![]() ![]() The picaresque narrative involves talking about a lot of things she has kept secret: Shalini’s tormented relationship with her mother, a woman called strong but not as a compliment, and her (the mother’s) relationship with Bashir. The first and the last chapters of the novel start with: “I am thirty years old and that is nothing.” The chapters in-between are the account of Shalini’s journey to Kashmir in search of Bashir Ahmed, a Kashmiri salesman, who used to visit her home when she was a child, but who disappeared from his home in the mountains six years ago. The Far Field is a confession by Shalini, a 30-something living in Bangalore. Madhuri Vijay’s debut novel is a “fictional” attempt to know Kashmir from both extremes-the latter more than the former-through the lense of a woman visiting here for the first time. There is another Kashmir the world knows through the newspapers, that of militants, a place embroiled in the Indo-Pak border conflict. ![]() ![]() There is a Kashmir that tourists know about: the one with houseboats, carpets, the one called the Paradise on Earth. ![]()
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