Hari Krishna Kaul, "For Now, It Is Night: Stories" (NYRB, 2024)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network

Episode: Hari Krishna Kaul, "For Now, It Is Night: Stories" (NYRB, 2024)
Date: October 18, 2025
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Kalpana Raina

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the recently translated collection of short stories, For Now, It Is Night, by renowned Kashmiri author Hari Krishna Kaul. Dr. Miranda Melcher interviews Kalpana Raina, the project's leader, about the intricate process of translating these stories into English and their historical, literary, and personal significance. The discussion covers literary heritage, the challenges of language and exile, the collaborative translation process, and the preservation of Kashmiri culture.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Kalpana Raina's Motivation and Personal Connection

• Kalpana Raina introduces herself as a Kashmiri who left the region early in life but retained strong ties through annual visits and family. Her mother’s dementia reignited her interest in Kashmiri heritage as she realized how much had been lost through political upheavals and migration.
• Quote: “During the course of those 10 years…I had many conversations with her that kind of reignited my interest in Kashmir and made me realize how much of it I had lost touch with.” (03:35)
• Raina's father read Kaul’s stories to her, as she could speak but not read the script. Hearing the stories prompted her to seek a way to make them accessible to a wider audience via translation (05:16).

About the Author: Hari Krishna Kaul

• A celebrated writer and Raina’s uncle, Kaul was born in 1934 in Kashmir and became well-known through both his short stories and radio/TV plays.
• Kaul's fame began with his first Kashmiri story, “Sunshine.” His method of sharing stories was direct and communal—reading them aloud in tea houses and college staff rooms for feedback (07:20).
• He was a modernist influenced by writers like Chekhov, Kafka, and Beckett, blending realism with global literary currents (08:22).

Selection and Representation of Stories

• The collection is chronological, selecting from four total volumes (about 42 stories), with a focus on the two earliest, most iconic collections. Kaul sometimes repeated stories in later collections to reemphasize critical favorites (10:22).
• Quote: “He had a very funny quirk about repeating some stories from one volume to the other…because he didn’t think those stories got the critical appreciation that they deserved.” (10:35)
• The editorial process aimed to give fresh translations and capture the vibrancy and body language of the original—elements earlier English versions had “glossed over.” (11:53)

Kaul’s Literary Evolution: Before and After Exile

• Early stories are rooted in Old Srinagar, portraying Kashmiri Hindu life in close detail, with politics simmering beneath daily encounters.
  • Quote: “For me, he mapped Srinagar…reminded me so much about Orhan Pamuk mapping Istanbul.” (16:27)
• Post-1989 exile, after fleeing violence and leaving his home with only what he could carry, Kaul’s tone shifts. The later stories grapple with memory vs. survival, become more ambiguous, and draw on allegory and symbolism.
  • Quote: “It’s almost as if he finds that ordinary language…cannot begin to describe this huge transition.” (22:01)

Reception of Kaul’s Stories

• Initially, the stories were eagerly anticipated in Kashmir, often self-published or distributed in journals.
• Winning the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2000 widened Kaul’s readership via mandated translations into other Indian languages (23:48).
• The English collection’s launch in Srinagar after 40 years was especially resonant; it was warmly received locally and internationally—reviewed in major outlets including The New York Times (24:09).

A Standout Story: “To Rage or To Endure”

• Raina’s favorite, the title story, encapsulates the agony of exile. It is notable for its abrupt narrative shifts blending nostalgia and trauma, wandering plot, and symbolic figures (26:46).
  • Notable Moment: The mother, carried by her son as they flee, tries to imprint memories of their home—a “sheer agony and torture that this narrator puts himself through.” (29:44)
• The story’s title is untranslatable, expressing “habituation” at the intersection of acceptance and resignation (31:52).
  • Quote: “The Kashmiri title is just a single word…at the intersection of acceptance and resignation and habituating oneself.” (31:39)

Translation Process: Challenges and Insights

• The translation project included multiple translators of varying fluency, working from both written texts and oral recordings.
• The project’s timing with COVID-19 compelled much collaboration over Zoom, reinforcing the team’s cohesion during global and political turmoil (33:23, 36:46).
• Co-translators—usually younger Muslims without direct experience of pre-1990 Hindu communities—found the translation process revelatory and collaborative.
• The stories resonated across generational and religious lines, merging different voices into seamless narratives without individual credit (44:30).
  • Quote: “No one owns these stories. We own each one of them.” (48:23)

