Between personal & political, a tragedy

Renu Sud Sinha

IT started as a short story and in Madhuri Vijay’s own words, “a really bad” one at that, but went on to become a well-crafted debut novel. Set in Bengaluru and Kashmir, The Far Field is a coming-of-age-story that has won many literary accolades.

The narrative is multi-layered and weaves many different strands into a cohesive and powerful tale of personal and political conflicts, loss, dysfunctional families, broken bonds, unintentional betrayals and mental illness. Constantly shifting back and forth in time and space, this mirrored book not only details the past, set in Bangalore of the 1990s, and the present, woven in the Kashmir conflict of mid-noughties, it also reflects some stark shades of a sad and ironical real-time reality of our times.

The Far Field, narrated from the perspective of its protagonist, Shalini, has been cleverly disguised as an outsider’s perception of Kashmir through the prism of naivety. Vijay has used a guileless Shalini to recount the story as she sees it.

It begins on a confessional note where a 30-year-old Shalini gives in to her urge to share a story she has withheld for six years because now ‘the urge has turned into something with sharper edges, which sticks under the ribs and makes it dangerous to breathe’. The naivety with which she had traversed those 24 years has been left behind in a conflict-ridden land. It is another matter that other people paid, perhaps with their lives, for Shalini to acquire this wisdom that often comes in the aftermath of some painful awakening.

Shalini fiercely loves her idiosyncratic mother even when she is unable to understand her. Amma is a mercurial woman with a sharp tongue whose “tenderness was as devastating as her viciousness”. When she commits suicide, a desolate Shalini is not able to come to terms with her mother’s death. Depressed, she goes about in a haze, till an object from the past brings back memories of a Kashmiri salesman, the only person whom her sarcastic mother had ever befriended. Bashir Ahmed, with skin ‘the colour of unpolished rosewood’ and ‘light stunning green eyes’, had disappeared from their lives nearly seven years ago.

Convinced that her mother’s loss is somehow associated with Ahmed’s disappearance, on an impulse Shalini decides to find him and perhaps also find some closure for her grief.

Thus begins an impromptu journey that will not only alter her life irrevocably, but also of those hapless people whose only fault is their kindness. It ends in entwining of personal and political conflicts and generating an infinite grief this time instead of ending it.

In The Far Field, Vijay has attempted to mirror an outsider’s perspective of Kashmir for which almost every Indian living outside the now-splintered state qualifies. For visitors, it is a paradise of pristine beauty; for its people, caught in the crosshairs of the State, the army and the militants, it is a living hell they can’t leave. In Vijay’s words, Shalini is a representative of thousands of such outsiders: intelligent, educated people, who remain wilfully oblivious to the injustices around them, as well as their part in those injustices.

For a debut novel, the writing is flawless, the deceptively simple prose is full of subtle complexities, the storytelling is gripping, the characters are well etched — Zoya, Amina, Riyaz and most others seem endearingly real.

However, Vijay seems to have fallen into a trap of her own making. In her attempt to deromanticise the reality and struggle of Kashmiri people, she has only shown one side of the story — their side. But overall a gripping book that should be read for its masterful craft, if not anything else — and it has a lot to offer going by the awards and honours it has won, including the 2019 JCB Prize for Literature and making it to the shortlist for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.