New Delhi, Feb. 28 -- The narrator of In Small Boxes, one of the 11 stories that make up Zahid Rafiq's debut collection, The World with its Mouth Open, is a young city reporter, employed with a newspaper in Kashmir. Oppressed by the grim interiors of his office, he steps out on the slightest pretext every day. He hangs out with a group of underpaid reporters like him, drinking tea at a roadside kiosk, smoking and shooting the breeze.

As he tells the reader, "For hours every day we spoke, recounting stories that had not made it into the papers, the stories behind stories, stories so sad, so funny, so true, that there was no place for them in the papers, stories that in their telling and retelling became myths and belonged to no one and to...