Reflections on Kashmir: Then and Now

• The stories act as a bridge to an “old Kashmir” now nearly vanished. Raina found the present-day valley “starkly monochromatic,” with the Hindu minority almost completely erased from public life (39:55).
  • Quote: “I was struck by how much, how little they understood of these two communities living side by side…Kashmir was…starkly monochromatic, if that term makes sense. It was lacking something that these stories brought back to me.” (42:38)

Behind the Scenes & Project Legacy

• The project endured powerful obstacles—including tech shutdowns in Kashmir and the COVID-19 pandemic—but thrived on the translators’ shared hunger for connection and cultural preservation.
• The translators’ refusal to claim individual credits speaks to the collective ownership and reconciliation the stories fostered (48:23).
• Raina hopes for more Kashmiri literature to be translated, noting that the Archipelago edition is the first US publication by a modern Kashmiri writer (50:05).
  • “There is now an interest in translation…And that’s very heartening to see.” (50:46)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On the necessity of translation:

• “No one else would be able to read them…It all came together in a way that propelled me to think about getting these stories translated.” — Kalpana Raina (05:16)

On the loss experienced by Kaul:

• “He’s lost his homeland, he’s lost his muse…his language is now twice a minority language. And above all, he’s lost his audience.” — Kalpana Raina (19:06)

On the project’s collaborative success:

• “We came together in a way that kind of, for at least that brief period of time, transcended all the problems in the world and in Kashmir.” — Kalpana Raina (48:41)

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Timestamps of Important Segments

• 02:42 — Kalpana Raina’s personal history and motivation
• 07:02 — Introduction to Hari Krishna Kaul’s life and writing
• 10:22 — On selection and arrangement of stories
• 15:59 — Literary evolution before and after exile
• 23:22 — Reception of stories in Kashmir and internationally
• 26:46 — Favorite story: “To Rage or To Endure,” narrative walkthrough
• 33:23 — Translation challenges, collaborative process, generational insights
• 39:55 — Changing face of Kashmir and reflections on lost pluralism
• 43:50 — Project’s behind the scenes: process, politics, and pandemic
• 50:05 — Future prospects for Kashmiri translation and literary revival

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Summary Conclusion

This conversation uncovers the literary and historical riches of Hari Krishna Kaul’s For Now, It Is Night, while highlighting the painstaking, collaborative effort behind bringing Kashmiri voices to new audiences. It is a testament to memory, loss, resilience, and the enduring power of stories to bridge generational, linguistic, and cultural divides. For listeners interested in literature, translation, diaspora, or the history of Kashmir, this episode is both a moving narrative and an instructive case study in the sustenance of endangered cultural traditions.

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Transcript

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today because we get to talk about an interesting book and an interesting project that led to the book as well. Because the book that we're going to be discussing is titled For Now It Is Night, published by Archipelago books in 2024 and it was written. It's a collection of short stories written by Hari Krishna Kohl about, well, about a lot of things. We're going to be discussing that set primarily in Kashmir, published in a number of different years. Some of them are funny, some of them are sad, some of them are kind of everything in the middle, but they were not originally written in English. And it's because of this really cool project that we're going to talk about that now. People like me who read in English get to engage with these stories, get to enjoy them. So I'm very pleased to have with me on the podcast the leader that has made this happen. Kalpana Raina is here to tell us about the book and the process of getting it to this point. So, Kalpana, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[Kalpana Raina]

Thank you, Miranda, for having me. I'm excited to do this.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

I'm very pleased to have you. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us what you. Why you decided to take on this project.

