U-turn and Other Stories is a curation of Kashmiri tales by Hindi/English/Kashmiri writer and filmmaker Gauri Shankar Raina and translated by Pankaj Bhan. Quite a few of the stories are situated in Jammu, which one doesn’t find too often in books on and from Kashmir, the focus usually being on the latter.
What is striking about these stories is that all the tumult and turbulence is kept at one remove, and largely viewed through a pragmatic lens. Dispossession is the central theme; it is what it is, seems to be the main credo of the characters in the book, as they go about quietly trying to find a foothold in a new place, having left behind much more than mere brick and mortar edifices.
Most of the characters in the book are Hindus, forced to leave their homes and lives in the Kashmir valley and go settle in Jammu and further down in the plains. While they are all Kashmiri-speakers, their situations and dilemmas are universal: how to find and secure love, how to set up a home away from home, how to protect one’s family.
The title story has to do with a plan to set up a mall on Dal Lake, and one environmentalist’s efforts to stem the inexorable creep of commercialism in the beautiful valley. Another evocative tale, ‘The Shroud-maker’, is a dismal account of the religious divide, here revealed in a local tailor’s good intentions that work to his detriment. ‘Mannequins’ has a Kashmiri forced to leave the valley and start life afresh in Delhi, equating lifeless mannequins all stacked together in a cramped space with his ailing, suffering wife who is missing the snow-clad mountains and green valleys they had to flee.
The language employed is simple, totally without polish. Unfortunately, quite a few errors of either editing or translation (a shikara ‘undulating on the bosom of the lake’ and a bus conductor occupying his seat ‘with great elan’ were particular standouts) mar the otherwise thought-provoking, slice-of-life flow of the stories.
The reviewer is a Bengaluru-based author, journalist and manuscript editor.