About the Book

Kashmir, ancient abode of knowledge and scholarship has a five thousand year old history. This charming landscape has unfortunately been distorted by continuing violence. The book is set in the turbulent nineties of the last century when the situation erupted for the first time. A plethora of characters drawn from its long history weave tapestry of events, the warriors of yesteryears don the robes of renunciation and hermits of bygone days are seen on the battlefield. The intended chaos represents the ground situation to a great extent. A political satire cloaked in fiction, the book dissects the inertia and indifference to human misery and tragedy.

The characters emerge from across eons and cultures. The fundamental legends get reinterpreted to make sense to modern sensibility. The narrative is racy and presents a good measure of fantasy in the form of fairies, demons, magical concoctions, charms etc. The stories of powerful men and women are interwoven with lives of ordinary folk to finally converge at a point and usher in a new dawn of hope and tranquility for the beautiful valley.

About the Author

Multilingual poet, scholar, translator, researcher, columnist, Ayaz Rasool Nazki is a man of all seasons with diverse interests in painting, photography, calligraphy, cultural history and manuscript studies, Ayaz has been able to carve his own distinctive niche in the literary world, voicing a sensibility that is at once postmodern and traditional, without belonging exclusively to one or the other.  His dominant passion has been creatively engaging with the questions of identity, memory and aspirations in South Asia’s most sensitive and turbulent zone—Kashmir.

A member of an outstanding family of writers, poets and scholars, Ayaz outgrew the teaching of sciences and never looked back. A recognized poet in Urdu and Kashmiri with many

publications, he broke into English with a very impressive translation of his outstanding father Mir Ghulam Rasool Nazki’s Sufi quatrains. His own collection of English poems ‘Songs of Light’ was recently published to critical acclaim.