[Kalpana Raina]

Sure. As you just pointed out, my name is Kalpina Raina. I'm a Kashmiri. I was born in Kashmir, but I left Kashmir. My parents actually left Kashmir pretty early in my life. But every summer holiday during my school years and colleges, a little bit was spent in. In Kashmir, so that I would not lose touch with my birthplace. And it really helped me retain my fluency in Kashmiri and keep my connections to the place. But after I left India in my 20s, and even after 1989, 90, when there was an exodus of Hindus from the Kashmir Valley, which the writer touches upon in a few stories, I lost my connection to Kashmir. And it wasn't until the last. The last 10 years or so that I. Because of frequent trips back to. Back to India, not to Kashmir, but to India, because of family illnesses and other things I was dealing with, I found myself spending a lot of time in India. And my mother, whose dementia had progressed at this point and she had really regressed into her childhood, I had many conversations with her that kind of reignited my interest in Kashmir and made me realize how much of it I had lost touch with. And so during the course of those 10 years, I found myself mostly my father asking my father to read these stories to me. Because, as we will talk about, one of the challenges in this project is that the stories were written as is a lot of Kashmiri literature in the Nasilic script, which I was not taught to read or write. So I had asked my father to read the stories to me. And with my literature background, I understood very quickly how good these stories were. And I was very, very taken up with the fact that no one else would be able to read them. Since, you know, it's hard to explain because of the political situation in Kashmir. The Hindus had all left. They really had not kept in touch with the language per se. And there was a period in Kashmir when a call was no longer read or was no longer in the curriculum. And all of these things. It's a kind of a mixed way of saying it came together. It all came together in a way that propelled me to think about getting these stories translated. I actually thought of this as a project that I would conceive and develop, but not execute, because I realized my limitations with the script, even though my Kashmiri is fluent, my spoken Kashmiri. And so as I started devise this, it took me another seven or eight years to bring this project to completion through a writer's residency and a translation Residency in Bangalore.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

It certainly is very clearly a project that was a labor of love and a lot of work, too. Right. Just because we love something doesn't mean it's easy to realize. So thank you for telling us a bit about the kind of multiple reasons that you engage with this and the amount of time and effort and care that went into it. But of course, because this is a project where you are, of course, driving it in many senses, but maybe unlike other books, you didn't actually write the stories. Right. So we do have someone else to introduce here. Can you please tell us a little bit about the author of the stories, Hare Krishna Kaul, and his life a bit.

[Kalpana Raina]

Absolutely. Full disclosure here. Hare Krishna Kaul was my uncle. He was my mother's younger brother. And I had grown up hearing about. He was a celebrity in Kashmir, and I'd grown up hearing about him. And he was also a playwright. So through his plays, which were done for radio and television, he reached a much wider audience in Kashmir than just the fiction that he wrote. But backing up here. He was born in 1934. He lived his entire life in Kashmir up until the exodus in 1989, 90, when he moved to Delhi, and he died in Delhi in 2009. He had been a professor of Hindi in one of the local institutions, but had always wanted to be a writer. And he actually started writing in Hindi in the late 50s, I think. But somewhere along the way, I think his peers and other people that he was in touch with convinced him that he should try writing in Kashmiri. And his first short story, in Kashmiri, which is the first story in the Archipelago collection, Sunshine, that was the first story that he wrote in Kashmiri. And he had a very interesting way of disseminating these stories. You know, the publishing industry in Kashmir wasn't that robust, to say the least. But his way of disseminating these stories was to go to their local coffee house, tea houses, and his college staff room, where he would once a month read out these stories to people to get their reaction and feedback. And I have heard, obviously I wasn't there, but I've heard that when he first read Sunshine, people were just astounded. And it became. It became a major landmark in Kashmiri short story writing almost overnight and really catapulted him into fame. And from there, there was no looking back for him. I should just mention that he really. He was a modernist writer in many ways, very influenced by what was happening in the rest of the world. And he had read widely, starting with Chekhov, and he'd read Kafka and Beckett and Ionesco, and you find elements of those in his work. And I think he was probably one of the. One of one or two major short story writers of his period in Kashmiri.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Thank you for giving us that introduction to his work and life. And of course, your connection to him as well. That definitely helps contextualize that these stories weren't just things that you were aware of, but as you said, were very much kind of part of culture and conversation. And because he did so much writing and engaged people in so many different ways. And obviously, short stories can create many opportunities, but also challenges. So how did you decide which stories to include in this book?

