Apocalypse Now

This past spring, English language writer Sushma Joshi, a graduate of Brown University (a member of the Ivy Leagues in the US), burst upon the literary scene with two books: Art Matters and The End of the World. Art Matters is a collection of her art related articles published in Nation Weekly (now defunct) and Kantipur Online. But the book I am going to discuss is the short story collection The End of the World which was longlisted for this year’s Frank O’Connor short story award.

The collection of eight stories reverberates with the contemporary Nepali society. She borrows the characters from everyday life and weaves them into stories in order to give them a structure of imagination. “Waiting for Rain”, for example, deals with a village near Kathmandu that has been affected by Maoist ‘people’s war’ and the buying and selling of votes in an upcoming election. Most of the stories have water like flow. There is an abundance of imagery.

The first story “Cheese” brings to mind a Nepali proverb: Umkeko Machho Thulo (A missed fish always seems big). Ten-year old Gopi is shepherded from village to work in a relative’s house in Kathmandu. Gopi doesn’t get his share of a slice of cheese brought by Prakash Babu, the son of his masters, all the way from Switzerland. When he is not even acknowledged as a member of the household, how would he be entitled for the precious cheese? The foreign food even comes in his dreams. Twenty years after this incident, Gopi fulfills his dream of having cheese. By now, he is not dependent on others but is self-reliant. Now a worker at a hotel, he leaves for Nepal Dairy in Lainchowr in order to fulfill the long unfulfilled yearning. He buys a piece of cheese for three hundred rupees but immediately starts vomiting. Did he sweeten his mouth for years for this? The untasted turns out to be a choicer wine.

“Betrayal” chronicles the story of a friendship that flourished between the central character Gautame, and Mahesh in Mumbai, India; their struggle in the foreign land and their experiences of being recruited in the Maoist army after returning to Nepal. But the denouement of the story is completely different. Gautame, who is returning from Hong Kong after he left the Maoists and went abroad, is arrested at the airport on Mahesh’s instruction. Confined inside a cell in a jail, he mulls over his past, intimate moments with Mahesh and the betrayal by a friend who he thought was very close to him.

“Law and Order” revolves around Bishnu, a new recruit at Police Headquarters. He steals vegetables from a neighbor’s courtyard, in what seemed like a huge effort. Then he is bewildered. Is that because of his hunger for the vegetables or for the young lass who lives there? The title story “The End of the World,” reflects a set of Nepali attitudes: words circulate and rumors fly fast in Nepal about the end of the world every now and then; the superstition; and Nepalis’ wish to eat good food before dying. “Matchmaking” depicts how women are examined like goods kept for sale before their marriage.

For me, the best story of the collection is “Blockade.” In it, the hunger for food is presented in two ways: Ram Bahadur Bomjom, who is meditatating without any food for several months, has drawn crowds. National and foreign media persons to god-fearing and inquisitive people to his place of spiritual repose in a forest of Bara. On the other hand, Hasta Bahadur Kathaya who hails from remote Kalikot district in Karnali region visits the meditating man in order to extract the secret of living without food, in the hope that it will solve his village’s perennial problem. How could he survive without food for so many months? Hasta Bahadur embarks on the journey to unravel the mystery so that the problem of hunger will be solved once and for all. He’s so dedicated in his mission that he leaves for the forest in Bara straight from his work in India. He doesn’t see the ‘Buddha Boy’ and seeks help from a monk who says: “The boy is sitting for world peace. He cannot be disturbed.”

Unable to meet the boy, let alone extract the secret of living without eating, he downs local raksi on a roadside stall. Then, he dozes off under a banyan tree only to be woken up by policemen who for a while mistake him for Bomjom. And then, he is suspected of being Maoist. Towards the end, when he is about to reach his home, Maoists force him to donate his money. He arrives home empty handed. Still, he cannot heave a sigh of relief. His wife has eloped, leaving their child dead. Hasta Bahadur, who sets about eliminating hunger, becomes its victim: his child dies of starvation.

These stories reveal a society in flux. After the restoration of democracy in 1990, the hitherto complacent Nepali society is increasingly moving towards one seeking justice and equality. The old hierarchies, ways of life and feudal systems are gradually crumbling. Deeply evocative, the stories present glimpses of small, private dramas that are shaped by larger political happenings.

