The World With Its Mouth Open by Zahid Rafiq is a deeply moving and powerful collection of short stories that brings the emotional and everyday lives of Kashmiri people to light. Released on 5 February 2025, the book paints a rich and honest picture of what it means to live in a place shaped by constant conflict. Through eleven thought-provoking stories, The World With Its Mouth Open explores pain, longing, beauty, and the quiet strength of ordinary people managing life in Kashmir.
Each story in The World With Its Mouth Open blends personal emotions with political realities. From a woman dealing with grief and a young boy dreaming of escape, to two wandering dogs and a journalist in search of meaning, Zahid Rafiq uses simple yet powerful language to show how people survive loss, injustice, and trauma. At the same time, he highlights the resilience, humour, and hope that still exist despite difficult circumstances.
With its clear prose and deep emotional impact, The World With Its Mouth Open is not just about Kashmir, it speaks to anyone who understands struggle, memory, and the desire to keep moving forward. Zahid Rafiq’s writing offers a fresh and honest voice, and this book stands out as a must-read for those who want to feel the truth of human experience through fiction.
In The World With Its Mouth Open, Zahid Rafiq’s storytelling shines through its attention to detail and symbolic depth. His characters are layered and real, shaped by their environment but never reduced to it. Each story reflects not only the physical struggles of life in a militarised region but also the internal conflicts of love, memory, identity, and silence. The book’s strength lies in how it captures both the quiet, personal moments and the larger truths about injustice and survival. By combining realism with poetic imagery, The World With Its Mouth Open creates a space where beauty and pain exist side by side, offering readers a rare literary experience that stays with them long after the final page.
Read Also: Nagrota Under Siege by Bhaavna Arora | True Army Story
Availability & Book Details
The World With Its Mouth Open by Zahid Rafiq, published by Penguin Hamish Hamilton on 5 February 2025, is available in multiple formats. The hardcover edition (192 pages) is priced at ₹347 on Amazon India, making it an affordable and widely accessible option. The paperback version is available at around ₹499 on Indian bookstores such as Champaca and Odyssey. For digital readers, the Kindle edition is listed on Goodreads and Amazon at approximately $9.99 (about ₹830), offering a convenient alternative for those who prefer eBooks.
You can purchase this book from Amazon India, Champaca, Odyssey Bookstore, and various international platforms like Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. Among all formats, the Kindle version is a smart choice for readers who value portability and instant access. Features like adjustable fonts, dark mode, and in-book search and highlights enhance the overall reading experience, making the Kindle edition not just practical but also reader-friendly.
Read Also: I Am a Soldier’s Wife by Geetika Lidder
Key Themes in The World With Its Mouth Open
Zahid Rafiq’s debut short story collection offers a heartfelt and powerful look into everyday life in conflict-torn Kashmir. The World With Its Mouth Open captures quiet struggles, deep emotions, and the unbreakable human spirit with honesty and grace.
- Everyday Life in the Shadow of Conflict: At the heart of The World With Its Mouth Open, Zahid Rafiq focuses on the everyday lives of ordinary Kashmiris, showing how conflict quietly shapes their reality. Rather than placing violence at the centre, the book shifts the focus to subtle, deeply personal moments where conversations, memories, routines, and encounters that hold emotional weight. These are not stories of soldiers and politics but of shopkeepers, mothers, workers, and children. Through their eyes, the bookcaptures the silent impact of conflict, revealing how it seeps into every corner of daily life, even the most routine ones.
- Themes of Absence, Longing, and Memory: One of the strongest threads running through The World With Its Mouth Open is the sense of absence of people, places, and peace. Characters are often caught between what was and what is, longing for a life that once felt normal. A woman waiting to give birth recalls lost friendships. A shopkeeper grows obsessed with the sad expression of a mannequin. These symbols of emptiness, paired with gentle recollections of the past, form an emotional core in the book. Rafiq uses memory not just to reflect loss, but to highlight the strength of longing and the human need to remember.
- Emotional Complexity and Inner Conflict: The characters in The World With Its Mouth Open are layered and emotionally complex. They are not heroes or victims but they are real people coping with pain in their own ways. Rafiq brings a deep emotional honesty to his stories, showing the quiet battles of individuals capturing grief, uncertainty, and fear. Whether it is a man devastated by a mistaken obituary or a boy traumatized by the death of his brother, the stories show how people respond to personal loss amidst a troubled land. Itgives space to these inner conflicts, treating them with compassion and nuance.