[Kalpana Raina]

Yeah, Miranda, that's a very good question. Because I think, as I mentioned to you, not only was he a short story writer, he actually was known much more for the television and radio plays than that he put up. Because obviously you don't need to be literate to listen to these. But the short stories are what cemented his reputation. And there were four collections of short stories, two published before he left Kashmir and two published after he left Kashmir. And in total, there are about 42 stories. He had a very funny quirk about repeating some stories from one volume to the other. Not too many, I think, two or three. And his reason, as he explained in one of the forewords, was because he didn't think those stories got the critical appreciation that they desired, that they needed, or that he desired. And it was almost like he was telling his critics here, you know, ignored this. I'm going to put this back up in front of you, so tell me what you think about it this time. The 44, 42 stories, whatever. The book is chronologically arranged, so you have stories from all four collections. And I think it's fair to say that the first two collections are probably better represented than the the last two collections for a variety of reasons. One being that some stories were repeated in the last two collections. But the first two collections have some of his most iconic stories. In fact, the ones that people still remember. Sunshine being the first one, actually, and Tomorrow, the Saint and the Witch, the Mourners, that which we cannot speak of. These are all from the first two collections. So it was important to get those iconic stories into the book, primarily because I think there had been some translations of those works in local newspapers, in local periodicals. And when I went back and looked at those English translations, I realized that, you know, they were very representative of their time. And I thought it was really important to redo those stories. In a way that you had a fresh set of eyes looking at them. And the language, which cause language is not, it's not 19th century language. And some of these English translations I think really glossed over the boisterousness of his characters and the body language that they used. And, and so these stories were picked with an eye to getting the best of his work, refreshing them. And then obviously in the last two collections, the whole, the whole huge life transition that happened for him, moving out of Kashmir and trying to reflect how he as a writer changed or how those incidents and that traumatic experience changed him as a writer.

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

So I wonder if we can talk a bit more then about his stories and how his writing changed over time. You mentioned the different collections being represented here. And, of course, he left Kashmir. Can you tell us more about how his writing changed after that point?

[Kalpana Raina]

Yes, I think that's an important topic to talk about. You know, he lived in what's probably known as Old Town Srinagar. It's a very small area, one, maybe two square miles, something like that. Very dense localities, congested, small, dark alleys leading down to the river. And this is the world that his characters particularly. This is the world that he lived in, which is important to point out. And it says the world that his characters in those early stories are situated in. He talks primarily about the Kashmiri Hindu way of life. That's his subject. But he observes every detail in their lives very, very minutely. He's almost like a miniaturist in how he approaches his. His characters and their circumstances. And, you know, with a little bit. It's really not an exaggeration that I. When I introduce him, I almost. I always say that for me, he mapped Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, in a way that I. You know, it reminded me so much about Orhan Parmuk mapping Istanbul. It was that deep, intimate knowledge of the city and. And the lives lived there that he brought to his works. So, you know, even though he's talking about Kashmiri Hindu way of life, this is Kashmir. So the politics always simmers under. Under the surface. So his characters are Hindus and Muslims, but they share the same landscape, the same language, but they're divided by religion. Thus what should be ordinary and what seems ordinary becomes quite extraordinary because it's Kashmir. And he doesn't gloss over. There are lots of people who would like to have you believe that up until 1989, 1990, Hindus and Muslims lived very peacefully in Kashmir. I should point out here that Kashmir is India's only Muslim majority state. And the Hindus are a very small part of the population, a very small minority. And so, I mean, there were. There was outbursts from time to time, riots from time to time, but by and large, things were very peaceful, but they were not without fault lines. And what Carl does is he talks about those everyday ruptures in everyday encounters. But he explores this with a lot of humor and describes how the two communities negotiated their everyday life. He talks about the hypocrisies, their petty jealousies, but along with the friendships that are inevitable when two people. When two communities live in close quarters. He was initially inspired by Chekhov. In fact, that first volume of stories is dedicated to Chekhov. So there's a very strong element of realism in those early stories. He's describing a way of life and the life of a community that, you know, that really no one had ever really talked about in great details. But after 1989, 1990, when he left, when he was forced to leave, it was exile for him. He left overnight and left for Delhi. He, I mean, he literally left with the clothes on his back. So he had to leave all his books, his manuscripts, everything behind in the family home. And for a moment, you know, if you can, if you stop and sit and imagine what this means to a writer, he's lost his homeland, he's lost his muse, which is Srinagar city. His language is now twice a minority language. And above all, he's lost his audience. I mean, who outside of Kashmir is going to listen to Kashmiri plays or read Kashmiri fiction? And that slowly starts, that realization slowly starts permeating these stories. And you see both the themes and the way and his craft change. So he moves from exploring, you know, everyday life and its hypocrisies and its problematic relationships. And he's examining in some of the latest stories his own shifting relationship with Kashmir. He starts off by mining his memories of Kashmir. A lot of those stories are about journeys back and forth, which a lot of Kashmiris actually used to take, especially Kashmiri Hindus and Kashmiri Muslims too. They would leave the valley in winter and come back in the summer. And he uses that as a point of sort of looking at this whole question of exile and loss of homeland and the journeys back and forth. And so we see him mining his memories, but we also see him using. Moving away from more realistic narrative, using more symbolism and myth and allegory in this later period. It's almost like he's, you know, and I think one of my co translators said this better in his little essay in the book, which is included in the book. It's almost as if he finds that ordinary language cannot, or ordinary plot structures or narrative structures cannot begin to describe this huge transition that's taken place and the isolation that has resulted for the writer from this displacement. So his stories become more ambiguous, like the story, like news, which I have a very hard time still understanding what that is about. And he's exploring this relationship between. Do you survive on memories or do you. Sorry, do you rely on your memories or do you have to discard them in order to survive? And each part of this step, I think the language and the narrative structure becomes more and more complex.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

