Last year, the journalist Basharat Peer published a highly accomplished memoir about growing up in

Kashmir during a conflict that in the past 20 years has claimed 70,000 lives. Curfewed
Night described how a population, brutalised by the Indian Army, were tempted into fighting for
militants sponsored by Pakistan. Peer’s own cousin, he relates, disappeared to become a militant.

Mirza Waheed’s debut novel, The Collaborator, covers the same ground but carries with it the
opportunities and dangers of fictionalising real events.
The novel’s unnamed narrator is a young man who lives close to the Line of Control that separates
Indian Kashmir from Pakistani Kashmir. Unlike many of his friends, he has not slipped across the
border to become a fighter for Aazadi (freedom). “I haven’t seen what the other side looks like,” he
says with a touch of envy “or how an AK-47 feels in your hands when it rattles off 600 bullets a
minute.”
Instead he ends up working for the Indian Army. His job is to count the number of dead fighters on
the mountains – militants killed in what are euphemistically called “encounters” with the army.
Waheed’s novel comes alive during the conversations between his collaborating narrator and his
boss, the drunken, swearing Captain Kadian who, when he is not boasting about old missions, is
lashing out at the stupidity of Pakistanis. The boy is attracted by Kadian’s power (in contrast to his
own impotent father) and his confessions during which there are glimpses of regret.
Kadian, meanwhile, is only too pleased to have someone to listen to his stories, something the
narrator senses: “Sometimes I think I am here just to give this lonely man company.”
Their conversations also serve to fill in some background. While it is understandable that Waheed
feels he has to educate his readers, the flow of the story is disturbed by these interruptions. Similarly
the horrific descriptions of starving mothers begging for food or a militant being tortured are not fully
integrated into the narrative and so seem gratuitous.
Waheed is a Kashmiri journalist who has covered the conflict for the BBC. I suspect he has written a
novel in order to channel the rage he must necessarily exclude from his reporting. But a cooler
approach might have prevented the novel being consumed by its own violent subject matter.
The Collaborator
by Mirza Waheed
308pp, Penguin, £12.99
Buy now for £11. 99 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) from Telegraph Books