Book 167: Hawai’i (English) – House of Many Gods (Kiana DAVENPORT)

Lightning season came, the air so electric the fillings in their teeth hummed. Everything they touched just sparked. There were flash floods, the seas gave off a yellow glow. For days, lightning zigzagged up the valley. It hit a wild pig that rolled into their yard completely roasted. One night, herringbones of ions, lightning striking everywhere. no one saw Ava leave the house. But they heard her awful scream, and found Ben standing over her, his hair electrified a gaseous blue.

Some books prove hard to find a single good quote (which doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily bad). Not this one – it was hard to choose!

It is set in Hawai’i and Russia – at first blush it is hard to imagine two lands more different, but the parallels soon become obvious – destruction by respective militaries, horrible consequences of the nuclear cycle, and poverty. (Even so, while both this part of Hawai’i and Russia are poor and polluted I can’t help thinking Hawai’i must be a much nicer place to live, for its climate and natural beauty if nothing else.)

Both suffer environmental degradation and nuclear pollution and sickness from rampant militaries. The beautiful island (home to some of the world’s most unique and endangered creatures) is used for target practice.

Sadly Hawai’i is no longer among the ranks of independent countries. It was deceitfully taken over by a kleptocracy of greedy American businessmen, and handed over to the USA (few Americans seem to be aware of this shameful episode in their history). Since then, the Hawai’ians’ tradition of aloha was taken advantage of by the US military and the Polynesians have been overrun by immigrants and tourists, so that they are only a small minority in their own country now.

The story is set mainly on the poverty-stricken Wai’anae coast of O’ahu. Ana was abandoned when she was a child by her mother Anahola and feels extremely resentful because of this. She meets Nikolai, a Russian who makes films about ecological catastrophes in his home country and in the Pacific, and they come to share common feelings. Having let him go, she heads to Russia to try to track him down.

Meanwhile her mother has thrown herself into the horrible trauma of working in ER departments, and tries fruitlessly to reconnect with her daughter, dying of cancer.

One thing I’d take issue with – having lived through the time of Chernobyl and its aftermath, I don’t remember individual Russians being blamed for it in the West. We saw them as being victims of the system. And another thing – Kazakhstan is not in Russia.

If I can have a little personal rant against American “spell checkers” on behalf of so many non-English writers: Here both the Hawai’ian and Russian languages have fallen victim. In the Polynesian (and Scandinavian) languages ‘i’ means “in”, in the Slavic languages it means “and”. In Polynesian, “a” is a possessive (”of”). Of course, such words shouldn’t be capitalised in the middle of a sentence. But smarty-pants programs like Word assume that they are English words and capitalise them. So despite typing correctly, you have to go back and correct them. Several phrases in both Hawai’ian and Russian have fallen foul of this in this book. Down with cultural imperialism!

This is an amazing novel. Much of the writing is very sensual but there is a lot of volcanic anger seething beneath the surface and often erupting. One that I can’t recommend too highly.

Davenport, Kiana, House of Many Gods, NY, Ballantine, 2006, ISBN 978-0-345-48151-1

Book 162: Lesotho (English) – Chaka (Thomas MAFOLO)

He saw all the affairs of his life, from the time of his childhood, and he found that they were ugly and frightening, and made a man shudder. And when he thought of the day when he came back from rounding up the calves, and found that there was already a plot against him, and the day the boys surprised him in the fields, and about the lion and the hyena, he realized that here on earth people live by might only, and not by right; he decided that here on earth the only person who is wise and strong and beautiful and righteous, is he who knows how to fight with his stick, who, when people argue with him, settles the matter with his stick; and he decided that, from that day on, he would do just as he pleased, and that, whether a person was guilty or not, he would simply kill him if he so wished, for that is the law of man.

‘Chaka’ is no doubt the seminal work of Lesotho’s literature (written about 1910), but the Basotho people have only a cameo role in it. Here we are in South Africa at the time of the birth and meteoric rise of the Zulu nation, created single-handedly (according to this) by Shaka, or Chaka as his name is spelled here. It is the story of a psychopath and reminded me of the rise and fall of the Third Reich.

