To See, To Witness, TO record
Liz Tascio The World With Its Mouth Open, by Zahid Rafiq Tin House, 2024. If you, like me, had only the faintest, most embarrassingly light grasp of the geopolitics of Kashmir when you began reading The World With Its Mouth Open, you still won’t be conversant in the political details when you finish this debut short story collection by Kashmiri journalist Zahid Rafiq. The decades of violent dispute by India, Pakistan, and China are not discussed; Kashmir is not even named as the setting. But you will have shared Rafiq’s close attention to its neighborhoods, its classrooms, market stalls, living rooms and bedrooms, kitchens, hallways, alleyways—the plain, intimate places of everyday life. And it’s there, in the close, living portraits of each person, that the destabilizing pain of living in this contested place, in this time, becomes clear. Threading through everything is a delicate sense of dread, of constant and quiet unease, the grief of losses and the certainty of more loss to come. In the opening story, “The Bridge,” a pregnant wife, anxious after two miscarriages, tentatively visits a traditional clinic, no longer sure she should rely only on modern medicine. She receives prescriptions for powders and teas and a directive to eat fish; she wonders if she can afford all of it. She emerges into the teeming, disorienting marketplace and thinks she might recognize a lost-looking man standing on the bridge: the older