Compared to neighboring India, the tradition of writing in English is a very recent phenomenon in Nepal. (Even in Pakistan, writers like Mohamed Hanif, Nadim Aslam, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Mohsin Hamid are recently making mark in English writing—I believe this is a renewed thurst mainly because Pakistan is back on the world radar). As a result, in Nepal there are very few writers who write in English. There are only two Nepali fiction writers whose books are published internationally: Samrat Upadhayay and Manjushree Thapa. But a strong possibility is evident in Sushma. The other good point she scores from her stories is that it tries to fill the void in literature about the ten-year long Maoist insurgency. However, it is not conflict-focused and it does not depict the incidents of violence and counter violence, and its direct impact on people who were caught in it.

Unlike other works by English writers in Nepal, Joshi’s stories are firmly rooted in Nepal’s soil. Published by FinePrint, The End of the World (price 250 Nepali rupees) has some grammatical errors here and there.

First published in Nepal Monitor.

Red Sun: The Road Less Travelled

This appeared in The Kathmandu Post yesterday.

In the summer of 2004, a journalist friend of mine travelled to the Maoist headquarters of Rolpa, hoping to meet the combatants. After a month-long journey through Rolpa and Rukum, the hinterland in the Mid Western region, he could not stumble upon a single combatant. He returned empty handed, and talked about it with his colleagues in cosy Kathmandu newsroom. Nevertheless, his travelogue was published in the Nepali language weekly newsmagazine, titled: “A Red Fort without Combatants.”

This came to my mind while reading Sudeep Chakravarti’s book Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country. Despite several attempts, the author fails to meet the combatants holed up deep in India’s backwater. Towards the end of the book, he embarks on a tour of Jharkhand, hoping to meet gun-toting guerrillas. Instead, he ends up pondering the beauty of the place: “Photography was born for this.”

However, this should not deter a tenacious reader from enjoying the fascinating book that blends travelogue and reportage to tell the stories of atrocities committed by both the Maoists and the state. The Indian government’s lackadaisical response to the threat caused by Maoists seems to partly propel his inquiry.

It was only in April 2006 when Nepal’s Maoists had already joined hands with parliamentary political parties to undertake peaceful mass protest to overthrow the monarchy that India awoke to the magnitude of Maoist crisis. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh termed the Naxal violence ‘greatest internal security threat.’

Sudeep writes in the preface: “Maoism is not our greatest security threat. Poverty, non-governance, bad justice and corruption are. Maoist presence in a third of India merely mirrors our failings as a nation.” He further elaborates on the goal of writing the book: “I wanted to adopt a role of a storyteller, to attempt to tear the veil of denial that urban, middle-class-and-up, policymaking India lives behind without realising there’s a poison pill inside the nation—of the nation’s own making.”

On his flight from Mumbai to Raipur, the capital of Chhattisgarh, the state most ravaged by ‘people’s war,’ the author meets his potential readers: Ritu Jain and SD Karmalkar, the former a graduate of India’s top business school and now an employee at American Express and the latter a manager at ACC Limited. The two are the epitome of “urban, middle-class-and-up” India that he aspires to inform through his book. He strikes a conversation and both like him seem worried about the violence and counter violence especially in the mineral rich and tribal dominated Chhattisgarh. The state has also become a laboratory for state sponsored vigilante groups thanks to the formation of controversial and notorious Salwa Judum in which the tribespeople are pitted against the Maoists. (The notion of arming civilians to crush rebels also found its way into Nepal’s Maoist insurgency. In 2005, retaliation forces under the name of Pratikar Samiti were formed in Tarai districts of Kapilbastu and Nawalparasi. Mohid Khan, a leader of such vigilante group in Kapilbastu was later killed in a communal violence).

But Chhattisgarh is only the tip of the iceberg. The Red Corridor (dubbed “Pashupati to Tirupati” by LK Advani), covers 12 states, from Bihar in the north and West Bengal in the east, to Andhra Pradesh in the south and the edges of Maharashtra in the west. It is also home to India’s underbelly where casteism, corruption, injustice, poverty and illiteracy hold sway. And, Maoists with their ideology of encircling city from village, easily bank on the state’s apathy and its absence in those areas.