His mother Nandi was pregnant with him before her marriage, and the two of them were banished due to the machinations of the king’s other wives (which would seem to point to a fair amount of power among the women). Chaka appears as a hero even as an infant. His rise to glory starts when he kills a lion then a hyena which had taken a girl. He nevertheless has to leave, but meets a sorcerer, Isanusi, with whom he makes a faustian deal to gain the kingship – he supplies him with killing medicine for his soldiers (which, if it not sated with enough blood, will kill him himself) and two invaluable advisors. After this he basically loses his humanity. The sweet Noliha falls in love with him (inexplicably for me) and he supposedly loves her too, though for both of them the only reason given is their attractive looks and voices.

He creates a war-centred society which reminded me of ancient Sparta. He never does marry – and doesn’t let anyone else marry either, apart from those of his fighters who were brave. For himself he picks any pretty girls he wants to use then discards them. Chaka trying to teach his people compassion seems ironic in the extreme. He names the new nation he has created from his people and those he has conquered, called Zulu (’Sky’).

Having gained all he had been promised in the original deal, Isanusi offers him more, at a terrible price (he could not be blamed for not reciting all the terms and conditions!) – even more conquests in exchange for whatever he most loves, which is Noliwa. For that he does not hesitate to murder the pregnant girl. He goes on a rampage at home and abroad, murdering tens of thousands of his own troops for supposed cowardice, and going on endless wars which cause mass displacement of tribes throughout southern Africa (the so-called difaqane). Lesotho survives when its king puts out the white flag. As Chaka becomes increasingly murderous and paranoid, getting rid of even his best and most loyal commanders, putting them in a situation where whatever they do is wrong (shades of Hitler again), and kills his own mother as well, two of his commanders revolt and set up their own independent states. The only way to put an end to the monster seems to be to kill him.

I felt that ‘Chaka’ explained his success (in terms of supernatural advisors, sorcery and ‘medicine’), but not why he ‘lost it’ – except for the more prosaic reason of greed for power.

This is a great and very readable work of art.

Shaka Day (24th September) is a public holiday in South Africa.

Mafolo, Thomas (1876 – 1948), Chaka, translated by Daniel P. Kunene, African Writers Series, Oxford, Heinemann, 1981 (first published in SeSotho 1925), ISBN 0-435-90229-6

Book 130: Eritrea (English) – The Fighter’s Letter (Paulos NATNAEL)

.

 

But who could forget the comedian Semere Dagnew. Wedi-Dagnew had small but penetratingly intelligent eyes, which disappeared when he laughed. Semere loved to tell morbid jokes about death and those who had died, the martyrs. He would wonder aloud if the martyrs remembered him now that they are in their graves. “What do you think they are saying now?” he would say without apparent irony. Making such jokes was his way of remembering them. It was also his way of talking about what it meant to be alive and what it’d mean to leave this world – life and death. He liked to question and to debate the meaning of life and specifically the life of a tegadalai [fighter]. Tegadelti [freedom fighters] used to say in those days that if there was heaven at all, it belonged to the tegadalai, especially after living such a terrible life in the wilderness and dying for his country!

 

This novel takes place during Eritrea’s ultimately successful struggle for independence from Ethiopia in the early 1990s. The fight was carried on by several guerrilla groups of various sizes; this book is written from the point of view of the smaller Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), though it seemingly tries to be fair to the larger Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), which was ultimately victorious and whose successor party now runs the country’s dictatorship. There is deep suspicion and fighting between the two (though this weakens the effort against the Ethiopians) until the EPLF forces the ELF to join it – its failure is blamed on dissentions within its leadership. 

Stefanos’ group – rather bravely if not bizarrely to my way of thinking – goes on a ‘tour’ to a rival liberation camp to get a different sides of the story. Despite the obvious awfulness of war life, he decides to join the ELF. But there isn’t as much description of the grittiness of fighting as you might expect; the author is obviously more interested in the party politics.

When a deserter is shot ‘by accident’, it seemed pointless to pretend that there was any doubt about deliberate intent.

Unfortunately, I found the writing pedestrian; the author obviously had trouble deciding whether he wanted to write a fiction or non-fiction book. You would think that a war book would at least be exciting. The author doesn’t really explain why life in Eritrea is so bad – seemingly everyone wants to go to the US (as does the protagonist, and as did the author). There are lots of acronyms, not all of which are explained, and lots of interesting Ava (Afar?) and Tigrinya words, most of which are. So, while it’s not bad, I feel it could have been much better.

