The Collaborator

In Kashmir "you simply do not exist if you don't have an ID card on you" (14). The dead bodies lying in the valley, nestled between "this Kashmir" and "that Kashmir," have been the casualties of war. They, when alive, sought freedom for Kashmir or simply wanted to run away from the military brutalities. Since "there is always an Indian and a Pakistani version of everything," these freedom seekers are somebody else's militants, and the only good militant is a dead militant. But it seems that the dead bodies simply refuse to go. Their IDs give them existence even after their death. And someone has to go down there, swoop like "carrion birds of animals", and retrieve these cards from the zone beyond the Line of Control. After all, IDs can become future evidence for "human rights catastrophe."

The maverick Captain Kadian of the Indian Army knows that he can make these bodies disappear with a dash of Kerosene. Then again, he wants these bodies to have a "big, big, burial" so that they keep on making statements for all those traitors who will try to flee from his line of control. He can of course cook up stories and feed the media. First, you have to remove the IDs before you can actually identify these bodies as "external agencies" who wanted to break Kashmir from India, "sever the crown of Bharat Mata's head."  

This is where the eponymous narrator of Mirza Waheed's debut novel, The Collaborator (2011), comes in. The narrator is the son of the Sarpanch (headman) of Nowgam, a village that offers a passage to/from Indian Kashmir to Azad Kashmir. He happens to be the only young man who has not run away from the Indian Army. Captain Kadian exploits his local knowledge to send him to the valley to collect weapons and IDs from the dead bodies. The narrator was only 19 when a fresh bout of trouble erupted in the 1993. His friends with whom he used to play cricket or music or hang out left soon afterwards. His father's will to remain the headman in a vacated village made him stay, and became a collaborator.

In the valley strewn with dead bodies, he keeps encountering faces that have been disappearing from his village. He re-members the dis-membered bodies. He imagines having conversations with the dead. It is the stench that bothers him the most. He gets used to the grotesque sight of mutilated bodies, the valley that grows corpses, but he never can get rid of the smell that is both literal and figurative. The smell originates from his own self of guilt, his putrid conscience. His father's decision to hold onto his post and his mother's silence can only add to his overwhelming guilt. He sees his father cowering before the Indian army while receiving brown packets of relief from the Governor. His father's silence at the face of what can be best described as army brutality (for example, he simply keeps on smoking his hookah when a young man shows his mother's ear cut off by the Indian army) is more eerie than his mother's. Silence seems to be the trophy of the collaborators, their IDs. The narrator's only solace is that he can offer prayers for the dead bodies while he is out there at the field of death.

Mirza Waheed was a journalist for BBC who was reporting on Kashmir and its facts. The objective dispassionate reporting is not enough for the facts that Waheed was grappling with. These are facts that exist in a liminal space between fact and fiction, analogous to ghosts that exist between being and non-being. Waheed adopts a style that can be described as 'narrative representations'; he is not simply “telling” a story. Rather, he is dealing with images that are acting on and interacting with one another.

We can always argue that this passionate rambling does not really take into account of the complicities of the Kashmiri problem. It just makes us aware of the casualties of war in a graphic manner. Waheed knows the power of rhetoric, rhetoric that politicians use to dress the fact with fiction. He even cites the speech of the governor, who is "a saliva-spraying frenzy, talked of Kalhana and Vincent Smith and Sankaracharya's Hill and King Lalitaditya and Badshah and Avanti Vernanand Sankara and swami Vivekananda, and Amarnath and Kalidasa and shiekh Nuruddin Noorani and Sister Nivedita and Sardar Patel...Mohammad Iqbal and North Block and Abul Kalam Azad ...Emile Zola and the three nation theory ...Article 370 ...and Kashmir's ineradicable place in the Indian vision" (233). Waheed uses a 17-line sentence (no wonder, he mentions Emile Zola) to state the Indian version of the Kashmiri problem. For the young narrator this is nothing more than a rant and a raillery of the real problem. And, as author Waheed knows, this grand narrative does not leave any room for the micro narrative involving the friends of the narrator who had nothing to do with militancy: Hussain the singer, Mohammad the master craftsman, Ashfaq 'the classic melancholic', and Gul the handsome and witty one.

As a collaborator, however, he finds himself outside the 'friend circle" one he discovers their bodies under water: "Are they talking about me? Are they making fun of me? By now they have formed a circle around me, but I just can't manage to touch any of them...I so, so want to put myself in their midst, shoulder to shoulder in the 'friend circle,' like good old times, but instead, I find myself splashing out of the water" (21).

Waheed has been charged of being immature in his understanding of Kashmir. Well you expect it from a  19-year-old narrator, don't you? At times, the narrator reminds me of Hamlet in the grave digging scene in which the Prince of Denmark talks to the dead jester Yorick. It seems the soliloquy has been expanded to explore its limit with Kashmir at the centre. I guess the analogy is even more apt as Vishal Bhardwaj has just dished out the 'rottenness' of Kashmir in his reconstruction of the Shakespearean tragedy. Readers of Waheed's The Collaborator are in for a rude awakening in the valley of death set in Kashmir.

The writer is Professor of English, University of Dhaka.
Advisor, Department of English and Humanities, University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB)