Summary

As Tilo contemplates which things to pack, she thinks about Musa’s “recoveries,” which she has kept safe for him. The “recoveries” include a family album, a stack of passports showing Musa in various nationalities, credit cards in the names of those passports, a hunting knife, nine mobile phones, and a pistol, among other things. An old notebook of hers is also included. It is full of stories followed by comprehension questions. One of the stories, “Nothing,” involves an unidentified “I” who wants to write “one of those sophisticated stories in which even though nothing much happens there’s lots to write about” (288). However, the narrator of this story realizes that such a thing cannot be done in Kashmir as there is “too much blood for good literature” (268). The last entry in the notebook is an army press release about 17 village...