 

NATNAEL, Paulos Micael (1956 – ), The Fighter’s Letter: an Eritrean revolutionary story (based on true story), Trenton NJ, The Red Sea Press, 2015, ISBN 978-1-56902-411-9

 

 

Book 121: El Salvador (Spanish) – Insensatez = Senselessness (Horacio CASTELLANOS MOYA)

‘Sometimes I don’t even know how the ill-feeling arises in me and who to take it out on.’ Monsignor [the bishop] kept looking at me with an indecipherable look through his tinted glasses with tortoise-shell frames, a look that made me fear that he would consider me a hallucinating literati looking for verses there, where what there was was a brutal denunciation of the crimes of lèse humanité perpetuated by the army against the indigenous communities of his country…

[my translation… I don’t know if ‘lèse humanité’ is used in French, let alone English, but I couldn’t think of a better translation on the lines of ‘lèse majesté’]

What a beautiful title this slim but rich novel has (a beautiful word for an ugly concept, in both languages). And appropriate, although it could have also been called Desensitisation.
It was not difficult to read in Spanish despite being stitched together with enormously long stream-of-consciousness sentences and paragraphs, so perhaps it could also be called Breathlessness…
The narrator comes to this country, apparently Guatemala, to copy edit accounts by the survivors and eyewitness of the atrocities which had been committed by the armed forces during a dirty war. He has been deceived by his friend into having to work on twice as many pages as he was told, and which were not ready for him, and he was deceived by the Catholic Church for which this committed atheist is working, which does not pay him as agreed (we are not sure, but maybe he was never paid at all, and maybe by the end he has become so obsessed with the work that doesn’t care about that any more?) He had made himself persona non grata in his own country, El Salvador, by saying that the country had its ‘first African president’ (meaning that he didn’t listen to his people, though it was assumed that he was just being racist).
The narrator is himself not such an attractive character. He is determined to get one of a pair of pretty Spanish girls into bed just to relieve his needs, but is shocked when she asks what he wants like a prostitute and reveals that she has a boyfriend to whom she will honestly tell all.
The narrator also has darkness inside him, like others, which makes you wonder if he wouldn’t be committing similar atrocities himself if it wasn’t for his different circumstances. He becomes increasingly paranoid (or is he?) that ‘they’ are out to get him.
Unexpectedly, it is often quite funny – he makes some gaffes, like mistaking a Uruguayan for an Argentinian – as bad as mistaking a Norwegian for a Swede or a Kiwi for an Aussie (not to mention the potential relationship imbroglio involved!)
Not surprisingly, he becomes psychologically damaged from having to read the horrible testimonies of the atrocities repeatedly in forensic detail. He keeps a notebook for himself with quotes, with the victims’ tortured grammar which somehow becomes poetic expression, and with which he becomes obsessed. Indeed he seems most interested in the literary nature of the indigenous peoples’ testimony.
Despite the unsavoury theme and conflicting (and conflicted) characters, I loved this compact novel.

CASTELLANOS MOYA, Horacio (1957 – ), Insensatez, Barcelona, Tusquets, 2004, 2014, ISBN 978-84-8310-314-2
Senselessness, translated from Spanish into English by Katherine Silver, NY, New Directions, 2004

Book 109: Austria (German) – Radetzkymarsch = The Radetzky March (Joseph Roth)

The Emperor was an old man. He was the oldest emperor in the world. Around him death was circling, circling, and reaped and reaped. Already the entire field was empty, and only the Emperor, like a forgotten silver stalk, still stood there waiting. For years, his clear and hard eyes had been looking forlornly into a lost distance. His cranium was bald, like a vaulted desert. His whiskers were white, like a pair of snowy wings. The wrinkles on his face were an untidy undergrowth, wherein dwelt the decades. His body was lean, his back slightly bent. He walked around at home with tripping little steps. But as soon as he went out onto the street, he tried to make his thighs firm, his knees flexible, his feet light, his back straight. He filled his eyes with artificial benevolence, with the true characteristic of imperial eyes: they seemed to see everyone who saw the Emperor, and they greeted everyone who greeted him. But in reality the faces only glided and flew by him, and they looked straight ahead at that delicate, fine line which is the border between life and death, out to the edge of the horizon, which the eyes of old men always see, even when houses, forests or mountains hide it. The people believed that Franz Joseph knew less than themselves, since he was so much older than they were. But maybe he knew more than many. He saw the sun going down on his empire, but said nothing. He knew that he would already be deceased before its descent. Sometimes he stood there innocently and was glad when someone explained things to him at great length which he already knew very well. Since, with the slyness of children and old men, he loved to mislead people. And he was pleased with the vanity with which they proved to themselves that they were more clever than he. He concealed his cleverness with simple-mindedness: since it was not seemly for an emperor to be as clever as his advisers. Better for him to seem simple than clever.

