Rafiq Kathwari is a literary author, photographer, and journalist. He was born in Srinagar, Kashmir, India, in 1951, at a time when the military heavily occupied the state. When he was one year old, his mother and four of Kathwari’s siblings had to leave India to move to Pakistan to be with their father, who, being loyal to the Prime Minister of Pakistan, M.A. Jinnah, could not return to Kashmir. Kathwari’s mother profoundly influenced his growing years: she suffered the agony of the Partition, separation from Kathwari’s father and her children, and subsequently from Srinagar. The interplay of politics and religion, the chequered history of the Kashmir Valley, and his mother’s schizophrenia heavily influenced his writing. Waqas Khwaja writes that Kathwari’s writing stemmed from his experience with the political situation and brought to life “an entire age, with its conflicts, discords, and betrayals before our eye so that the mother’s travails mirror, uneasily, unsettlingly, his homeland Kashmir.”