The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed (2011). Set on the Pakistani-administered side of the Kashmir Valley during the 1990s insurgency, this novel follows a young man tasked with collecting identity cards from corpses in the hills along the Line of Control. Waheed writes from personal experience of life in the border zone — the landscape, the military presence, and the weight of living in a disputed territory are rendered with unflinching precision. For anyone travelling near Hajira and the Line of Control, it puts a human face on what is otherwise an abstraction.
Curfewed Night by Basharat Peer (2009). A memoir by a Kashmiri journalist who grew up on the Indian-administered side of the Line of Control and returned as an adult to document what the insurgency did to his society. Peer's account of crossing between worlds — educated in India, working internationally, belonging in Kashmir — illuminates why the border dividing places like Hajira from the valley towns on the other side carries such psychological weight. Direct, honest, and essential reading.
India's Wars: A Military History, 1947–1971 by Arjun Subramaniam (2016). Dry in title but illuminating in content, this account of the wars that shaped the Line of Control in Poonch District — the 1947–48 war, the 1965 war, the 1971 conflict — makes sense of the checkpoints and military geography a visitor encounters near Hajira. The Poonch sector features specifically, and understanding why this particular stretch of border runs where it does changes how you look at the hills.