On any given day, dire, discouraging and often frightening media reports focus endlessly on at least half-a-dozen places in the world, almost as if the repetition itself was designed to create numbness. And on any given day, similar calamities continue to unfold in dozens of other places --- like Kashmir, for example --- on smaller but no less devastating scales.

This northern Himalayan region of the Indian subcontinent is where author Zahid Rafiq began his career as a journalist and where his debut short story collection, THE WORLD WITH ITS MOUTH OPEN, is set. Neither province nor territory, Kashmir desperately wants to be an independent country, but since 1947 its 15 million people have been claimed, with varying degrees of aggression, by India, Pakistan and China.

"Every tale in THE WORLD WITH ITS MOUTH OPEN is weighted with abundant detail, atmosphere, texture and journeying. But there is no traditional ending, achievement, closure or even vindication."

Rafiq’s hometown of Srinagar is the more prominent of Kashmir’s two capital cities, but as many of his stories powerfully suggest, its administrative power is precarious at best, whether in law enforcement or in the provision of essential services. The lives of Kashmiris, especially those in backstreet urban neighborhoods or struggling rural villages, are similarly precarious. Seen through the author’s reportorial lens, their existence evokes hard truths barely veiled by fictional details. It can be a lot to digest for so-called “first world” readers accustomed to resolved endings, or at least some form of closure. Don’t look for either here.

While collections often share their titles with the most prominent story, THE WORLD WITH ITS MOUTH OPEN is tersely defined in “Crows,” about a schoolboy who chooses not to study for his lessons, even though he is guaranteed a beating from the teacher, who takes out his own failure to make it to university on his apathetic young students. In one of his frequent angry outbursts, the teacher thrusts the boy into the doorway and yells, “Do you know what is waiting out there? Do you? The world, with its mouth open!”

This is the kernel at the damaged heart of every story: the world is cruel, unkind, unfair and hungry. Its mouth is always open, not as a doorway or portal to success, but as a beast ready to eat up all who lack the brute strength, cunning, creativity or wealth to overcome it. And all those strategic assets are in short supply among Rafiq’s characters, some of whom, like the boy in “Crows,” are not even given names. Named or unnamed, their lives have become anonymous, even bereft of potential, under the looming weight of both local and global uncertainties. With few exceptions, they live on the sharp edges of poverty, relying on fruitless hopes, dreams and deceptions to get by --- making deals with fate, gambling on elusive returns, selling abilities they do not have.

There is the impoverished journalist in “Small Boxes” (perhaps evoking the author himself) who haunts a local shop where he cannot afford to buy even the cheapest item there. Or the youth in “The Man with the Suitcase” who loses his job due to incompetence, but leaves home and comes back every night as if he were still employed. In “Bare Feet,” a man returns to Kashmir from abroad and is prodded by the spirit of a dead stranger to contact his grieving family, but the mission is a humiliating failure.

And so it goes. Every tale in THE WORLD WITH ITS MOUTH OPEN is weighted with abundant detail, atmosphere, texture and journeying. But there is no traditional ending, achievement, closure or even vindication. Zahid Rafiq’s stories simply stop, sometimes with startling abruptness, when they run out of energy --- just like real people do when life throws up more obstacles than they can overcome.

But as discouraging and depressing as its scenarios often are, there is still a point to THE WORLD WITH ITS MOUTH OPEN. And it’s this: oddly enough, the predominance of inconclusive endings leaves room for a faint glimmer of what every human being on our troubled planet craves --- hope.