That complexity, of course, is, as you said, a reflection of what he himself is experiencing. But also not just him. I mean, I imagine they would speak a lot to audiences as well. So can you tell us a little bit about the reception that these stories found when they were first published?

[Kalpana Raina]

When they were first published in Kashmir or in, you know, I think the, the later collections, they were partly self published, partly sent back to Kashmir to be published in the journals of the Cultural Academy. Of course, there's, there's no ability to publish anything in Kashmiri outside of Kashmir. So he was very reliant on getting the publications and the stories out in Kashmir. And he did a lot of that by self publishing in earlier periods and then sending stories back. And the Saithi Academy, India's Cultural Academy Award that he won in 2000, I think, helped to, helped to get these stories out into the public because the Academy always had or had the mandate to publish every prize winner's stories in all the Indian languages, believe it or not. So he was published by the Academy, which is another way that these stories got out. The initial reception to the stories was fantastic. I mean, it was. People would kind of wait for the next story to come out. They were published initially as individual stories and then when he could get the money together as books, when this collection, the English translated collection, came out. HarperCollins in India was the publisher in India that had published a couple of months earlier. And the launch of that publication, I had insisted, had to happen in Srinagar. And it was an opportunity for me to go back to Kashmir after 40 plus years, which in itself was another whole story. But the book was received. I mean, I couldn't have asked for a better reception. It was just really received very warmly. It was appreciated. Every major newspaper in Kashmir, there are several newspapers in Kashmir, both Kashmiri, Urdu and English newspapers, reviewed the book. There were television interviews about it. And the book here, when it was published in New York by Archipelago, was also extremely well received. There was a review in the New York Times Book Review section. Obviously the readership here is a different kind of readership, but I would say it was really well received. And a couple of lectures in universities and colleges where there was more interest in it went very well and helped to publicize the book and get it out there.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Hmm, that's really lovely to hear about it, getting such a reception in multiple different kinds of audiences. Thank you for sharing that with us. And I do want to ask more about the stories themselves. Obviously, we can't talk about all of them, but is there maybe one that you found as a favorite or most interesting story in the collection?

[Kalpana Raina]

