THE WORLD WITH ITS MOUTH OPEN

Rafiq’s quiet, empathetic debut story collection focuses on the everyday challenges of living in Kashmir.

These 11 stories center on ordinary lives, ordinary people, and in one case, ordinary dogs—but the lives, and the stories, are haunted by violence at their edges. In “The Man With the Suitcase,” a young man whose brother was killed in a protest and who supports his grieving parents financially has lost his job in a luggage shop. He hasn’t told them; instead, looking for refuge, relief, or hope, he spends his days chasing a job, and an oft-glimpsed man hauling a familiar suitcase, through the streets. In “The House,” a wealthy couple is having a fancy new house built, and when a workman unearths part of a skeleton, they have to figure out how they’re going to make the inconvenient bones go away without attracting unwanted attention or spooking the crew, their children, or themselves. In “The Mannequin,” the struggling owner of a clothing shop receives a mannequin that wears, at least to his eyes, an expression of unspeakable sadness and misery. On the way to return it to the creditor who gave it to him, he has a disturbing encounter with two boys, and in the end the mannequin is partially dismembered, one boy’s cheek is stinging from a slap, and the shopkeeper feels even more desolate than before. We encounter another shopkeeper living a life of quiet desperation in “In Small Boxes.” This man falls apart at the seams after a local newspaper is tricked into running his obituary, prematurely. Rafiq writes crisply and tenderly, with occasional flashes of humor and exquisite attention to the trials of day-to-day life.

Tender, subtle, sad—many of these stories read like elegies for the living.