SIDDHARTHA GIGOO‘s The Garden of Solitude [Flipkart / Amazon] is the first novel in English by a Kashmiri, on Kashmir. As it starts arriving in bookstores, I am grateful to him for sharing an extract.

‘Life teaches us that there is beauty in ugliness,’ Sridar said.

Then Pamposh said something that Sridar was not prepared for.

‘Every day I lead the life of a centipede. I crawl. I lick. I hide. I sting. I wake up to the fumes of kerosene in the morning and the sting of speeding ants, feeding ravenously on the sugar spilled on the floor of the tent. It feels as if I have never had a morsel of rice for ages. I wake up hungry and go to bed hungry. I lead the life of a centipede, I crawl. All around the camp, there is stench of human excrement and waste. People wake up in the morning, hungry and muddled.

Continue reading ‘Snakebite or sunstroke?’: An extract from Siddhartha Gigoo’s novel, ‘The Garden of Solitude’ →