Kashmiri journalist and writer Basharat Peer has described author Feroz Rather’s book, The Night of Broken Glass, as ‘A work of terrifying and hypnotic beauty’. That might be because the first-time author manages to pack in courage, beauty and violence, all at the same time, in the short stories set in Kashmir in the year 1989, the year the insurgency broke out. The doctoral student of Creative Writing at Florida State University, tells us the reason behind writing these stories and why he thinks not much has been written about Kashmir. Excerpts...

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When did these stories start taking form in your mind? 

I started writing fiction back in 2010 when I joined the MFA program at Fresno State in California. Some think of fiction-making as a process where you plunge into your own unconscious to arrive at the stories. For me, it was more of forging the brutalities unleashed on Kashmiris every day and distill them into prose.

Where have these stories stemmed from? How much of it has come out of personal experience? 

The way fiction works is quite intricate. While the characters are in the foreground, they have a complex relationship with the writer in the background. I might have written about the people I know in real life and about the spectacles of violence they witnessed in Kashmir, but they are ripples in my own consciousness. I would say some characters grew from the impressions of the people in my own family and neighbourhood. But what is important in fiction is that one aims to transfigure the real real into the fictional real. Fiction creates its own truth.

While the characters overlap, the stories are different. Did you set out to write them this way? 

I like how the stories in The Night of Broken Glass spill into each other. I am equally thrilled by how there are gaps. This is a way of respecting the intelligence and imagination of readers who have the willingness to make connections between the 13 stories and create a narrative whole. 

I would not say it is merely a collection of stories. Since the minor characters that appear in the beginning become the predominant voices towards the end, that creates a strong semblance of the novel. I’ll, however, leave it to readers whether they want to qualify The Night of Broken Glass like that.

Kashmir is a favourite subject with authors, writers, filmmakers. What did you think was missing that you wanted to write about? 

The desire to write a novel is the desire to say something that you arrive at yourself. It is probably one of those genres that reflects the writer’s individuality in the strongest possible ways.

Given the magnitude of the things that’ve happened in Kashmir, I do not think much has been written. We are just beginning to articulate how Kashmiris have been wronged in history. We are just beginning to celebrate how despite the oppression, we survive as a society.

What is your next book about? 

I am working on a political thriller set in Srinagar and San Francisco.