A pregnant woman meets a long-lost acquaintance only to have him mysteriously slip through the streets, never to be seen again; a shop owner buys an expensive mannequin yet grows haunted by its look of painted anguish; and a group of teenage boys grow infatuated with a girl-next-door before reality rudely pierces their bubble.

A quiet and meditative peek into the daily lives of Kashmiris, Zahid Rafiq’s debut short story collection conducts a cast of characters across the landscape of a city surviving through rubble. The World with its Mouth Open’s eleven stories are of dogs, crumbling cement, and gun-wielding soldiers, all set under the cold grey sky of war-torn Kashmir. Rafiq heightens these themes with lyricism and attention to detail, crafting heart-wrenching and addictive prose in the process.

In “Crows”, the classroom of a tutor “known for his teachings and beatings” is explored. Beginning mid-test, the story is of a boy who shirked studying and now finds himself hovering his pen “just above the paper, to keep calamity from striking before its hour.” The story tingles the all-too-familiar pit in one’s stomach from exam days, worsened by the presence of a brutal teacher. Failing to produce a single correct answer, the teacher tears the boy’s sheet into pieces before striking him twice across the face until his “ear buzzed” and “face stung”. And then, the calamity: the boy must scrounge around the backyard to produce a stick with which the teacher could beat him. Anxiety and dread ripple across the pages, and Rafiq twists and retwists the gut as the boy goes from staring at an answerless test sheet to running across the classroom, screaming, “Not the nettle. Please. Not the nettle.”

Yet the teacher, despite his violence, is known for “kindness and rare forgiveness, of slapping a boy only to find his face burning with fever and giving him the day off, of charging only half fees from orphans.” As the more ambiguous history of the teacher is unpeeled, the nettle-wielding terror of “Crows” deepens. As branches loom above the boy, he thinks of his mother, who wept and pleaded to enrol him in this tuition centre; he remembers her begging the teacher, “Beat him, skin him, pull out his nails. But please give him education.” Between the beatings, the teacher asks the boy what is beyond the classroom: “The world… with its mouth open. You hear me? With its mouth open.”

Meanwhile, in “Dogs”, another stand-out story, two street dogs wander the dusty streets of Kashmir looking for scraps of food while journeying toward the “old dog”, an elder of legend who can cure one of the strays of his recent ailment: a mysterious and unpleasant taste,unlike any food or known flavour, that refuses to leave his mouth, no matter how much he eats or drinks. For a moment, the dog wonders whether it’s connected by some mysterious passage to his mind, where everything he has seen and experienced had “leaked” toward his throat, coating his tongue in a keen discomfort. As the two cross streets and parks to find the old dog, they face an onslaught of threat and assault, sometimes in the form of dust grains that clog their windpipes, and sometimes through a park with “too many people with nothing to do and, in their boredom, doing nothing.”

“Dogs”, like the rest of The World with its Mouth Open, moves slowly, taking time to flesh out peripheral characters and pepper the landscape with details. When the dogs think of graveyards, the reader recalls the other stories in the periphery, like the smell of freshly tilled grave soil in “Flowers from a Dog”. Then particulate clouds that blow across construction sites into the ailing dog’s throat, has echoes in “The House” a story of builders who stumble upon a severed hand while digging the groundwork of a mansion. The result is a neighbourhood of stories, shared by grief and proximity.

In The World with its Mouth Open, the lives in the Valley, from the street animals to the people, weave into each other. All are strangers thrown together by the theatre of war, and in this fact, all are unwillingly tethered together through common currents of trauma and resilience. Rafiq, the conductor of this orchestra, sets the tempo of lost childhoods and disappeared persons in Kashmir under siege.

Mahika Dhar is a writer, essayist, and book reviewer based in New Delhi. She is the creator of bookcrumbs and her short stories have appeared in Seaglass Literary, Through Lines and Minimag among others.