Published: November 11, 2019 2:24:38 pm
You can’t go home again
A debut novel set in Kashmir about big ideas — identity, belonging and the perils of good intentions.
The first and last chapters of The Far Field begin with the same sentence. “I am 30 years old and that is nothing,” the novel’s narrator Shalini says. At the outset, it is an admission of a lack of wisdom, a form of naivete. “This country has changed every instant I’ve been alive…and I have been touched by none of it,” she adds. By the end of the sprawling novel, keenly tuned to the events that she has both been witness to, and perpetrator of, the disclaimer takes on an elegiac note, imbued with a bone-deep weariness. In the 400 pages between these twin statements, uncoils a mirrored story – of a childhood in the shadow of a mercurial parent, and of a landmarked by a violent past and present, and an uncertain future.
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