The plot of the novel emerges from several moments in Shalini’s life: her childhood with her parents, as a teenager when she sees Bashir Ahmed last, the time when her mother passes away, the time she starts on her journey to find Bashir Ahmed, and the moment that is now. The picaresque narrative involves talking about a lot of things she has kept secret: Shalini’s tormented relationship with her mother, a woman called strong but not as a compliment, and her (the mother’s) relationship with Bashir. The first and the last chapters of the novel start with: “I am thirty years old and that is nothing.” The chapters in-between are the account of Shalini’s journey to Kashmir in search of Bashir Ahmed, a Kashmiri salesman, who used to visit her home when she was a child, but who disappeared from his home in the mountains six years ago. The Far Field is a confession by Shalini, a 30-something living in Bangalore. Madhuri Vijay’s debut novel is a “fictional” attempt to know Kashmir from both extremes-the latter more than the former-through the lense of a woman visiting here for the first time. There is another Kashmir the world knows through the newspapers, that of militants, a place embroiled in the Indo-Pak border conflict. There is a Kashmir that tourists know about: the one with houseboats, carpets, the one called the Paradise on Earth.
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