The Night of Broken Glass breaks new territory in the space of creative writing about Kashmir, but falls short on providing any new, definitive insight into the collective psyche of trauma and chaos engendered by occupation. Taking its cue from the narrative of Holocaust writing, it strives to observe the creation of memory through testimony and further employ language as a testimony, departing from the tradition of journalistic realism that has come to define much of Kashmiri fiction writing. This departure permits the book to explore occupation as a metaphor for existential crisis engendered by occupation with a psychotic intensity, but suffers from a lack of fresh insights into understanding the contingencies of everyday life in Kashmir beyond what is already known, and experienced. The thirteen interlinked chapters in the novel double as short stories, more effectively at that, narrated in different styles—some narrated in first person, like Rosy, while…

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