[my translation]


That was Roth’s genius description of Emperor Franz Josef I of the doomed Austro-Hungarian Empire, which ruled a large part of eastern Europe and which some see as a sort of proto-EU while others as a prison of nationalities. In any case, it was due to disintegrate in defeat in the First World War, going (as the author describes it) into glorious dirty defeat, with its vain banners flying. It is the moment in history when people’s loyalty was to be no longer to a monarch but to a nation.
The novel follows the fortunes of three generations. The first is a baron who fortuitously becomes the hero of the Battle of Solferino (a battle which heralded the decline of the Habsburgs), saving the Emperor’s life by pushing him down just as he’s about to be shot. He is subsequently angered by a school book which makes him out to be more heroic than he was – he couldn’t stand to be exploited for propaganda purposes.
Regardless of the truth of the legend (like that of the Habsburg Empire itself), the succeeding generations do not come up to the standard. His son works as a government official. As for the third generation, Carl Joseph gambles away his money, gets the District Commissioner to look for money, and cadges money from the Emperor himself by reminding him about his ancestor at Solferino. For Carl Joseph, it is easiest to die (in the First World War) to the sounds of a military band, especially playing the jaunty Radetzky March of Johann Strauss (the novel’s leitmotif, so well-known to us now from the end of the Vienna New Year’s Concerts).
Austria-Hungary was obviously doomed, but the Austrians didn’t (or didn’t want to) see it. Those at the centre held strange ideas about the outer parts of the empire (where much of the story takes place) which they may never visit.
The novel is full of vivid images and wonderful descriptions like the one above. It is one of the great historical novels of the 1900s. I was certainly glad I chose it.

Roth, Joseph (1894 – 1939), Radetzkymarsch, Köln, Anakonda, 2012, ISBN 978-3-86647-866-4

Book 96: Czech Rep. (English) – The Good Soldier Švejk = Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka (Jaroslav HAŠEK)

The members of the commission… were remarkably divided in their conclusions about Švejk. Half of them insisted that Švejk was a ‘half-wit’, while the other half insisted he was a scoundrel who was trying to make fun of the war.
’It’ll be a bloody miracle,’ roared the chairman of the commission at Švejk, ‘if we don’t get the better of you.’
Švejk looked at the whole commission with the godlike composure of an innocent child.
The senior staff doctor came up close to Švejk:
’I’d like to know, you swine, what you’re thinking about now?’
’Humbly report, sir, I don’t think at all.’
’Himmeldonnerwetter,’ bawled one of the members of the commission, rattling his sabre. ‘So he doesn’t think at all. Why in God’s name don’t you think, you Siamese elephant?’
’Humbly report, I don’t think because that’s forbidden to soldiers on duty.’

The commission’s dilemma about the good soldier Švejk is also our dilemma. It’s impossible to know which Švejk is the real one. What is beyond doubt is that he became one of the greatest and most lovable characters in literature.
I don’t think there’s any need for a spoiler alert that the Austro-Hungarian Empire lost the First World War and was soon to be no more; and after reading this hilarious account of its wartime activities there’s no need to wonder why.
It always remains ambiguous as to whether Švejk is a pure idiot or hard at work sabotaging the war effort.
He spends the war ‘trying to catch up with his battalion’ – or is he evading the war? And the same goes for his people – the Czechs were marched off by their Austrian and Hungarian masters to a war they had no interest in winning; it was not their empire. A lieutenant compares being Czech to being a member of a secret organisation. Czechoslovakia was one of the many captive nations that escaped when it disintegrated in 1918.
Švejk is always loitering around the periphery of the war, but that doesn’t stop him from changing its course.
Like Catch-22, the novel satirises the ridiculousness of the army system, if anyone should actually try to take it seriously. And I wonder if he inspired Forrest Gump?
Some of my favourite moments were the ciphers debacle, the blown up chauffeur who goes to army heaven, the army poster that Švejk takes literally, the woman whose every whim he obeys… No matter what the situation, Švejk has a story to tell and at one time even when asleep answers ‘Present!’ and starts to tell another tale, like that other great Czech invention, the robot…
Hašek died before finishing his masterpiece; but I like to think the war would have finished just as Švejk finally rejoined his batallion.

