeah.
RAFIQ: I'm honest when I say, this - it's me. It's, like, a very subjective experience of living. I'm sure there are people who know that they're going to be around next year, 28 of March, and they have planned for it. Like, in America, I realize people book vocations, like, six months away. That kind of planning - it comes out of a certain degree of security where you know that I have agency, I have control, over six months later.
DEGGANS: Absolutely. Zahid Rafiq - he's the author of "The World With Its Mouth Open." Thank you so much for joining us on the show.
RAFIQ: Thank you, Eric. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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