India Today – August 13, 2018

68 INDIA TODAY AUGUST 13, 2018

irst there’s

silence.

Choreographer

Ashley Lobo

moves about

gently touch­

ing each of the

10 dancers of his company,

Navdhara India Dance Theatre

(NIDT). Over the next one

hour, there’s an explosion of

movement—bodies writhe on

the floor, a man and a woman

perform a feverish duet, dan­

cers run at breakneck speed

and push their legs higher and

higher. There are moments

of tenderness, but there’s a

sense of foreboding too in

Lobo’s latest piece, Agni.

“The nature of the world

today is such that people

are being ignited to exclu­

siveness,” says Lobo while

F

one of the many intercon­

nected stories in Feroz

Rather’s book about Kashmir,

a tyrannical army major

watches Hitchcock’s Rope

on TV. As the passage becomes increasingly

surreal, his private reminiscences merge

with scenes from the film.

Like Rope, which was about a motive­

less murder, The Night of Broken Glass

centres on tragic, untimely deaths and

destructive hubris. But unlike the film,

famously made up of long takes, this book is

filled with the literary equivalents

of slow dissolves. One story

plays alongside and informs

another. Voices and perspec­

tives change. Chronology is

uncertain. Nightmare scenes are

told with the lucidity of report­

age, and actual incidents related

as if they were nightmares.

All this adds up to an

unusual, restless narrative that

looks at the violence in Kashmir

mainly through the experiences

of young people who smoke Revolution

cigarettes, wear Liberty shoes and strive

for ‘azadi’, usually to no avail. A boy makes

a rosary out of bullet shells collected by his

father. A journalist writes a resignation let­

ter to her boss, denouncing a profession

of complacent, power­drunk men; later,

the boss gets to speak to us too. A story

where a man finds himself looking after a

cancer­ridden shell of a body, belonging to

an inspector who had tortured him 25 years

earlier, feels like it might be about grace and

catharsis, but the final mood is that of injus­

tice that was never redressed. “I did not

know where to direct my anger,” a frustrat­

ed narrator tells us, and this is true for so

many of the victims in these stories. Grand­

sounding ideas like forgiveness or bene­

diction hold no meaning in a place where

destroyed lives cannot be un­destroyed,

and there is no closure even after death.

(One passage is in a ghost’s voice.)

The Night of Broken Glass is terrific as a

concept, with its many narrative detours and

collisions—no safety nets for the reader, no

familiar structures we can cling

to. In execution, though, this

book blows hot and cold. Rather

tries to do many different things,

which is always admirable in a

debut, but sometimes he tries

too hard. Many passages are

unwieldy and some of the writ­

ing is over­earnest, straining for

effect. One sample among many:

“Wispy white roots drank their

fill until they were soggy and

satiated, the water soundlessly

penetrated the hearts of the soil particles,

suffusing the empty spaces in between [...] a

multitude of trickles descending to touch my

bare, twinkling toes.”

That’s a pity, because the author some­

times does much more with much less. A

single, terse sentence such as “The shop

filled with the gloom of humiliation”—after a

story is told about a respected man being

slapped by a soldier—can be more effective

than paragraphs of ornate prose. n

—Jai Arjun Singh

Fractured

Narratives

REVIEW

IN

THE NIGHT OF

BROKEN GLASS

by Feroz Rather

HarperCollins India

222 pages, ` 399

“I did not

know where

to direct

my anger,”

says the

narrator

of one of

the stories

LEISURE