HAŠEK, Jaroslav (1883 – 1923), The Good Soldier Švejk and his fortunes in the world war, translated by Cecil Parrott, London, Penguin Classics, 2000, ISBN 978-0-140-44991-4
(originally published in Czech, 1926)

Book 84: South Sudan (English) – Beneath the Darkening Sky (Majok TULBA)

But Priest’s blood is on my hands and under my fingernails, and his cord has been severed. I told myself that those cords would be cut by me or another. It didn’t matter who, because it was going to happen. We are mere instruments of fate, we soldiers. All those people were shot and would have been shot and we were the walking, running, screaming dead, but it matters that I killed them. The cup must be passed and the poison must be drunk, but that doesn’t mean you have to drink it. The cup was in my hands and I could have cast it back in their faces and died. That would have been better. Oh God, that would have been better. But I drank it. And I passed it and I took the communion of devils. What kind of God would listen to my prayers? Not in this field, not among the blood of devils. I have lived. I have been spared. There’s still time to escape.

 

We have all heard of countries terrorised and traumatised by the nightmarish, upside-down world of child soldiers, but to experience what it is like in reality – and to be one – you must read this book. Beneath the Darkening Sky covers many of the same ugly themes that we have seen (e.g. in Cambodia) and will see again in some other countries, but like them turns them into compulsive reading through the beautiful language of great literature.

South Sudan became the world’s newest country but has had little peace or good news even since then. The interminable (civil) war of this Christian/Animist south, with the oil resources, against northern, Muslim, Sudan for independence both devastated the land and prevented any development. But no sooner did it finally win freedom than the various ethnic groups started fighting among themselves.

The author was nine when rebel soldiers attacked his village and kidnapped all the children taller than an AK47 to become child soldiers. Tulba was an inch shorter; he eventually fled the country to live in Australia. But he wrote this brilliant first novel of what might have happened to him if fate had made him an inch taller.

 

Like the Khmer Rouge for example, the rebels claim to be creating Utopia but actually make only hell on earth. Obinna’s new life is a daily nightmare interspersed with dreaming. It is soaked in casual, self-defeating brutality. The most mercy people can expect (like his friend Priest, in the quote above) is a quick death. Obinna grows down, instead of up.

Among other horrors, the boys are used by the cowardly soldiers to walk in front of them through minefields. When one of them does step on a mine, the scene is described in movie-like slow motion (which felt like watching a crash test dummy flailing about in a car).

 

Like any great novel about a horrible time (similarly to In the Shadow of the Banyan, for Cambodia), the tragedy is not unrelieved. I found the fake ambush especially funny.

 

Traumatising as it is, I highly recommend this novel. It is narrated in short staccato sentences like machine gun fire. I can’t wait to read his second book, “When Elephants Fight”, and hope Tulba will be able to write more books.

 

While I was reading this, there was a documentary series on the Vietnam War on TV. I was struck by what one American Vietnam veteran said: “I only killed one person in Vietnam; the rest were objects.” This novel gives a devastating portrayal of the desensitisation of the killers, of the deadening, dehumanising objectification of death. As Obinna says: “They don’t get to choose to live and I don’t get to choose to kill”.

 

 

TULBA, Majok, Beneath the Darkening Sky, London, Oneworld, 2013 (first published by Penguin Australia, 2012), ISBN 978-1-78074-241-0

Book 82: Zimbabwe (English) – Bones (Chenjerai HOVE)

Today the sun has set. It will set again tomorrow. But you are not here to see it. That is the difference. Even the birds and the insects that sing, they sing the same way as they sang when you were here. But now that you are not here to hear them, that makes the difference. Suns will set, birds will sing, insects will sing, but the difference is in the ears that will hear them. Today your ears are not here to hear them with me. Your blood is not here to tell me what all the songs of the forests of the farm say.