- Humour, Hope, and Human Connection: Despite its dark backdrop, The World With Its Mouth Open is not without moments of hope. Zahid Rafiq blends dry humour and warmth into his storytelling, showing that even in chaos, people find ways to connect. Small gestures of an old friend reappearing, a moment of shared laughter, the comfort of familiar places that offer emotional relief. These flashes of light do not erase the pain but show that humanity persists. Inthe book, humour and hope work together as quiet forms of resistance against despair.
- A Deeply Rooted Sense of Place: Kashmir is not just a setting in The World With Its Mouth Open, it is alive on every page. The detailed descriptions of narrow alleys, market smells, creaking rooftops, and misty mornings give the stories a grounded realism. Rafiq’s Kashmir is full of contrast: it is both beautiful and broken, tender and tense. Through sensory writing and symbolic spaces like bridges, crows, small boxes are the collection which paints a vivid picture of a land that is as fragile as the people living in it. This deep connection to place gives a voice that is both local and universal.
- The Politics of Silence and Survival: In The World With Its Mouth Open, silence becomes a powerful form of expression. Many of the characters cannot change their circumstances, but their inner lives reveal a quiet strength. By focusing on the small struggles like finding work, returning home, hiding grief which Rafiq shows how survival itself becomes a political act. The book critiques systems of control without turning its characters into symbols. Instead, they are individuals who keep going despite the odds. This approach adds richness to the book making it not just a commentary on Kashmir, but on the endurance of human dignity.
- Breaking Stereotypes Through Honest Storytelling: Too often, Kashmir is portrayed only through the lens of violence. But The World With Its Mouth Open breaks that pattern. It refuses to reduce people to headlines or statistics. Instead, Zahid Rafiq writes about Kashmiris as complex human beings with dreams, fears, flaws, and desires. His characters are more than victims and they are survivors, artists, dreamers, and mourners. In doing so, the bookchallenges simplified narratives and offers a fuller, truer picture of life in a conflict zone.
- A Literary Debut That Resonates Beyond Borders: Zahid Rafiq’s powerful debut, The World With Its Mouth Open, speaks not just to Kashmir but to anyone who has lived with grief, silence, and resistance. Its themes of identity, survival, and human connection resonate far beyond geography. The collection stands out for its lyrical prose, emotional depth, and refusal to turn pain into spectacle. Through each story, the bookbecomes a quiet but urgent call to listen, feel, and see the lives behind the headlines.
A Glimpse Into the Stories of The World With Its Mouth Open
Read Also: Nimbu Saab-Story of a Barefoot Naga Kargil Hero
Each of the eleven stories in The World With Its Mouth Open offers a slice of life from Kashmir is quiet, unsettling moments that reflect emotional weight more than dramatic twists. Below are brief, spoiler-free glimpses into each story:
- The Bridge: A pregnant woman meets the brother of an old friend, but he mysteriously vanishes before she can reconnect.
- Crows: A young boy fails a test and anxiously anticipates the reactions of his strict teacher and fearful parents.
- In Small Boxes: A journalist repeatedly visits an elderly shopkeeper who owns an antique store, until the man’s sudden death leaves a void.
- Bare Feet: In a city under military watch, a man believes he sees a ghost and decides to meet the ghost’s grieving family.
- Beauty: Teenage boys secretly watch a neighbour girl they admire, blurring the line between innocent affection and obsession.
- Flowers From a Dog: A man returns to the grave of his former partner, confronting the sorrow of love and memories left behind.
- The House: While digging to expand his home, a man unearths a human hand and must quietly deal with the disturbing find.
- Dogs: Street dogs wander through the city, sharing their thoughts about survival and the unpredictability of human life.
- The Man with the Suitcase: A man struggles to find a job after losing his brother during a protest, wandering the city in search of hope.
- The Mannequin: A shopkeeper becomes disturbed by the haunting expression on a new mannequin meant to draw customers in.
- Frog in the Mouth: An overly talkative man rambles nonstop in a restaurant, revealing the absurdity in ordinary conversation.
