‘This Our Paradise’: Karan Mujoo’s debut novel is tender, heartbreaking, and ingeniously panoramic

“A debilitating symptom of exile is unfamiliarity with your homeland,” writes Karan Mujoo in a brief author note at the end of his stunning debut novel This Our Paradise. The novel begins in early 1990, when a Kashmiri Pandit family is forced to leave their home in Bagh-i-Mehtab, leaving behind their lives and histories of a home “lovingly built, brick by brick, laugh by laugh, meal by meal, evening conference by evening conference.” Perched on this fragile moment, This Our Paradise is tender and heartbreaking, but also ingeniously panoramic. A parallel narrative also follows in the novel. In 1968, in Lolab Valley, Shahid is born to a farming family. His childhood is shadowed by poverty and starvation. The family relies on rain to quench their fields, but the divine promise is precarious at best, as years go by without a shower. Shahid, as a child, trains himself in the bitter lessons of disillusionment and pledges that his life must have more meaning than his parents’s: “He wanted a life of dignity. A life independent of the mood swings of weather gods.”

Straddling these two narratives, Mujoo deftly captures at least two Kashmirs. One of the exiled and abused Pandits, and the other of mounting militancy. In either, however, a deep sense of defeat and dislocation is registered, impressing an old, timeless truth: wars make corpses of all.

As the Pandit family leaves their home behind, they believe that their return is inevitable. “The systems were sluggish, but they worked. It would take a few months, maybe a year, but then we would be back in Bagh-i-Mehtab.” A fascinating merit of the novel is its play with voice. The Pandit family’s narrative is related to us via an eight-year-old narrator, who grows up in a radically changing Kashmir, and at the time of his family’s exile in 1990, is eleven years old. The other narrative – told in alternating chapters – is written in the third person. The former, perhaps, is an autobiographical voice for the author, an unnamed child narrator in exile, who represents a universal longing for home, but also a certain innocent incomprehensibility about his situation. The latter, however, is an omniscient narrator’s voice. Mujoo directs the action in Shahid’s life, and in doing so, performs a daunting task: introducing in depth the making of a militant. Not only the physical training, but also the mental make-up – torn between fundamentalist calls to violence and retribution, and the need for amity and belonging, these aspiring militants fight inner battles of ambiguity and guilt in the novel.

Foundations of calamity

The seeds of discontent are sown over many decades in the Valley. From its secession to India in the aftermath of the Partition, to its turbulent political history, effectively, an impervious sense of dysfunction pervades the air by the 1980s. The novel manages to refer to these crises as well. From the fault lines of Sheikh Abdullah’s rule to how corruption seeped into the deepest recesses of Kashmiri culture and institutions during the reign of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, the novel is an unrestrained censure of how multiple systemic failures led to the growth of fertile ground for conflict, militancy and war in Kashmir. Mujoo also notes how these movements are supported by international security agencies as well as forces from Pakistan, which train and brainwash the youth of Kashmir in the unsubtle vagaries of religious fundamentalism as well as violent retribution. As he listens to a fundamentalist militant leader’s demagoguery, Shahid bemoans the loss of righteous living in the Valley, as allegedly, the inhabitants “avoided the simple, pure way of life, and instead indulged in vain and vague Sufism… What people called syncretic, he realised, was actually blasphemous. No wonder they had suffered for centuries.”

A deep dissatisfaction with the institutions in power, and indeed an absence of order led to a point in the 1980s, where “there was a fervour in the streets... The tehreek was not a juvenile movement led by a ragtag bunch of teenagers. It had the backing of Pakistan and the ISI. It was being built up slowly and assiduously, its rhythm and tempo monitored carefully.” Mujoo must be commended for his balanced prose, which often dares the powdery taste of non-fiction to ultimately serve an engaging and often fictive narrative inspired by real events – with creative changes integrated in places. For instance, see this passage – a speech from a Liberation Front leader about the cyclical patterns of exploitation of the Kashmiris: “Everyone has exploited us – Afghans, Mughals, Sikhs, Dogras, Britishers, Indians. We were always seen as an inferior people. As wretched beings desecrating paradise. All our masters promised prosperity and light. And all of them unleashed death, destruction and plunder. That’s why we demand azadi, that’s why we must have azadi.”

One of the most stunning episodes in the novel is when Shahid traverses wild mountains in Kashmir to reach a militant training camp. While the journey itself is arduous, a reward awaits these revolutionary devotees. The maulvis at the camp introduce trainees to their “wives”, Kalashnikovs: “This gun is going to be your begum. You will sleep with it, wake up with it, always keep it near you, never let another man defile it. If you take care of your gun, it will take care of you. Is that clear?” Later, Shahid argues with his mother who pleads with him to give up his militant ambitions. He says, “Thousands of boys are ready to fight for the cause. I won't sit at home like a eunuch while Muslims around the world are butchered. While Kashmir is sold to Indian agents. Someone has to do something.” The call for violence comes from a cocktail of insecurities. Self-imposed religious threats align with constantly insatiable male egos to become guardians of an area of conflict.