 

‘Bones’ is the story of the vain search of a woman (Marita) for her son, gone to fight in the guerrilla war against the racist white Rhodesian regime that was to lead to Zimbabwe. Everyone seems to be obsessed with her. Her story is told by Janifa (who has been wooed by her son); the herbalist Marume; Chisaga, the white farmer’s cook (about whom we get a totally different impression from his own words than from Janifa’s); ‘the unknown woman’ at the mortuary who Marita tries to give a decent burial; and the more omnipresent view of ‘the spirits’. The farm owner is foul-mouthed and hated even if probably far from the worst that could have been pictured. What is might be his real name is never revealed, but he is called Manyepo “because you think we are always lying to you”.
The novel is all the more powerful because Hove doesn’t spell out or labour the differences between blacks and whites, or the history between them. They are there, but they are there for us to extract. Hove’s anger and revolutionary fervour are there and we feel them, but as if it were the heat from a furnace under the floor:

 

“A people that fears death will never enjoy freedom from the heavy chains of being called boys by people of the same age, men and women.”

 

If you expect a novel about a revolutionary war to be about men fighting the unjust regime, ‘Bones’ is not like that. It is about those left at home, and is told mainly through the women’s voices. And what shines through is that they are at least as heroic as the male soldiers. It is, as far as I can judge, another masterly success of a male writer writing about women with understanding, compassion and admiration.
The language of the novel, which is apparently rooted in Shona idiom, is quite wonderful, not poetic but as controlledX as poetry, majestic as a religious text but hypnotically readable, and scattered with delicious proverbs and phrases (I can’t tell if they are traditional or original), e.g. “A closed mouth is a cave in which to hide”. ‘Bones’ was yet another discovery of a great novel and a great writer who deserves far wider acclaim. One of the Heinemann African Writers Series, it is not very weighty (I read it in one day, coincidentally on Robert Mugabe’s 93rd birthday) but it is concentrated brilliance.
Published in Harare!

 

HOVE, Chenjerai (1956 – 2015): Bones, Harare: Baobab Books, 1988, ISBN 0-908311-03-6

Book 74: Kashmir (English) – The Collaborator (Mirza WAHEED)

 

Captain Kadian takes a large swig from his glass tumbler, closes his eyes for a moment, smacks his lips, and says, ‘The job’s not that hard, you see, you just go down once a week or fifteen days, and the money, the money is not bad at all.’

 

This novel is set in Indian Kashmir, near the ‘Line of Control’ with Pakistan. Kashmir isn’t an independent country (though you suspect most Kashmiris might want it to be). When India and Pakistan gained independence, the Muslim-majority state was ruled by an indecisive Hindu maharaja who opted for India at the last moment. Open and covert warfare between Pakistan and India, and Kashmiri militants, for decades has been the consequence. Both countries claimed the state and occupy it (India the majority). India promised an independence referendum at the outset, that has never been held. Some sixty years later, no solution is in sight. The lovely valley is perhaps the world’s most likely flashpoint for a nuclear war.
In ‘The Collaborator’, brutal, drunken Indian Army Captain Kadian gives a marvellous self-justification for his actions, going through the full catalogue of rationalisations with which such people kid themselves (only). It’s their own fault that atrocities occur, can’t be helped, just part of his job, I’m just a tiny cog in the machine, it’s the law, those who whinge about human rights don’t understand, I have a family too, I didn’t kill them myself, they chose to die, it would have happened anyway, even if I agreed I couldn’t do anything.
He forces the boy narrator to ‘collaborate’ and count the fallen corpses in the typically beautiful Kashmir valley on the border (a job he considers too dangerous for his own soldiers); every day he expects to find one of his boyhood friends who had gone across to Pakistan to join the militants.
The high point is the visit of the Governor of Kashmir, who helicopters in as if on a military operation, humiliating the villagers (who had been warned by an azan ((Muslim call to prayer)) recited backwards), like the preparation for a massacre instead of a ‘hearts and minds’ campaign.
There are a lot of Kashmiri, Arabic and Hindi/Urdu words used, but unfortunately no glossary is provided and they are not always explained.
Although he is speaking of his scavenging expeditions, when the Collaborator says he is tired of it all he must be speaking for most Kashmiris.

 

WAHEED, Mirza (1955 – ), The Collaborator, London, Viking, 2011, ISBN 978-0-670-91895-9