BOOK REVIEW
Author: Kamal Hak
Publisher: Jeoffry and Bell
Printers & Publishers, Delhi
ISBN: 978-93-5779-623-1
Extent: 219 Pages
Year of Publication: 2026
" Silence
Between Snowflakes: The Exile Stories" by Kamal Hak is not a
book that asks to be admired for its polish alone. Its force lies elsewhere: in
witness, memory, indignation, tenderness, and the stubborn refusal to let a
displaced world be tidied away into statistics. Hak writes as a Kashmiri Pandit
in exile, but he does not write merely to record grievance. He writes to
preserve a civilisation of gestures: the old neighbourhoods of Rainawari, the
intimacy of temples and ghats, the rhythms of Herath, the informal republic of
shop ledges, boat rides, family teasing, marriage anxieties, food, mourning,
pride and humiliation. The result is a moving and often uncomfortable
collection, one that gives the reader not a neat historical account but the
emotional weather of exile.
‘Silence Between Snowflakes: The Exile Stories’ is not merely a collection of memoiristic
sketches; it is an archive of grief, memory and cultural survival. In this
deeply affecting volume, Kamal Hak transforms personal recollection into
collective testimony, chronicling the emotional, social and spiritual
consequences of the displacement of Kashmiri Pandits. The author himself states
in the prologue that these are not fictional stories but lived experiences
representing the post-exilic sentiments of an entire community.
Comprising approximately fifty
stories, anecdotes, reflective essays, and personal memoirs, this collection
repeatedly evokes the distinctive milieu of Rainawari, which emerges as a
recurring and unifying presence in this collection. Readers who have lived in
Rainawari will readily recognise many of the personalities, institutions,
landmarks, and social spaces recalled by Hak. References to the Mandali at Bod
Mandir, Chuni Wattul, Shomba Kalpush, Nika Halwoi(affectionately remembered as
Lalla), and Teja Watal's cloth shop vividly resurrect the social fabric of a
bygone Rainawari. The narrative is further enriched by allusions to a host of
familiar figures, items, shops and
places, including the demba nav (a simple, rudimentary boat), Ahad Teilwani,
Vishwa Bharati, Bum Chooek, Kraalyar, Qadir Ganai, the local butcher, Chaman
Lal Pandith, Nera Kak, Jagar Nath Akhoon, Rahman Kral, the potter, Moma
Subziwoal, Mahi Kak's newspaper shop, Dr Prem Nath Waffa's medical store,
Warris Khanun Chah, Hari Parbat, and the celebrated folk singer Gopi Nath Bhat,
popularly known as Gupa Baccha. Collectively, these references serve not merely
as nostalgic reminiscences but as valuable cultural markers that reconstruct
the social and cultural landscape of old Rainawari, thereby enabling former
residents and other readers alike to reconnect with a shared historical memory
and sense of place.
The strongest quality of the
book is its concreteness. Hak understands that memory becomes powerful when it
is anchored in particulars. A house is not simply property; it is a room
arrangement, a lane, a crowd of cousins, a kitchen left stocked in the hope of
return. A temple is not merely a religious structure; it is the remembered
image of a Shambu that once offered strength, later replaced by desecration and
emptiness. Exile, in these pages, is not just departure from Kashmir. It is the
loss of social texture. It is the inability to be cremated where one’s
ancestors were cremated. It is the strange embarrassment of accepting ration
packets when one’s family once gave freely. It is having a house in Delhi or
Noida and still knowing, with painful clarity, that it may never become home.
Hak’s prose is at its best
when he allows such details to breathe. In pieces such as ‘The House that could
never become a Home’, ‘The Exile’, ‘My Shambu Has Disappeared’, ‘Opportunity of
Heaven Lost in Exile’ and ‘Longing for Reunion’, he reaches a register of
genuine pathos. These are not abstract laments. They are scenes of ordinary
people caught in an extraordinary rupture. His grandmother’s longing to return,
his own inability to reconcile comfort with belonging, and the recurring image
of a homeland preserved in the mind but damaged in reality give the book its
emotional centre. Here, the author deserves real credit. He knows that
displacement is not finished when physical safety is achieved. It continues in
language, ritual, memory, family formation, political invisibility and the
private shame of needing help.
