Twenty years ago, I met Feroz Rather on a cricket field in his village Bumthan in Kashmir. It was a blistering bright summer afternoon, and at the end of a raucous game – that was the only time we played against each other – we sat under the elms on the eastern shore of the river Sandren and began to talk. Ever since, our conversation continues. We have discussed a variety of ideas at great length in Aligarh Muslim University where we went to get our BAs – Feroz did a BA in psychology – and later in Delhi, when he was preparing to go for a creative writing programme in the United States while I began my doctorate in philosophy at Jawahar Lal Nehru University. We disagree with each other a great deal. But over the years, we’ve come to agree that we come from an agrarian society where scepticism is not a vibrant practice or a cherished value, especially among the middle-class and upper-middle class families. However, one of the subtle delights of talking with Feroz has been to subvert that trend. And while I was reading his book The Night of Broken Glass, I felt his desire to evoke a mood of interrogation again and again through the character of the boss. One of the most moving passages is on page 194 in “The Boss’s Account” where the protagonist contemplates a pasture: I had walked into the middle of the pasture and had touched a willow. Its trunk was thick and bark was hard and impenetrable. I could not picture the trunk individually; I could not think of it as something that belonged exclusively to the willow tree. It remained a part of the pasture, of the larger continuity, beyond and outside of me.I see this as a moment in the history of Kashmiri consciousness where the novelistic sensibility is nailed. It is here that ‘the boss’, at once a powerful journalist with torn loyalties and a disillusioned aesthete, wrenches from the pasture a sense of his own individuality. Feroz is a great admirer of V.S. Naipaul and I could see how he applies the Conradian myth of the landscape gone hostile for its inhabitants to the village of Kanelwan in Kashmir. Early this June, I met Feroz in Delhi while he was on his way back from Kashmir to Tallahassee where he teaches creative writing at Florida State University. We sat in a café and had a long chat, parts of which have been reproduced here: The Night of Broken Glass is your first book. You grew up in Kashmir seeing people being tortured and killed. How difficult was it to balance literary imagination with the experience of horror, torture and death?Had I chosen to write a memoir or an anthropological or political treatise, the battles would have been different. I think for the memoirist, the challenge is to simultaneously remain loyal to history and to her own self. The memoirist relates a personal story as a consequence of some larger historical event. That probably was my first impulse too, to affirm my loyalty to history. And there are reasons for why I felt or feel that way. It is certainly because of the magnitude of physical violence being inflicted on us. The very foundations of our world are being shaken every day. Since there is a threat that our moral universe might be obliterated, our culture destroyed, our history erased, one tends to resort to the forms of narrative which are more concrete than abstract.The Night of Broken GlassFeroz RatherHarperCollins India, July 2018Since I resorted to fiction, the challenge was different and probably more difficult. Fiction is supposed to work at a purely imaginative level. For me it is the hardest thing to write and that is also because I too very strongly share the reporter’s and the memoirist’s impulse. However, what I realise and am fascinated with is the novel’s capacity not only to replicate a historical event but to realise what has become of the people who witnessed or went through the event. The last four stories in The Night of Broken Glass are written around the Bijbyor massacre of 1993. Psychologically, it is disturbing as well as fascinating to explore what has become of the characters who witnessed that incident. But even more important is how arriving at the memory of the massacre bestows them – the characters – with a sense of their own self. Coming to your question, the balance is to be struck by measuring the intensity of the (historical) event in relation to the impact and how that shapes the contours of the characters’ being and manifests in their distorted behaviours. Most of your stories are set in post-1989 Kashmir, except for a few like the “The Cowherd”, which is a wonderful story. There are characters who rebel and die; there are characters who side with the state and kill. You manage to give them a sense of selfhood besides getting into who they are historically. But did you feel that the pressure of the present – I mean of the violence in the history – annihilating the past of these characters?It is a very good question and I understand now what happened in the course of writing this book. If you look at “A Rebel’s Return”, the narrator-protagonist is strangulated. I am certainly someone who wants to witness and collide with our history no matter how brutal it is – the strangulation of Ilham in this case. But I am interested in seeking ways to procrastinate life and in exploring spaces where one can reflect on the past. I want to be stubborn in affirming our will to live while death is sporadic and frequent. And that is what happens with Ilham. He lives an excruciatingly lonely existence despite his death, all the while contemplating his militant past. Many of your characters are from the margins of society. Jamshid is