Mirza Waheed’s debut novel The Collaborator (2011) was critically acclaimed and quickly adopted into mainstream literary establishments in the West, as evidenced by its shortlisting for numerous literary awards, including the Guardian First Book Award. However, the critical reception to having a fictional representation of the traumas produced by the lived reality of the Kashmir conflict runs the risk of missing out on specific critical nuances that Waheed has woven into the novel’s complex narrative.