Scattered Souls by Shahnaz Bashir

It was the 1990s. The army descended upon Kashmir to quell a massive armed
rebellion against Indian rule. They entered not just the land, but also the lives
of its people, fracturing their idea of home and punctuating their days and
nights with curfews.
This extraordinary collection brings together the stories of some of those
people probing the quandaries of their precarious existence. There is that
ex-militant whose past continues to stalk his present; the wife who begins to
dress like her husband after losing him to a crossfire. There is the boy who
obsessively follows President Obama's India visit, hoping to hear him mention
the 'K' word; and the man whose transistor triggers paranoia in his
neighbourhood.
Unassuming yet hard-hitting, Scattered Souls journeys through a destroyed
Kashmir swaddled in the memories of its fragile beauty.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

Shahnaz Bashir was born and brought up in Kashmir. His widely reviewed and critically lauded debut novel The Half Mother won the Muse India Young Writer Award 2015. In its New Year special issue of January 2016, Kashmir Life, a popular weekly tabloid of Jammu and Kashmir, profiled Shahnaz as 'one of the nine impact makers to stand out in the 12.5 million population of the state'.