Cups of Nun Chai

by Alana Hunt

316 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2020

Reviews

[Jasun Chelat · Rating 5 out of 5]

i had to create this book on goodreads?????
anyway. first book of the year, picked it up in delhi midlands not knowing who or what. tired of algorithm i decided to open books and then read a page and i got this.
if i write a review it feels like they will arrest me
but i tried to find nun chai in kerala, they had kahva at the government grocery store but no nun

[Abby]

I read Cups of Nun Chai on the heels of James Baldwin, and that was the right choice. Many of Baldwin’s ideas were not his own, or not first his own, but I think he says it best when he talks about political self-determination as “the right to be wrong,” which is certainly relevant to Kashmir. Hunt is talking about political self-determination slightly differently here, and I appreciate her approach. Reading bits and pieces from places in conflict, books like House of Stone, I have come to believe in the absolute priority of preserving normal life and daily necessary human activities: education, preparing food, building, marrying, visiting. But because of this book I also see another pole of priority, which is valuing and even preserving a degree of indecision or multiplicity of political futures. This too is essential in contested areas wracked by conflict that both is and isn’t personal. To cultivate and maintain a situation where wrangling of identities is possible without violence.

In recent years I’ve noticed the meaning of the word “violence” expanding, and while I understand that these things are connected and often come packaged together, I feel a bit uncomfortable with this expansion. I still think we need a word that means direct-bodily-harm-on-purpose. In the same way I think people who raise alarms about censorship should perhaps revisit the astonishingly recent story of the Indian official who gave the Kashmiri newspaper editor a list of the names he did not want to see in print, or the forced shutdown of local television, or the wholesale shutdown of cell phones and internet as a political tactic. Not that violence or censorship always have to look one way, but if we think we’re collectively out of the darker woods of those terms, think again.

I was intrigued by the premise of centering this book around conversations, especially ones reiterated from memory. I also often find that what I want to write about happened in the form of conversations that can’t be recreated ver batim. I was attracted to this work explicitly because it is not any of the nonfiction approaches we’re used to–not a work of investigative journalism, not a memoir of her time in Kashmir. The journalistic information about the place and the stories about her time there enter obliquely, not exactly the point. I was attracted to an attempt to respond to something horrible that happened very far away from the writer, through conversations with many people who had never even heard of it. This seems essential and relatable in a world with an unprecedented potential for connection and therefore a very modern anxiety about how to respond to things that happen far away to people you do not know. That’s not something that’s really been explored much in books I’ve read, and I liked that this approach was different.

But I also missed those other approaches, which are designed to give you pertinent background info that I never really got here. “We spoke in more detail about fake encounters, demonstrations, stone-throwing, and the escalation of violence.” But what happened? “Maharaja Hari Singh. 1947. Democracy (thwarted). The hope of self-determination. An armed uprising. Military occupation. More than 70,000 dead.” I get that writing this history more explicitly would be lengthy and a delicate project in its own right, but I feel jealous of the tea-drinkers who seem to have had their questions answered while I the reader, with just as little background as they, am left with all of mine. “There’s no spiel,” she tells Ben, but there definitely is, or at least questions she must answer in more or less the same way again and again. The map in the beginning is equally unsatisfying, with not even mountains or rivers to orient me. Just a blob of color with unfamiliar words (towns? regions? landmarks?) (are they in their geographical relation to each other or just spattered on there like the color?) (does this count as a map if it imparts literally no interpretable information?) on it. I like the project, but I think the book form of it could have benefitted from some bolstering.

But I greatly respect the unfolding of this work, which took place over two years and has been transforming for a decade before arriving in book form–an openness to change, a memorial that’s in it for the long haul. A long-term memory. And in the end I love the way this work illuminates how multifaceted and complicated are our international connections–our friends whose worlds and politics we don’t fully understand, our scattered and severed family ties, our nebulous connections to places we visit and briefly love. I want to see more writing about that strange world.

[Saffiya Bakshi · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful, political and personal