5 months ago
2
U-turn and Other Stories is simply a curation of Kashmiri tales by Hindi/English/Kashmiri writer and filmmaker Gauri Shankar Raina and translated by Pankaj Bhan. Quite a fewer of the stories are situated successful Jammu, which 1 doesn’t find excessively often successful books connected and from Kashmir, the absorption usually being connected the latter.
What is striking astir these stories is that each the tumult and turbulence is kept astatine 1 remove, and mostly viewed done a pragmatic lens. Dispossession is the cardinal theme; it is what it is, seems to beryllium the main credo of the characters successful the book, arsenic they spell astir softly trying to find a foothold successful a caller place, having near down overmuch much than specified ceramic and mortar edifices.
Most of the characters successful the publication are Hindus, forced to permission their homes and lives successful the Kashmir vale and spell settee successful Jammu and further down successful the plains. While they are all Kashmiri-speakers, their situations and dilemmas are universal: however to find and unafraid love, however to acceptable up a location distant from home, however to support one’s family.
The rubric communicative has to bash with a program to acceptable up a promenade connected Dal Lake, and 1 environmentalist’s efforts to stem the inexorable creep of commercialism successful the beauteous valley. Another evocative tale, ‘The Shroud-maker’, is simply a dismal relationship of the spiritual divide, present revealed successful a section tailor’s bully intentions that enactment to his detriment. ‘Mannequins’ has a Kashmiri forced to permission the vale and commencement beingness afresh successful Delhi, equating lifeless mannequins each stacked unneurotic successful a cramped abstraction with his ailing, suffering woman who is missing the snow-clad mountains and greenish valleys they had to flee.
The connection employed is simple, wholly without polish. Unfortunately, rather a fewer errors of either editing oregon translation (a shikara ‘undulating connected the bosom of the lake’ and a autobus conductor occupying his spot ‘with large elan’ were peculiar standouts) mar the different thought-provoking, slice-of-life travel of the stories.
The reviewer is simply a Bengaluru-based author, writer and manuscript editor.