The Naxalism or Naxalite movement can be traced to a small village called Naxalbari, near Siliguri in West Bengal. In 1967, a group of Bengalis launched an armed uprising led by Charu Mazumdar and Kanu Sanyal. The rebellion was quickly suppressed. Mazumdar died in detention, but Kanu, who dissented with the former is “among the few on-ground leaders and participants who still live in and around ground zero.” The writer even manages to sneak into Nepali border side of Kakkarbhitta where he runs into a Maoist pro-democracy protest in the spring of 2006.

Had the writer travelled a little further west in Jhapa district, he would have come across a remnant of Naxalbari in Nepal. In 1971, a handful of young communists from Jhapa, inspired by Naxalite movement, launched an armed uprising. But after the massacre of a few local ‘feudal lords’, the movement was swiftly crushed. This incident which is considered precedence to Maoist ‘people’s war’ is not mentioned in the book.

By juxtaposing Indian Maoists with their Nepali counterpart, the writer suggests Indian comrades to follow Nepal’s path. But this seems like a wishful thinking. Of late, the gulf between Indian Maoists and Nepali comrades has widened. CPI Maoist’s recent decision to call Nepali Maoists ‘revisionist’ says it all.

Visiting Palace-Museum in Nepal

A year after Nepal’s last king, Gyanendra Shah, vacated the royal palace in Kathmandu, I queued up for hours to see behind the walls of the building that for years remained shrouded in mystery. Soon I noticed that it’s not the large, ornate rooms that draw the most attention, but the site of a royal massacre eight years ago that threw the country into political upheaval.

It had been three and a half months since the government opened the palace-turned-museum to the public. Three teenage girls stood before me. One of them peeked through the iron fences for a glimpse of the sprawling palace area. Inside, manicured lawns were visible, birds were chirping in the spacious garden. I overheard the girls talk about former princess Himani Shah’s recent adventure at paragliding in Pokhara, a popular tourist town. The cacophony of vendors scrambling to sell mineral water bottles and ice-cream seemed to be subdued by endless honking of the vehicles on the adjacent road. It was just past noon and the sun was merciless.

Lonely amidst the crowd that moved in snail’s pace, I mulled over the ill-fated monarchy. I was in Dubai’s International Airport in an early June 2001 night when I heard the news of the royal massacre. I lived there in a self-imposed exile, working at a McDonald’s, hoping to earn some petro dollars, trying to gain my share of the Arabian boom. A combination of circumstances—joblessness and the desire to cross the oceans—had taken me to United Arab Emirates in the autumn of 1998.

At the outset, I could not believe the news of the massacre. I thought it could be one of the rumors circulating back home. It was mid-night in Dubai’s state of the art airport that welcomed the passengers from almost every corner of the world.

In the night of June 1, 2001, Crown Prince Dipendra, clad in combat fatigues, armed with assault rifles and pistols, and high on drugs and alcohol, killed most of his family including King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya. Upset, apparently because his mother did not let him marry his sweetheart, he had entered the shooting frenzy. He later shot himself. The prince was anointed king as he lay unconscious in a military hospital. He died two days later. The throne passed to his uncle Gyanendra who was absent from the royal banquet, fueling the suspicion among common people.

It was a difficult time for Nepal’s monarchy. The virtual obliteration of royalty happened in the midst of a ruthless Maoist “people’s war.” The country seemed on the brink of collapse. One Maoist ideologue even wrote an obituary of the institution of monarchy. A year after the mass murder, I was planning to return home winding up my four year sojourn in the Gulf.

Many of my well-wishers said it was not the right time to go back to Nepal. I did not pay heed to them. But even as I was booking my airline ticket, King Gyanendra dismissed the elected government and formed a caretaker government headed by his loyalists. His bloodless coup of February 1, 2005 was the final act in his effort to begin an autocratic rule in the country. A joint struggle by political parties and Maoists a year later forced him to step down. Following the Constituent Assembly elections in April 2008 in which Maoists won by 38 percent, the king was booted out of the palace. The king’s exit fulfilled one of the major demands of the former rebels.

As I stood in line, these recollections and images of the past flashed in mind. After paying 100 Nepali Rupees (USD 1.33), I entered into the palace. On my way, the security men asked to switch my cell phone off; taking picture was strictly prohibited, they told me. Visitors comprised kids, young men, women and the elderly. School children, ferried in buses, easily outnumbered them.

