‘I Would Have Written On Kashmir Even If There Were 40 Other Novels On The Subject’

Mirza Waheed was born and brought up in Kashmir before he moved to London in 2001 to work for the BBC Urdu Service. His debut novel The Collaborator, a gripping account of Kashmir in the 1990s, was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award. And now Waheed has written another novel, The Book of Gold Leaves, which is again set in Kashmir and tells the story of a fraught Shia-Sunni romance in the backdrop of the ongoing political conflict. 
In a conversation with Riyaz Wani, Waheed talks about how his memories of life in the Valley have influenced him as a storyteller: Tehelka

Edited Excerpts from an interview •

Like your debut novel, your second novel The Book of Gold Leaves is also set in Kashmir even though you have not lived here for many years now.
The Collaborator was literally, physically and figuratively set on the border, where there is a line of fracture, political, geographic and historic — a ridiculous faultline that cuts through our land and divides our people. That is also where the rebellion against the Indian government started in the 1990s and there were many killings. So I set my first novel there.

However, the story of the second novel was in my mind even before I wrote The Collaborator. But The Collaborator was more urgent and there came a point when I just had to write it.