Well, as you said, unfortunately we cannot talk about all of them. I do have. I do have a few favorites, but I think if I had to pick one, I would probably pick the last story in the Archipelago collection, which is translated as the title is To Rage or To Endure. And the title was notoriously from the original, was notoriously hard to translate. And I'll come back to that. You know, that story, I think it was either the last story that he wrote or the last, but one story. He did write a novella in Hindi, actually, after that, just I finished that very close to the time he passed away. So this is one of his last stories. And one of the reasons I like it is, you know, one. One has read a lot of literature of exile and loss of homeland and all of those themes. But in this one story, I think the narrator. There's very little. There's very little plot, there's very little structure. There's an introduction to the narrator saying how wonderful winter is in his childhood and his memories of the soft snow and what happened in winter. And then from one sentence to the other, the switch is made. He describes this winter, which is now the winter of 1989, 1990, this winter is different. And he talks a little bit about that. And there's this wonderful sequence where the narrator goes back into his home, realizing that things are different now and that he has to leave. And he puts his aged mother on his back. And while he's trying to get out of the house, the aged mother is looking around at her home and her belongings and sort of trying to take little snapshots in memory of everything that she's leaving behind. And then suddenly again there's this switch. They're running through the snow. I mean, I'm making it sound like it's sort of linear narrative, but it really gets all mixed up. They're running through the snow and they find themselves in desert like conditions. So it's kind of like, if you want to be realistic, they're going from the cold of Kashmir to the heat of the Delhi. And then again, the narrative changes very quickly and nothing moves forward except a series of conversations and a little bit of back and forth between the mother and the son. And all different characters are introduced. There's a conversation with the son where the mother asks the sun, the planet sun, not this, not, not her son, which is blazing so strongly. And the mother asks the son to soften itself, because she's not used to this heat. And other characters are introduced. Gandhi is introduced, Medieval poets are introduced. And when I was trying to figure out what was going on, I realized, I think, from the author's perspective, these images and symbolisms of secularism, of Indian secularism, of people living together in harmony, and he. He sort of brings them into the story, telling them that, you know, you failed me, all the stuff that you talked about. None of that really matters anymore. I'm standing here alone, and I have to decide whether I leave this or leave all my memories behind, because maybe that's the only way I can. This is the narrator, obviously, at this point, that's probably the only way I can survive by extinguishing all of this from my memory and from my mind. And the reason. And that's the note the story ends on. And the reason I said the title in Kashmiri is not the English title comes from the last few sentences of the stories where the narrator Sundays, I have two options. I can either rage against this, or I can endure. And I will probably choose to endure. And the Kashmiri title is just a single word, which is a very complex word to translate because it means getting accustomed to getting used to habituating oneself, but not in a good sense. So it's kind of at the end that Kashmiri translation. Sorry, the title stands at the intersection of acceptance and resignation and habituating oneself. And that was so, so difficult to translate that we kind of just fell back on the last sentences of the story. So for all these multiple reasons for the narrative arc, the craft, the theme, the sheer agony and torture that this narrator puts himself through, and the realization of what it really means for a person to lose their homeland, and describing the exact moment of exile, how you take your memories with you in your mind, is what really makes this story stand out for me.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Thank you for telling us about one that really means something to you. And it definitely gives us a sense as well about the complexity of these stories. I'm wondering, were there any things that you found surprising or maybe even exciting when you went through the stories, obviously, with the intention of translating them and putting them together? That's obviously a different perspective than just kind of reading them for fun. Was there anything that you sort of found going through that process that surprised you about kind of going back in time to this point in Kashmir?

[Kalpana Raina]