A big hall down the entrance overwhelmed me. I was greeted by huge portraits of former kings in their heavily jeweled regal garbs. There the walls are mirrored while the floor is covered with red carpet. As I negotiated the narrow passageways, I came across several rooms named after Nepal’s 75 districts. Most of them seemed reserved for the visiting dignitaries. Other rooms have porcelain knickknacks and family snapshots.

I learned that currently the museum employs, but it does not have trained guides for the tour. Employees are stationed each room to guard the valuables. The museum, it appears, will soon be able to collect its own resources to afford to recruit the needed personnel. In the four months since February end this year when it opened to the public, the museum has earned over USD 1, 25, 000 from entry tickets. So far, 1, 56, 087 people have visited the landmark.

In a corner of a shelf, in the book-lined room, I found a series of tomes by Joseph Conrad, Agatha Christie, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo and William Shakespeare. I wondered if any of the royal members read those classics. After the massacre, a few writers drew an analogy between Shakespearean tragedies and the bloodbath that took place inside the palace.

I entered the royal bedchamber which actually underwhelmed me. It’s not very big and the room is rather congested. Many middle class urban Nepalis favor king-sized bed and theirs can easily outsize the one I saw for the king. But the banquet hall with a capacity of 110 guests turned out to be impressive. Another attraction was the gold-and-silver crafted ceremonial throne. But the specter and the crown were mysteriously missing. A palace official told me it will be on display soon. But his body language betrayed his assurance.

Still, the most important item—the site of the shooting—turned up only at the end of the tour. An army man, with an assault rifle slung in his body and dressed in battle fatigues, guarded the entrance. This eerily reminded me of Dipendra whose action on the midsummer night paved the way for the end of monarchy in Nepal.

It is an open site, without most of the original structure. The building was dismantled after Gyanendra took over as monarch. At the time, nobody could question anything that happened inside the palace, which remained inaccessible even to the Prime Minister, let alone the common folk. A culture of secrecy pervaded the royal premises. But even in this newfound freedom after my country was declared a republic, I was dismayed at what lay ahead of me.

It’s a patch of a leveled-ground beside the main palace. Visitors threw curious glances and tried to locate the spots where each royal was killed.

A tall man who was guiding his elderly parents seemed like a perfect guide.

The queen died here, the king fell there, he told them, matter-of-factly.

The barren land looked an unlikely site for the nation-shattering massacre. Bullet marks were visible at the wall of the palace. I could not believe that an entire clan was wiped out in this non-descript place.

It is a small part of the 753-ropani (over 37 ha) Narayanhiti palace, named after a water-tap (“hiti”) for Narayan, the Hindu god of preservation, remains off-limits to the public. The area also includes royal gardens, foreign ministry offices, military quarters, and a home for Ratna Rajya Laxmi, the former queen mother. The actual museum area occupies only 219 ropanis (about 11 ha). The museum is still in the making for a wider public access. Officials told me so far 44 sets of CCTVs have been installed in the interior of the palace. More will be added. A Daimler Benz car gifted by Hitler to late king Tribhuvan, too, will be on display.

The palace I saw betrayed the grand public perceptions of monarchy and its institutions. I guess it’s got to do with our culture in that we are in awe with someone who rules. In Nepali language, someone pampered or important is called “raja” (king). Similarly, “sarkar” also denotes both to government and royal members. A raja cannot be ordinary, although he could be just like everyone else living in his ordinary palace.

As I came out of the ill-fated building, I found out that people had varied reasons for visiting it. Some came out of reverence for monarchy. Others, like me, out of curiosity. I found myself contemplating about my country, an awkward republic we have where the talk of revival of monarchy haunts us, every now and then.

Originally published in Nepal Monitor.

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

This appeared in today’s The Kathmandu Post.

Life lessons

Deepak Adhikari

What would you do if you learned you have only a few months to survive? What wisdom would you share if you knew it was your last chance? What legacy would you like to leave?

Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, mulled over these questions. At age 47, he was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. He was going through the treatment of chemotherapy and his most recent treatment hadn’t worked. He had just months to live. He was asked by the University to give a last lecture as per the US tradition in which professors give talks titled “The Last Lecture”. Randy writes in the introduction of the book by the same title: “If I were a painter, I would have painted. If I were a musician, I would have composed music. But I am a lecturer. So I lectured.”

