Harper Collins India's 'Future Tense' talks about how a family that was affected due to the internal political conflicts in the state. The story revolves around the son of a former militant, Fayaz. He is an aimless bureaucrat whose marriage to his wife Zeenat has broken down. His nephew Imran is a young student, a misfit in Srinagar, hoping to join a new kind of spectacular resistance.
Talking about the book, Nitasha Kaul said,
"What happens to big dreams on small canvases that are shrunk even smaller by the politics of conflict? The characters in Future Tense have inherited the many tragedies and contradictions that belong to Kashmir. The paths of my characters intersect and diverge against the factual and fictional backdrop of contemporary Kashmir, with its friendships, betrayals, floods, uprisings, and human shields."
She further said, "Kashmir is my homeland. In the face of every renewed silencing of Kashmiri voices, us Kashmiris will continue telling our many stories in different forms, forums, and genres. My novel Future Tense is part of the vital oeuvre of narrating the histories and herstories of the many different real and imagined Kashmiris that exist on maps, in the hearts, in the people’s memories. This is a novel that was birthed post 2016 uprising and it will be read post a profound loss of Kashmiri autonomy in 2019. It has been a work born of love and sacrifice, and I hope that you who read this will keep the stories of Kashmiris alive in your head and heart."
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The story revolves around the son of a former militant, Fayaz is an aimless bureaucrat whose marriage to his wife Zeenat has broken down. His nephew Imran is a young student, a misfit in Srinagar, hoping to join a new kind of spectacular resistance. Shireen, the granddaughter of a spy, discovers how her painful and divisive family story is deeply intertwined with the history of Kashmir. The paths of these characters intersect and diverge in Nitasha Kaul’s tour de force novel Future Tense, which traces the competing trajectories of modernity and tradition, freedom and suffocation, and the possibility of bridging the stories of different kinds of Kashmiris.
Notably, Nitasha Kaul is a multidisciplinary academic and novelist. She has worked on themes relating to identity, democracy, political economy, feminist and postcolonial critiques, Kashmir, and Bhutan. Her first novel Residue was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. She currently lives in London.
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