Bearing witness

Mujoo is an able storyteller, no doubt, but his gift lies in the art of documenting details – the oft-ignored ordinary, everyday realities of living in the Valley. To this end, the most delectable details in his novel are about food. He writes about both the families’ staple diets with a charming familiarity. A breakfast of nun chai and Kashmiri bread, followed by haakh over mounds of rice for a second breakfast, and rogan josh or rajma goguj or dum aloo and breads of various kinds for other meals during the day. Food is more than just nutrition, it connects the characters to their histories, as well as each other. In various episodes, in the midst of grim news about violence and disappearances in the Valley, the families indulge in feasts at home, effectively grounding themselves in these connections fostered by food. In a gorgeous passage, Mujoo writes about types of Kashmiri breads being prepared by their family’s official bread-maker: “When the dough was glutinous enough, he shaped it into various breads with his hands. For girdhas, he made small depressions in the circular dough with artisan-like delicacy. To create thin and flat lavasas, he stretched the dough to its limits. For the ghyuv czut, generous amounts of clarified butter was added.” Countless Kashmiri words are sprinkled in the novel, often without explanations, which add an authentic flavour to the novel. Mujoo is equally proficient in describing the landscape of the Valley. He returns to the chinars and lakes and cold climes – all the characteristic elements we associate with Kashmir – but often with a tenderness of his own. As if the longing of the characters describing these scenes is his own too.

In one particular episode, Mujoo wins over with his heartbreaking portrayal of a funeral that the Kashmiri Pandit family must execute overnight after the shocking murder of a member. In January 1990, as the insurgency in Kashmir peaked, hundreds of Pandits were massacred in brutal terrorist attacks. The challenge, however, was not only dealing with the loss of a loved one, but also assuring them safe passage into the afterlife. Cremation grounds were inaccessible, priests unavailable, and the threat of being slaughtered traced everyone who broke curfew to arrange for straws, wood and clothes for the departed. The funeral scene in the novel is heavy with the weight of loss, and because it is so detailed – as it extends for almost 30 pages in an otherwise slim novel it carries a poignant message: grief at once speeds and stops time in its track, and the only way forward is through. But in Kashmir, it takes a more crippling form, allied with astounding loneliness and isolation. The bonds of community – previously strong – are snapped as neighbours turn against each other in a state of abject fear. For the funeral, the Pandits do not even have enough people to lift the bier. “Four men were required to lift the bier, but only three were available. This was what we had been reduced to. We could not even properly lend a shoulder to our dead.”

This Our Paradise rings with the loss, longing and defeat of exile. It is also about the act of witnessing and enduring this dislocation. As the Pandit family listens to news of deaths and attacks on the radio, the reality of the threat remains a rumour until it invades their own personal space. The eleven-year-old narrator notes: “The literature of violence had to be lived to be felt.” Similarly, in the parallel narrative, Shahid runs away from his home and later confronts his own ambiguity and vaulted guilt at killing innocent civilians, as well as his own dislocation in life. Shahid’s mother joins the ranks of countless Kashmiri women, whose lives are exhausted in an eternal “baptism of waiting.” Mujoo writes:

“Not only in Zogam, but in Srinagar, Anantnag, Shopian, Sopore, Bandipore, Baramulla, Pulwama, Handwara. Hundreds of mothers sat glued to their windows, hoping for a sight of their lost sons. But most of these boys would never see home again. They were fated to disappear like phantoms in the misty hillsides; to perish in cold, unmarked graves; to join the battalions of the forever lost. And their mothers would continue to wait by the windows until the windows themselves grew weary.”

In India, everyone has an opinion on the freedom of Kashmir, most would robustly and even angrily argue that they have the rightful claim to include it in the mainland. Some “political analysts” even suggest “Israel-like solutions” in the Valley. But the more one reads about the fraught history of what we ignorantly call a paradise, one realises how unfortunate the Kashmiris have been: either abandoned in exile from their homes or left to bear relentless violence of militancy. The cost of freedom in Kashmir has been formidable. Mujoo’s brave novel is an earnest accounting of this cost, or at least a part of it. A single book can hardly ever manoeuvre this disorienting task, but each honest attempt brings us closer to our own ignorance, and perhaps in effect, it’s the opposite.

Kartik Chauhan can be reached on Instagram and X.

This Our Paradise, Karan Mujoo, Penguin India.