What would a dying man talk about? Death, you may think. But the audience which consisted of his wife, friends, journalists, colleagues and students were pleasantly surprised when he gave a highly motivating and life assertive lecture assisted by PowerPoint, titled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.” He listed his childhood dreams: being in the zero gravity, playing in the NFL, authoring an article in the World Book Encyclopaedia, being captain Kirk, winning stuffed animal, and being a Disney imagineer. Surprisingly, he had been able to fulfil all of his childhood dreams. The slideshows and the follow up book talk about how he succeeded in fulfilling them. In the first chapter, he writes: “I won a parent lottery. I was born with the winning ticket, a major reason I was able to live out my childhood dreams.”

One of the audiences in the Carnegie Mellon hall was a Wall Street Journal columnist. When Jeffrey Zaslow heard about Randy’s last lecture, he knew there was a good story behind it. So, he asked WSJ to fund for his travel to Pittsburgh. It rejected the idea citing lack of budget. But Jeffrey was undeterred. He drove 286 miles from Detroit to Pittsburgh to cover the event on Sept. 18, 2007. The event featured in the WSJ under the title: “A Beloved Professor Delivers the Lecture of a Lifetime.” He not only wrote the story but also collaborated with Randy on a book. Jeffrey talked to Randy when he rode his bike around his neighbourhood in south-eastern Virginia. He turned those conversations to the stories that were published as a book, making it to the bestseller’s list. Apart from Randy’s heart-warming story that defies death, there was also a story of journalistic dedication that surfaced from the last lecture.

I was in Pittsburgh when Randy lost his battle to cancer on July 25, 2008. I was working at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette under a six-month fellowship programme. In course of exploring the city, I visited Carnegie Mellon University in Oakland, Pittsburgh. But I came to know about Randy only after his death. Mark Roth, a staff writer at Post-Gazette wrote a moving obituary on Randy, an award winning teacher and researcher who had worked with Adobe, Google, Electronics Arts (EA) and Walt Disney. So did Jeffrey Zaslow.

When I returned home in early September last year, I made sure that The Last Lecture was one of the dozen books I brought along with me. Back in Nepal, I would discover Jagdish Ghimire, a seasoned author who has almost become a Nepali version of Randy Pausch. After knowing that Ghimire is diagnosed with terminal cancer, I borrowed Antarmanko Yatra, a memoir-cum-autobiography that won prestigious Madan Puraskar, from a book-loving friend. While reading the book, I could not help but compare Ghimire with Pausch: though oceans apart, the zeal of life, positive thinking and enthusiasm are the hallmark of both individuals. Listening to Ghimire’s lecture in several literary gatherings, I realised that he too was full of life, humorous; there was no hint of his imminent death. He has even remarked in a recent programme organised by American Embassy that he has defied death.

At one point in the book, Randy says: “Time is all you have. And you may find one day that you have less than you think.” This coming from a person who knew he was soon going to die. The book is full of anecdotes, motivational tips, and life-lessons that Randy hoped would illuminate his children’s life in his absence. Randy had married his sweetheart Jai (pronounced “Jay”). They had three kids: Logan, Chloe and Dylan. In his final days, he made sure that he devoted his time for his family. He left no stone unturned to secure a good future for them.

The Last Lecture combines humour, inspiration and intelligence. It forces you to pause and ruminate over your own life. The anecdotes and vignettes linger long after the final sentence is read. Schedule your time with this book.

Sold: A Novel by Patricia McCormick

This appeared in The Kathmandu Post today:

A sold daughter
Deepak Adhikari

In Sold, American author Patricia McCormick’s coming-of-age novel, the harsh reality of life in a mountain village in Nepal is presented in stark vignettes. The story of Lakshmi, a girl in the village of Goldhunga, narrated in first person, is deceptively simple yet very poignant.

A graduate of journalism from Columbia University, Patricia embarked on a research of Nepali girls’ trafficking into India (some estimate says 12,000 of them are trafficked to India every year), through a grant by New York Foundation for Arts. The result was a heart-wrenching story of a girl, mired in poverty, sold into prostitution in an Indian brothel. The characters are thinly veiled real life people.

