The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed

Posted on: May 03, 2012

The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed

Previously published in the Herald magazine. 

The Collaborator is a startlingly self assured debut by Kashmir born journalist Mirza Waheed. It is the bleak, lonely and wonderfully lyrical story of a young man growing up in a little village close to the infamous Line of Control. Amidst the turbulence of Kashmir in the 90s, the nameless narrator and his friends have somehow retained a sense of innocence – or so it seems at the start. They spend their days playing cricket, swimming in the crystal clear river and singing songs by Rafi and Lata – idyllic, simple days untainted by the violence and bloodshed that surrounds their valley.

 

Slowly however, the young men all vanish with no explanation, presumably to join the rebel movement. The narrator is left behind, alone and uncertain why his friends would leave him with no warning. There is a sudden downward spiral, an unraveling of the life the village thought was theirs – everyone but the narrator’s family leaves, hoping that by returning to their ancient nomadic ways they may avoid further humiliation at the hands of the Indian Army - and possible death. There is a loss of values, a loss of brotherhood and of course of home and hearth, with the narrator being the ‘abandoned one, the left-out one, the one who must tell the story. […] He’s the only one now.’ 

 

The army has a station nearby and the narrator is hired by the man in charge, Captain Kadian, for a job of pure horror – he is to count and identify the bodies of the men killed by the Indian army in the surrounding areas, forever fearful that he may find his friends’ bodies one day. Of course, even though he does not ever see his friends again, all the bodies he does search are as young and as innocent as they were. It is in the scenes of the narrator’s trips to the valley where bodies are dumped, that the power in Waheed’s language becomes really clear. He is incredibly poetic when dealing with the absolute abject horror of the bodies that lie in the valley; tumbled together with no sense of ceremony and no burial possible. ‘Bodies after bodies – some huddled together, others forlorn and lonesome – in various stages of decay. Wretched human remains lie on the green grass like cracked toys. Teeth, shoes.’ They are a signal to the Pakistani check post, says Kadian, a semaphore to show them what happens to the young men they have sent to fight for freedom.

 

The Collaborator may remind some readers of war poets who wrote of the death of youth, the war against nature, against humanity; the loss not just of life but of innocence for those who remained. More than just an anthem for doomed youth, this is the love song of a man whose home and heart have been ripped away from him. But Waheed says that the novel is not autobiographical. ‘It does,’ he states, ‘draw on my experience as someone who grew up in Kashmir during the peak years of the armed separatist movement. Some themes that are close to me have found their way into the story. Also, I have fictionalised some real events from the early 90s. The premise of the novel and all the main characters are completely invented.’ And yet, while the subject matter is depressing, Waheed’s prose is also lilting and elegiac in its descriptions of friendships and family, even if all in narrator’s past.

 

Even the most apolitical of readers can not failed to be moved by The Collaborator – not simply becautheTre narrative forces them to face such atrocities, but because even when read only as fiction, the story is so very eloquently presented. Waheed says, ‘the notion of this novel was so compelling - for that it had to be written. I couldn’t not write it’. And it will be difficult to find a reader not as compelled, not moved, not devastated by his strong, true voice.