I mean, there were a lot of challenges, you know, logistic challenges, working with multiple translators. And as I had mentioned, somewhere along the way, I had gotten these stories recorded so I could hear them for myself. And then I realized that Micashmiri was good enough that I tried translating from the recordings, and then that was working well, and I decided to translate the stories myself or translate some of the stories myself. So the challenge was working with multiple translators, putting. And we all worked from the recordings, and they worked from the print. But even their reading fluency in Kashmiri, which is a whole other topic of how the language is slowly dying, their reading fluency was of varying degrees. So meshing all of that together. And then if you read the introduction to the book, you'll know that a lot of it was completed over Zoom because the project really started just before COVID hit, or just around the time Covid hit. But as I was. That was kind of not the question you asked me. But as I was reading through those stories, it was really wonderful to realize how the author had worked. Not only situations that I was familiar with from my childhood, but characters that I was familiar with or composite characters from various people that I knew I was. It was a very interesting study of how that you have to understand. I knew this life very well from my multiple trips as a child to Kashmir. I knew the author well, I knew his neighbors well, and I knew their milieu well. And to see some of those characters and those incidents and some of those people come into the stories and to recognize and to recognize that was very, in a sense, moving, but also very funny because I hadn't thought about this for a very long time. And for my co translators, it was also very illuminating because over the course of most of them, in fact, all of them had grown up, really come of age post 1990. So their interaction with Hindus was very, very limited. In fact, one of my co translators told me that she hadn't known a single Hindu family growing up. And I think as I was relating this on the way of life and how the stories brought back memories of people and incidents, I think that added to their. To their enjoyment of their stories, of the stories, and their relishing of the stories and their understanding of the stories. So while it was a trip back to memory lane, it was also a reminder as we worked through this over Zoom in two years. And we really had a very, very good working relationship. I think the pandemic contributed to that because we all look forward to getting together every week, weekend on Zoom, and going through each other's drafts and gelling them together to the extent that the translations became more fluid and seamless. I think that experience also sort of helped me move from memory to what, what Kashmir was like now. Because obviously in course of two years you start sharing stories with each other and things came up in the stories for which they had no background or no understanding which I had to explain, which were either Hindu ceremonies or particular words used by Kashmiri Hindu families. And I. I don't know if that was the question you were asking. I kind of lost track a little bit. But there were. It wasn't so. I mean, obviously I had been away from Kashmir for so long that it was. Even though I knew the language, I began to understand a little bit more of what had happened in the 40 years that I had been away. And some of the stances, all the political stances or some of. Some of what was in the news headlines began to make more sense to me.

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[Kalpana Raina]

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[Kalpana Raina]

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[Kalpana Raina]

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[Kalpana Raina]

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[Kalpana Raina]

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

No, that's a really interesting answer and insight into the process of all of this. Maybe you could tell us about some of the links that you saw in this process between things in the stories and Kashmir today.

[Kalpana Raina]

I don't know that the links that I saw in the stories and Kashmir today were that obvious to me. The links that I saw in the stories were took mostly to the old Kashmir. But I think some of my co translators were a little bit more understanding of. I mean, one of the things that everyone points out about these stories Is how the right or how a call, even from the first story, did not shy away from calling a spade a spade, if you like. For lack of a better term, that first story opens. Sunshine opens with Poshkuch, the character in Delhi. And her first pronouncement is, and I'm paraphrasing this, how wonderful it is to be in a place where everyone is Hindu. You know, there's no Muslims around. The butcher is Hindu, the baker is Hindu, the maids are Hindu. And that immediately takes you into. And this was written in 1965, I think. Yes, it was written in 1965. And immediately takes you into how, in some ways, while the situations are very different, they might not be that different. As I started out by saying, there was never total communal harmony. There was always resentments, there were regrets, there were resentments, there was caution of one community dealing with another. And I think the Kashmir of today is somewhat different in the sense. I mean, this struck me so much when I went and I went back a couple of times in these last two years or three years. It struck me so much about how one community has been totally erased, in a sense, out of. I mean, really erased out of the landscape. You don't see Hindus in the markets, you don't see them in the restaurants. You don't see them on the streets talking to young people, which I did in these last two trips. I was struck by how much, how little they understood of this two communities living side by side, how much surprise they expressed when I told them about my familiarity with downtown Srinagar, which is where my grandparents lived and where I visited. And they couldn't quite comprehend that there had been a time when I would go back and forth and other people would go back and forth. And there was again, I said the Hindus were a minority, but they were very visible. There were lots of temples, there were lots of evidence of people on the streets. The dresses are a little different, so you can always recognize Hindus versus Muslims. There was Kashmir, to me, when I went back in these last couple of years, was intriguing, was interesting, but it was also starkly monochromatic, if that term makes sense. It was lacking something that these stories brought back to me.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

That's really interesting to see your reflections over time sort of through these stories. Is there anything further you want to tell us about the sort of behind the scenes process of putting all this together? The translation? I mean, even just things like you were telling us about, figuring out the title, that. That was a really tricky challenge to navigate. Are there any other sort of Moments that really stick out, that kind of took the whole team coming together to make it make sense.

