The wistful narrator of Madhuri Vijay's remarkably vivid debut, The Far Field, is Shalini, a young woman from an educated, industrious family living in South India. Growing up as an only child, Shalini's relationship with her mercurial mother was all-consuming, with the two spending much of their days together. This intensely private mother-daughter connection is shattered when a handsome, charming traveling salesman from Kashmir, Bashir Ahmed, disrupts their insular lives.
Now entering her 30s, the daughter recounts her mother's life-changing friendship with Bashir Ahmed and Shalini's subsequent journey to Kashmir to track him down after her mother's death. She travels from her father's house in the modern city of Bangalore to the rough and mountainous north. In Bashir Ahmed's village, our narrator becomes caught in a deadly power struggle between villagers and the occupying army. Her devastating story reveals itself in the form of a confessional, an admission of guilt by omission over her role in the Indian military's capture of Bashir Ahmed's innocent son, Riyaz.
Vijay's descriptive powers and eloquent prose work brilliantly in awakening the reader to the majestic beauty of Kashmir and the severe hardships of villagers who make their home in its verdant landscape. Vijay's writing is socially astute, exploring taboos of mental illness, female sexuality and religious indifference. It is also politically relevant, a reminder that beautiful but war-torn Kashmir is still a disputed territory, fought over for decades by India and Pakistan. --Shahina Piyarali, writer and reviewer