Book Review

Book Review: The Collaborator
Author: Mirza Waheed
Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: Penguin Viking
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0670920525
ISBN-13: 978-0670920525

Few weeks ago, while talking about Pakistani writings in English and its coming of age, a columnist hyphenated Basharat Peer and Mirza Waheed as Pakistanis. While I and hundreds of others (Including of course the two names in question) were outraged; the irony it seemed was not misplaced. It's generally believed that only Pakistani writers can produce good pieces of fiction on conflict. I wonder - are they the only one who have mastered this craft?

Last year, in one of a diplomatic parties, an Indian Foreign Service official tried to explain to me why Pakistan was producing good literature on the subject. According to the gentleman, the country was going through flux, which provided a good fodder on the subject. I told him, "Hello! We have Kashmir, North East and the entire Naxal belt. What happened to it? But I could not snap him as I had not, till then, stumbled upon The Collaborator.

Mirza Waheed in his new book takes us to an unknown territorial terrain. The truth is, the mainstream narrative in India knows precious little about Kashmir. Most readers get their primary shock in the very first few pages when Mirza successfully tries to separate the identity of two distinct groups of Kashmiris — Gujjars and people from downtown Sri Nagar and around.

Then enters the eponymous protagonist (and narrator) who is all of 19 and is sitting in front of Captain Kadian of the Indian Army. He has special penchant for Hindi cuss words which he uses as helping verb or adjective depending on how many pegs of Old Monk have gone into his esophagus. The captain offers a deal where the boy has to strip the bodies of infiltrators, who were gunned down in the previous day fire (or plain cold extra-judicial murder) and rolled down the hills, off ID and arms and other paraphernalia and bring it to the Captain’s sadist, sodomiser peon. The offer is - if the boy completes his task successfully he will be paid Rs 500 for his service. A little apprehensive in the beginning, the boy agrees not because he wants money, but because there is nobody young enough left in his fictional LOC village to perform this task. The false IDs are used to fudge infiltration data that is televised every year. Kadian takes immense pleasure in telling the boy that stupid media persons just parrot the data "he" provides them.

A closer look throws three sets of people in the village: the one who crossed over to POK for training and are either killed or missing, the ones who have been killed by the army in the cold blood and the ones who have left for towns in the valley. Clearly, Mirza’s Nowgam is microcosm of what Kashmir has turned into.

The emotional trauma that the boy passes through when he strips the corpses of their belongings has been handled brilliantly. "It is not easy picking up stuff from dead people," the boy laments and in moments of rage, curses Kadian for what he has pushed him into. But somewhere, lurking beneath his heart, is a fear that one day he might stumble upon the corpses of his four childhood friends – Hussain, Gul, Ashfaq and Mohammed—who quietly left for POK one after the other.

The most brilliant section of the book is where Mirza describes the slow radicalization of Gujjar village when the inhabitants come in contact with the city lads. "When we were mosque-less and imam-less, people seldom prayed, some almost never did; but now, everyone seemed to be in a rush to make up for a lifetime of lost blessings, to catch up with divinity." The transformation has been handled subtly and presented as a boy of 17, who has seldom been in contact with any outsider, would see it. "Moustaches half a century old—shaped, oiled and coloured for decades—either disappeared altogether or gave way to thin, austere alterations above the new beards." Never has the conquest of Wahhabism over Sufism been described in such lucid manner. What Mirza achieves in this episode is pure magic.

The portion that describes the departure of his friends is natural, real, believable and yet chilling. How does it feel when the shyest of the boys in the village, Hussain, who loves to croon Rafi’s romantic numbers, slips one night unnoticed? Just like that. Without a word. Or for example Gul, who, the narrator suggests, "had taken a liking to Nuzhat, or more accurately, her swelling chest," decides to leave it all for the cause. You might not agree with the method but you sure cannot ignore the emotional investment that has gone to the cause.

However, the most interesting character is that of Captain Kadian. The Captain, which the narrator suspects, is either Punjabi or Jat (probably not knowing that one can be both at the same time), holds the narrative intact. I have heard murmurs that the character is a caricature or worst, stereotype, of a rookie fresh from Pune and Dehradun. Well, it might be; but it is a caricature I have come to like. If at all this Pak-bashing, rum-guzzling, officer is a caricature, then it is probably the best caricature I have come across following Charles and Richard Churchill in Chimanada Adichie’s brilliant take on Biafran War: Half of a Yellow Sun.

With the risk of sounding politically incorrect, I can say that Kadian represents as much Indian Army in him as Richard Churchill represents the fashionable radical of 60s who cannot tell a Leninist from a Trotskyite. Other characters too are believable and will dance in front of the eyes in flesh and bones as you get engrossed.

The only dampener can be the way the author has taken liberty with chronology of events. The coming of "curfew-loving" Governor (read Jagmohan), the crackdown and the exodus of Pundits appear jumbled up. But I guess a fiction writer is entitled to take a few liberties with the years. A case in example can be the Oscar winning flick ‘The King’s Speech’ where writer David Seidler has conveniently reduced the tenure of Neville Chamberlain to accommodate adequate screen space for Stanley Baldwin and Winston Churchill. Or for example, Ridley Scott’s brilliant take on crusade, Kingdom of Heaven, where writer William Monahan stripped off at least 20 years from character Balian of Ibelin to let Orlando Bloom play the role. But these adjustments have not harmed the story in any way.

The Collaborator
is a triumph of Indian writing in English and it would be sad, rather tragic, if people just buy it to display on their bookshelf as they have been doing with Ulysses, Mein Kampf or closer home, God of Small Things.