[Kalpana Raina]

I think what stood out to me was again, this was a project, I think that just had to happen. We got together, the team, the band as I called it, then got together in August or late July of 2019, which is when we sifted through the stories, kind of thought about how we were going to translate them. And we got together in Bangalore and this writer's residency that I are talked about. And it struck me then those initial meetings were kind of difficult because obviously I had conceived the project and I was driving it, but I was heavily reliant on them at that point. I was still not sure that I would be translated, translating myself. I thought I was just going to put this together and someone else would execute it. But it was during those initial meetings, I mean, a lot some of them had not read Call before. And as they were. As we were reading the stories together, we decided to. Part of the selection of the stories was to actually sit down and read stories to each other. They were reading, I was listening. And as we were reading the stories to each other, we found ourselves getting caught up in them, laughing, crying, whatever. And I realized that the stories were reaching out across time from the 60s and the 70s, and they were impacting or influencing a younger generation and a very literate generation. All three of my co translators are extremely literate. They're academics or there's art critics or are working in literary studies. And their response to these initial attempts to put the stories together reinforced my decision and my belief that these stories really need to be told, they need to be widely circulated. So that was one aspect that I remember. And of course, right after that, when we went back to work on our individual stories, there was a major shift in the politics of Kashmir. The Indian government took away whatever autonomous rights it had and put it directly under the control of the Delhi government, which meant that the Internet was severed for many months, or there was very limited Internet available. And that's when this whole idea of getting the stories recorded for me came up. And one of the translators was in Bangalore. I got him to record some of the stories. There was limited interaction with the translators in Kashmir. And somehow the stories were all recorded together, were recorded and sent to me. And that's when I realized that I could translate. And so there was a period when we were all sort of working in isolation. I don't know how much work they did, but I was listening to these stories incessantly morning, day and night. I was just totally steeped in them. And then In March of 2020, we got together as a team again, physically, in Bangalore. And that's when we started seriously thinking about how we were going to first allocate these stories amongst ourselves and who would translate what and how we would go about it. And we left Bangalore, and the pandemic hit, and India went into total lockdown. So that was another period of isolation for all of us. I didn't get back to New York from India that year until June or July from March. So that was a period, I think, when we all worked on our individual drafts. And then when I got back to New York, we set up the zoom calls. We set up a schedule of working together. And then I think there was sort of a hunger to talk to each other and to. Because of the pandemic and because of everything that was happening in Kashmir, we again took each story and dissected it. This time 17 or 18 stories, and dissected them word by word. Reading the print, hearing the recordings, look, sort of debating each other's understanding of the stories. And it was a very long, very arduous process. But in that, I think the stories meshed. Of course, you know, I took a look once they were all together at sort of making sure that there were not four voices speaking, but there was some fluidity to the translations. And I think it was during that process where we already had the Indian and the New York editors involved. And one of the questions asked was, how do you want these stories represented? Do you want them, you know, by whoever started working on the first draft? Do you want names attached to the translators, Names attached to each stories and to a person? We said, no, no one owns these stories. We own each one of them. And that was, again, another very telling moment for me that how the stories had brought together. You know, I'm much older than the other translators. They're all Muslim, I'm Hindu. But we came together in a way that kind of, for at least that brief period of time, transcended all the problems in the world and in Kashmir.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

That's a wonderfully optimistic note to end on for our conversation about the book, leaving me with just a final question of is there anything you're currently or looking to work on in future that you want to give us a brief sneak preview of?

[Kalpana Raina]

Well, I think it's not so much. Well, a little bit of my own work. I'm trying to go back to my own writing. There's more stories to translate to. Trying to find. Lay my hands on the screenplays, the play, the dramas to see if we can get hold of them. Everything was lost. So we're sort of it's like excavating an archaeological excavation, finding stuff in private collections, in other collections. But I do want to mention what I think what this book has started. There is now an interest in translation, translating from Kashmiri. And I'm beginning to see more stuff coming out in English translations and in Hindi translations, and so getting a wider audience for writing in Kashmiri from Kashmiri writers. And that's very heartening to see that. I mean, the Archipelago book is actually the first publication in the US Of a modern Kashmiri writer. And I suspect, and I hope there'll be more soon.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, that would be very intriguing indeed. And for any listeners who want to read this book published by Archipelago in 2024, it is titled For now, it is Night. So, Kalpina, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Tell us about it.

[Kalpana Raina]

Thank you so much, Miranda.

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It's been a pleasure.

[Kalpana Raina]

Sam.