Village and the City

ISBN -13: 979-8272617835
Imprint: Independently published (Kindle Direct Publishing)
275 pages
Genre: Fiction
Published: 2025


 Khalid Afroz grows up in a quiet village in Pulwama and lives a quintessential rural life. He drinks from mountain streams, chases cricket balls across wild fields and watches neighbours barter pencils, milk and cheese to ends meet. After securing a position in the Department of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, he becomes increasingly restless about moving to Srinagar. What does one do when the soil that raised him feels too small, yet too sacred to abandon?

His family’s shift from rice paddies to apple orchards further deepens this divide. On their father’s advice, his younger brother clings fiercely to farming and its prestige, while Khalid broadens his horizons in search of a faster paced life and greater opportunities. Can ambition be pursued without betraying tradition?

Through the intimate struggles of Afroz family, the story becomes a broader meditation on belonging and departure, relationships and reality, memory and modernity, home and exile. Will Khalid reconcile with his rural roots, or will destiny compel him to divide his life between his ancestral village and his new home in Srinagar, leaving him torn between the two?