a cobbler’s son and there is the cobbler. Then there the ailing cowherd (who is the cobbler’s father) and the car-washer who becomes a stone thrower. Generally, Kashmir is understood in terms of a war over sovereignty. The social realities are almost ignored in the discourses about Kashmir. How important are class and caste in a war? Feroz Rather. Credit: FacebookYou see the novel is a promiscuous beast. It goes everywhere, nosing through and sniffing forbidden spaces – realms which are not spoken about or revealed to the public. I do think The Night of Broken Glass predominantly reflects how the narrative of Kashmiri life has been obliterated by military violence. I was extremely anxious while writing the last few chapters where I felt the magnitude of violence was so much, the narrative might become gratuitous, the novel might completely fall apart. I somehow managed weave into my way, but what saved me was the interiority of the characters like Gulam grounded in the social. Gulam is a cobbler and it is there that his class and caste become important. Being a watul is a part of his identity, in a way, beneath/besides the political. Although it certainly does affect his politics. Initially, he does not buy into the idea of aazadi. In fact, it is only when he goes to search his son’s bullet-riddled body and ends up in a mosque, he starts crying and sides with the people who believe in aazadi. It dawns on him how the language he inherits has the force of prophesy. I remember that part quite vividly, from the last story “The Night of Broken Glass”. What is the significance of the title?I am certainly obliquely aware of the Kristallnacht, though I did not do any research in that direction. In all honesty, I arrived at the image myself. I was also fascinated by Newtonian idea of how light is made up of this substance called aether. When I thought of The Night of Broken Glass, I visualised this stuff made up of more darkness than light hovering over the skies of Kashmir. It was more of a shadow flitting through my head that transformed into many scenes of violence in the book. The one that frightened even me was when Major S in “Rosy” beats Qadir Suth with his gun and breaks his jaw. That is a disturbing scene. While you say that the protagonist of the story, Rosy, is imagining it, within the narrative, I could picture it happening for real. Is the ambivalence feigned?I am not supposed to reveal (smiles). All I can say is that it is a fictive character imagining a fictitious scene.There is a vividness to that scene that is remarkable. But you also evoke a tremendous sense of setting. Do you know the part in “The Pheran” that I am thinking about? Yes, the section where in the city of Srinagar there is a prolonged description about the bunker by Zero Bridge. There is a story I’d like to tell you. Almost a decade ago when I was 24, I published my first article in The Caravan. It was about the city of Srinagar. When I was researching the article, I came across an image from the times of Badshah. An image of mud houses with flat roofs where tulips grew in abundance. Isn’t that a beautiful image? Something you would like to look at in just, benevolent times. Now I think the image was a mere projection embodying my desire to go back to a past, I don’t know how historically accurate, but certainly peaceful and harmonious. The way I wrote Srinagar in The Night of Broken Glass must have shown you how I’ve become more grim. How the Sikh soldiers bring the body of Kamran from the jungles and pass it on to the soldiers in the cantonment. How the soldiers display the dead body on the Wall. Reading Naipaul, especially A Bend in the River, enabled me to explore the human potential for being hierarchically violent in the realm of power. He taught me the bitter lessons of not shying away to see the ruthlessness, the many manifestations of meanness and jealousy, with which humans like ‘the boss’ do not fail to deal with each other. Going back to the nature of violence, do you think war affects the aesthetic capabilities of people? To seek beauty in war is the poet’s foremost prerogative. War ravages the landscape. War mottles the mind. War proliferate the shadows of fear. War scares people and they become uncertain and restless. The consequences are devastating but there is a greater longing for unity and beauty. For the artist, it means a deeper urge to arrive at some structuring principle to assort the rubble and chaos. To gather and array in one place the shards of glass strewn across the night. How did the war affect your capability at arriving that structuring principle that holds The Night of Broken Glass together? I struggled a lot because the magnitude of violence I was dealing with threatened to exceed the limits of the narrative. I suffered but I persevered, trying to find a way to sustain my story. In the last chapter, Gulam narrates what happens to that beautiful girl from Bijbyor named Rosy when Major S traps her inside her house. In Kashmir, woman sing elegies for the dead. The elegies are also allegorical, elliptical narratives. They go round and round before recounting what would be a high point in terms of action or plot. Rosy’s mother’s elegy told through Gulam’s dead wife told through Gulam told through the narrator of the last story who resembles the writer who resembles me: I had to create that chain to save the story as you find at the end of the book. I might not have emerged unscarred, but who in Kashmir really has? Idris Hassan Bhat holds a doctorate in philosophy from JNU and teaches academic writing and argument at Ashoka University.