TWENTY years ago a British politician suggested there should be a “cricket test” for immigrants. Their Britishness, he argued, could be gauged by the side they supported in cricket internationals. By this measure, the Muslim majority living in the Indian-administered Kashmir valley has never been Indian. In one famous cricket match in 1983 a crowd at a game in Srinagar, the valley's main town, rooted raucously for the Indians' opposing team, from the West Indies. In “Curfewed Night”, Basharat Peer recalls an incident from his own childhood that is less well known but that India would find even more provocative: a match three years later in which, on the very last ball of the game, India lost to Pakistan. In Mr Peer's home town, “people hugged, jumped around and shouted over the din of celebratory firecrackers.”

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