At the same time, the book
is not only about injury inflicted from outside. One of its more interesting
dimensions is Hak’s critique of his own community. He worries about cultural
thinning, social complacency, performative leadership, dowry practices,
out-of-community marriages driven not only by choice but by economic and ritual
pressures, and the way exile can turn solidarity into fragmentation. Pieces
such as ‘The finger points at me’, ‘An apology to Turmoil’s Children’, ‘Wanted
a Suitable Boy’, ‘Do Kashmiri Pandits Give Dowry?, ‘Is it all about Rainawari?’
and ‘Celebration of Destruction’ are effective because they complicate the
book’s moral field. Hak is not merely accusing the world; he is also asking
what the displaced have done, or failed to do, with their pain. That gives the
collection a seriousness beyond complaint. It also prevents the reader from
reducing the book to a single political emotion; its canvas includes ethics,
inheritance, habit, loss and self-reproach.
The account of the vandalisation of the Shiva temple at Rainawari is
rendered with remarkable restraint, a narrative strategy that makes the episode
all the more poignant. Hak avoids rhetorical excess, recording the desecration
with quiet anguish. The tragedy lies not merely in the destruction of a sacred
edifice but in the profound spiritual dislocation it engenders. The
disappearance of ‘Shambhu’, the
temple's Shiva Linga, signifies the loss of an inner sanctuary that had
sustained the author through exile. The temple's vandalisation thus becomes
emblematic of a wider cultural rupture; an erosion of memory, continuity, and
sacred geography, leaving behind an enduring sense of bereavement and
existential loss.
Another notable strength is the author’s words
for speech. Kashmiri, Hindi and English expressions enter the narrative without
apology, and this multilingual texture gives the book credibility. The reader
feels that these stories have not been translated out of their cultural
climate. They retain the heat of argument, the awkwardness of family
conversation, the sudden intimacy of strangers, and the sharpness of public
humiliation. For readers outside the community, some references may demand
patience, but that is a reasonable demand. Hak is not writing a museum label
for outsiders; he is writing from within a wounded inheritance.
The structure of the book is
deliberately non-chronological, and this suits the subject. Exile rarely
arrives in a straight line. Memory loops, interrupts, returns, contradict
themselves, and then return again with greater force. The book moves between the
1970s, 1990s, later visits to Kashmir, political episodes, social gatherings,
religious ceremonies and domestic conversations. At times, this creates a
cumulative rhythm, like someone opening many old trunks in a single room. The
same names, places and anxieties recur, but each return adds a different
pressure. Rainawari becomes
geography, community, symbol and accusation all at once.
Silence
Between Snowflakes often feels less like a curated literary
object and more like a living archive: raw, insistent, crowded, grieving,
funny, irritated, devotional and defiant. Hak’s humour is one of the underrated
strengths of the book. His accounts of Kashmiri food, onions, Mooli, social
habits and community gatherings prevent the collection from becoming
monochrome. The laughter is not decorative. It shows what exile threatened to
erase: not merely land or property, but personality, wit, appetite,
neighbourhood absurdity and the daily theatre of a people.
The title is well chosen.
The silence in the book is not peaceful. It is the silence after abandonment,
after disbelief, after failed promises, after unanswered questions. But
snowflakes also suggest fragility and uniqueness. Each story is a small unit of
remembered life, easily lost unless held carefully. Hak’s achievement is that
he holds many such fragments long enough for the reader to feel their weight. He
turns private recollection into communal testimony without entirely flattening
the individuality of the people he recalls.
A notable feature is the
author’s extraordinary clarity of observation. Social details are rendered with
ethnographic precision: neighbourhood characters, temple rituals, culinary
practices, linguistic nuances and communal interactions are described vividly.
Consequently, the book serves not only as a memoir but also as a valuable
cultural document preserving aspects of Kashmiri Pandit life that risk
disappearance. Silence Between
Snowflakes is therefore a worthy and necessary book. It may not always moderate its intensity for the
reader’s comfort. But it is honest, humane, historically alert and emotionally
exacting. Kamal Hak deserves praise not because he has produced a flawless
work, but because he has done something more consequential: he has recorded the
inner life of exile before silence can swallow it. He gives his community’s
grief names, rooms, roads, rituals, arguments and voices. In doing so, he
reminds us that exile is not only the story of leaving a place. It is the
longer, harder story of carrying that place inside oneself, even when return
has become uncertain. Silence Between Snowflakes belongs to
the growing corpus of South Asian exile literature. Yet it differs from many
contemporary memoirs in its insistence upon memory as moral testimony. Hak
repeatedly emphasises remembrance as an ethical responsibility. This volume is
not merely read; it is experienced. It lingers long after the final page, like
silence itself; soft, persistent and impossible to ignore.
( Avtar Mota )
Based on a work at http:\\autarmota.blogspot.com\.
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