Walid Sadek, an artist and writer who works on post-war Lebanese society, writes of the figure of the “nonposthumous survivor” as one who carries the burden of unnecessary memory, whose testimony is a challenge to post-conflict normalcy and peacebuilding. During this period of mass psychosis, those disappeared or illegally abducted, come to occupy a liminal space between the dead and the alive. Their existence itself is called upon question, the traumatic rendering of their memories can neither be narrated in the past nor the present tense. This unresolved trauma that lingers in the air holds back any attempt of a rushed reconciliation; the shadow-memory of the survivor keeps the unreckoned past alive, even if barely.

In a similar vein, Zahid Rafiq’s debut book, ‘The World With Its Mouth Open’, offers a world where these lines are less watertight than we’d like to think. Tying together eleven tales in his elegant, original prose style, Rafiq sketches a picture that is deeply complex, where memory, dream and reality intertwine in ways that escape sensible narrative.

In doing so, it defies the neat predictability of the conventional plotline, where the story is structured around an event, a turning point, the anticipatory build up before a revelation. Rafiq doesn’t care about tying loose ends together, his stories breathe through its characters, and remain aloof to the reader’s didactic urges. Devoid of a moralizing force, it is still one of the most deeply humane pieces of writing in the genre.

His writer-gaze has no paternalism, sympathy, contempt or admiration – it is devoid of feeling and is laser focused on the character’s stream of thought, their gestures, reactions, as well as their silences. In his mostly bloodless prose, we can sense a numbness, an unease; most of all, a suffocation of its inhabitants whose self-perception is acutely shaped by the “viewfinder of the gun”. A woman runs into an old acquaintance in the market and loses him without cause; a writer returns to his homeland and finds that his long absence has hollowed out his oldest friendships; a severed hand is discovered in the middle of a renovation and no explanations are offered. These appear to be blips, anomalies or chance circumstances. When Manzoor, the mason in The House, insists on digging deeper to see what else could be unearthed, the owner’s wife hides behind her tea offerings, her husband’s absence, the chatter that a trip to the graveyard could spur. The lack of curiosity is a moment of self-awareness, marked by an unwillingness to spell out the obvious. It is not that Rafiq’s stories are empty of context, but that often, the context is knowingly suppressed. To the untrained eye, this collection can be catalogued under absurdism. To the more attuned reader, we know that Rafiq is only capturing a glimpse of what it means to exist in the Valley. You can fall off the face of the earth anytime, and it would neatly fit into the world he has painted, the world he has meticulously captured in his years as a former journalist.

The story the title is borrowed from, Crows, places us beside an unnamed boy and his quivering finger as he struggles with the bottomless pit in his stomach, while choosing between multiple choice questions. The story is checkered with the boy being brutalized, verbally and physically. In the private tuition his mother’s pleadings have finally allowed him to attend, the boy is caned and yelled at. Between the beatings, the teacher asks the boy if he knows what lies beyond the protective shield that is his classroom: “The world… with its mouth open. You hear me? With its mouth open.”

With Rafiq, dialogues are restrained, in a way that allows for the inexpressibility of the situation to come alive, and when the characters do speak, it means something. However, they don’t always speak to their pain, but around it. The story ends with the boy wondering aloud, his friend more anxious about the trouble he will be in at home than he is himself, why the crows come back to their nests, when they could keep flying and find abodes elsewhere. If there are hidden meanings, Rafiq couches them well. There are no screaming metaphors, no satisfying ends, but the stories bleed into each other through a wordless capitulation of the effort to justify why the people in them behaved the way they did.

In Bare Feet, a ghost pleads with a lecturer who has come back to see his ailing father, to look for his family, with nothing to locate them but an ambiguous whisper: “A narrow alley runs beside the house. Children play in that alley.” He takes on this quest immediately, as if in a daze. This museless wandering isn’t as much a source of confusion as is the fact that his friend, Hassan, who wordlessly agrees to accompany him. Unassuming, hardened by the death of his brother, and as reliable as the old bike he still rides, he carries in him the soil he lives on.

Rafiq isn’t here to tell these tales to prove a point. He isn’t pleading with an audience or demanding some vague semblance of justice. He is probing into the strange, ephemeral, transitional bonds between strangers, the rationales that are forged under chronic hardship, the ways of coping that are far from discernable, and a world where death has left its aftertaste in the world of those left behind, alive. 

Yusra Khan is a freelance writer and journalist based in Delhi, with bylines in Outlook India, Boomlive, South Asian Today, among others. She is interested in covering public-interest topics relating to technology, labour rights, health and privacy. She spends her weekends working as a film and culture critic for Goa-based Storiculture Company.