[dropcap]Z[/dropcap]ahid Rafiq’s debut, The World With Its Mouth Open released this month by Tin House in America and soon to be published by Penguin in India is a timely reorientation of the Kashmiri Anglophone fiction. The stories draw upon the everyday banalities of making a life in Kashmir. They resonate with an affect—one that lingers after the story has been read to an end. There’s an overarching sense of a shared desolation grounded in characters who navigate the alleys, the shops, the checkpoints, and the pointed gaze of the soldiers. The anthology marks a way out, an opening in the discourse of Kashmiri Anglophone fiction.

By focusing on the lived experiences of people in the wake of imminent violence, Zahid opens fiction to the possibilities of the ordinary that carries itself on, even amidst disappearances, corporal punishments, deaths and disappointments. While Kashmiri writers like Akhtar Mohiuddin, Amin Kamil, and Hari Krishna Koul have centered themselves around the lived realities of people, Zahid has opened a possibility for the English language to resonate with a distinct Kashmiri experience.

While a major chunk of the English literary production in Kashmir is situated around the turmoil of the nineties, Zahid’s stories are not allocated to a specific historical epoch. Such an expansive approach alleviates the stories from being a documented account of the violence. While other Kashmiri Anglophone novels and short stories are taken to narrativizing history, specifically, the history of the turmoil in 1990s, Zahid’s approach to history is ancillary in that he foregrounds the lives of characters as they navigate personal and public spaces, embodying both a historical past and the traumatic present. What emerges is not merely history, but the fragile, often overlooked pursuits of everyday life.

These stories delve with striking psychological acuity into moments that dwell around and precede an impending violence—a group of adolescents voyeuristically obsessing over a girl, a child laboring to sketch the human liver in class, two friends riding across the narrow lanes in Srinagar, and a man wandering through the graveyard in search of closure. Such quests, though seemingly mundane, unravel the quiet dramas of existence, where the banal is shaken out of its familiar frame. What is offered instead is an account of the human possibilities of continuity and discontinuity amidst the ravages of death, mourning, unemployment, and unrequited love.

The characterization is acute, realistic and rooted in a detailed observation. There’s Manzoor, the labourer with white earphones dangling around his head, and a decapitated hand in his spade.  There’s Mansoor who is agitated at the mannequin with a forlorn expression. Nusrat, caught in the middle of a road, navigating between presence and absence. And Salim, who roams around Srinagar struggling to find employment. Zahid’s prose pulsates in a latent and quiet tension. His renderings of cramped alleyways, corrugated roofs, the damp Press Enclave and bustling fish markets do more than describe; they evoke a visceral realism, grounding these familiar spaces in the lives of characters as they navigate these spaces.

In all these and many other stories, Zahid draws, with an elegant humour, the contours of a world on the verge of breaking apart. His stories are set in a world that is unsettling, that is mourning and recuperating, that is stuck as well as progressing, that is carrying on despite the haze and downpour of historical onslaught.

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The World With Its Mouth Open

Stories

by Zahid Rafiq[/et_pb_blurb] [et_pb_image src="https://inverse.azan-n.com/content/images/2026/04/zahid-npr.jpg" title_text="zahid-npr" url="https://www.npr.org/2024/12/01/nx-s1-4932110/zahid-rafiq-discusses-his-short-story-collection-the-world-with-its-mouth-open" url_new_window="on" _builder_version="4.27.4" _module_preset="default" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_image] [et_pb_blurb image="https://inverse.azan-n.com/content/images/2026/04/booklist.jpg" _builder_version="4.27.4" _module_preset="default" text_orientation="center" link_option_url="https://www.booklistonline.com/The-World-with-Its-Mouth-Open-Rafiq-Zahid/pid=9799621" link_option_url_new_window="on" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"]

Lindsay Harmon
Book List

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Briefly Noted Book Reviews
The New Yorker

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Tender, subtle, sad—many of these stories read like elegies for the living.
Kirkus Reviews

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Publishers Weekly: What We're Reading
Publishers Weekly

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Shelf Awareness

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