For Now, It Is Night

Hari Krishna Kaul’s short stories, shaped by the social crisis and political instability in Kashmir, explore – with a sharp eye for detail, biting wit, and empathy – themes of isolation, alienation, corruption, and the social mores of a community that experienced a loss of homeland, culture, and language. His characters navigate their ever-changing environs with humor as they make uncomfortable compromises to survive. Two friends cling to their multiplication tables while the world shifts around them; a group of travelers are forced to seek shelter in a rickety hostel after a landslide; a woman faces the first days in an uneasy exile at her daughter-in-law’s Delhi home. 

Kaul dissects the ways we struggle to make sense of new surroundings. These glimpses of life are bittersweet and profound; Kaul’s characters carry their loneliness with wisdom and grace. 

Beautifully translated in a unique collaborative project, For Now, It Is Night brings many of Kaul’s resonant stories to English readers for the first time.

These meditative, minutely-observed stories bring back to life a Kashmiri culture that is tragically fading into the past. Kaul’s observations of everyday life in the valley have a particular poignancy in light of his own displacement in 1990. The personal struggles of his characters take place against a backdrop of political turmoil, and For Now, It Is Night will bring English-speaking readers a new understanding of Kashmir, beyond the headlines.— Hari Kunzru, author of Red Pill and White Tears