Critical Acclaim for The World With Its Mouth Open
“Extraordinary…. A revelation…. he crafts narratives that transcend borders, delving into intimate and profound questions of survival, love, and connection.”—Flaunt Magazine
“Eleven stories bring forth eleven lives, changed by an encounter—with a stranger, personal grief, financial circumstances or the conflict that stains the quotidian conditions in Kashmir.” —Electric Lit
“Quietly shattering stories, full of poignant everyday glimpses of life in our broken and bruised city. These tales are surreal and darkly comic. One of the best books of the year.” —Inverse Journal
“This absorbing début story collection is composed of quiet snapshots of life in Kashmir. … characters are haunted by failures both personal and of their country, resulting in everyday heartbreak that is no less acute for being prosaic.” —The New Yorker
“A striking portrait of the resiliency of humanity and the communities it can build.” —Chicago Review of Books, A Best Book of December 2024
“Piercing. . . . his powerful storytelling and brief moments of reprieve demonstrate the haunting complexity and delicate nuance of an investigative writer struggling to comprehend the interconnectedness of humanity.”—West Trade Review
“Zahid draws, with an elegant humour, the contours of a world on the verge of breaking apart. . . . an account of the human possibilities of continuity and discontinuity amidst the ravages of death, mourning, unemployment, and unrequited love.” —Inverse Journal
“Stunning. . . . In understated but lyrical prose, these stories reveal moments of beauty—a box decorated with poppies, the yellow silk lining of a ruined suitcase—amid overpowering loss. Recommend to fans of Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie.” —Booklist, Starred Review
“Rafiq writes crisply and tenderly, with occasional flashes of humor and exquisite attention to the trials of day-to-day life.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Through the haunting themes of violence, loss, displacement, and longing, Zahid Rafiq is also able to capture the profoundness of ordinary life, and this collection urges us toward beauty, laughter, and refuge in the face of darkness.” —Electric Lit, A Best Short Story Collection of the Year
“Violence runs riverlike beneath Zahid Rafiq’s gorgeously restrained sentences: these are visionary tales shot through with longing and grief. Rafiq writes with gentle humor and profound grace, showing such compassion for the ways we are, all of us, so shabbily and persistently human. An utterly exquisite debut.” —Emily Fridlund, History of Wolves
Read Also: Inside The Terrifying World of Jaish-E-Mohammed
Why You Should Read and Buy The World With Its Mouth Open
If you are looking for a book that quietly reflects human emotions and everyday life without the noise of politics or conflict, The World With Its Mouth Open is worth exploring. Instead of focusing on terrorism, violence, or religious tensions which are often the usual themes in books set in Kashmir instead this debut collection by Zahid Rafiq takes a different path. It brings to light the small, personal stories of ordinary people trying to live their lives in peace, despite being surrounded by long-standing unrest.
These eleven short stories do not rely on drama or action. They take you into the inner worlds of characters dealing with common struggles like loss, loneliness, uncertainty, and quiet hope. The author, who belongs to Srinagar, offers a unique perspective on Kashmiri life, one that is not dominated by conflict but shaped by routine, relationships, and resilience.
While the stories are not deeply rooted in the physical landscape of Kashmir, they still manage to capture the emotional weight of people living in a place that has often misunderstood. If you enjoy slice-of-life narratives that focus more on characters than on plot, this collection might speak to you.
The characters feel real and relatable, and two stories in particular “Flowers From a Dog” and “The Mannequin” stand out for their emotional depth and thoughtful storytelling. These stories show how people find meaning and moments of connection even in difficult times.
You should read The World With Its Mouth Open not for a political overview of Kashmir, but to understand the quiet strength of human beings who carry on despite the silence, the sorrow, and the uncertainty. This is a book for readers who appreciate emotional storytelling and the subtle beauty of ordinary life.
Final Thoughts
The World With Its Mouth Open is not a typical book about Kashmir. Instead of focusing on conflict, it gives space to ordinary people and their everyday struggles. While the setting of Kashmir may not feel fully present in every story, the emotions of the characters are honest and relatable. Zahid Rafiq’s writing focuses more on moments than complete plots, which may not appeal to everyone. But for those who enjoy slice-of-life storytelling and character-driven fiction, this collection offers quiet but powerful insights into how people survive, connect, and carry on. It is a thoughtful debut that shows how even the smallest experiences can reveal deep truths about life.
Read Also: Terror Financing in Kashmir – Book Review