The 269-page novel, which was a finalist for the US National Book Award 2006, depicts the tragic life of women and girls in rural Nepal where a cruel combination of illiteracy, poverty, superstition and backwardness force them to survive in very tough circumstances.

Flipping through the pages of Sold, I was reminded of Sandra Cisneros, the Latino author of The House on Mango Street. In several vignettes, Cisneros weaves the stories of Esperanza, a Mexican-American girl growing up in the United States. The only thing common in these two novels is the method of storytelling. Unlike Esperanza’s, Lakshmi’s world is that of deprivation, abject poverty and hardship.

However, a vignette titled “Difference between a Son and a Daughter” can be likened to the one in The House on Mango Street: “Boys and girls live in two different universes.” In Nepal too, during childhood, a son is pampered while a daughter has to follow strict rules in the patriarchal setting. In the story, it emerges that the difference is stark: “A son will always be a son, they say. But a girl is like a goat. Good as long as she gives you milk and butter. But not worth crying over when its time to make a stew.”

Some of the pieces are as short as 3-4 lines; they can be read like poetry. There are white spaces here and there in the book. The author has remarked that the empty spaces are meant to play with the reader’s imagination.

In the vignette titled “Maybe”, the mother and daughter indulge in a luxury. It turns out to be a cigarette her mother has hidden for the rainy days. But the euphoria soon ends when the incessant monsoon rain destroys their mud house, rendering them hapless and helpless. Lakshmi’s irresponsible stepfather sells her to a strange city woman for eight hundred rupees. Gullible Lakshmi, only 13 at the time, is deceived by everyone: she was thinking all along that she was going to work as a housemaid in the city.

After crossing the border and ending up in a brothel probably in Calcutta, she undergoes inhuman torture at the hands of Mumtaz to whom the so-called uncle-husband (she was instructed to call the trafficker her husband in the Indo-Nepal border in order to deceive the police) sells her to. Before that there are layers of transaction that show a complex web of trafficking. She ends up in a jail-like brothel ironically named Happiness House.

The girls in the brothel, ranging from a 10-year-old to middle aged women, are forced to have sex with strangers. They are caught in an endless cycle of threats. At times the hell-like atmosphere is lightened up with small pleasures. After all, once you are familiar with the surroundings, you grow used to it. Lakshmi meets a boy named Harish with a David Beckham haircut who teaches her some English words. There are characters like Shilpa who loves movies, and Monica who is friendly with her clients. They learn things clandestinely and hide their memorabilia.

When Pushpa, a fellow inmate falls sick, Mumtaz says, “If you don’t get out of the bed and see customers today, you are on the street.” The brothel owner’s cruelty knows no bounds. Pushpa begs not be thrown out. Mumtaz demands that she sell her daughter. She thunders: “In a few years, when she is old enough, I can make a lot of money with her.”

A vivid scene of police raid in the Happiness House reminded me of a documentary I watched on BBC a few years ago. In it, underage girls were shown emerging from a cave-like room. When tipped off about police raid, Lakshmi and other underage girls are kept in a structure where it’s difficult even to breathe.

The story ends as Lakshmi is waiting for a kind-hearted American who promises her to rescue from the hell-hole. In the denouement, Mumtaz is already nabbed by the police but Lakshmi’s fate is left ambiguous. The novel poses a question on its beautiful yellow cover: Can she ever be free? The answer probably is no because the cross-border trafficking still goes on unabated.

Q&A with Samrat Upadhyay

In mid April, I received an email from US based Nepali-English writer Samrat Upadhyay. In it, he informed me about an upcoming event in Washinton, DC in which he was reading excerpts from his book for a charity organization Committed. He wondered whether I was interested to cover the event for Kantipur Daily (Nepali version of this interview is published at Koseli, the daily’s Saturday supplement). I mailed him a set of questions and he replied them after the event on April 26:

In an email you said, this is the first time you are reading an extract from your book for a charity event. How did you feel?

It was great to be reading for Community Members Interested (COMMITTED, an all-voluntary nonprofit organization focusing on Nepal run by a group of young, dynamic Nepalis living in the Washington, D.C. area and led by Jayjeev Hada. COMMITTED helps Nepali communities in areas of poverty alleviation, land use, health, and public facilities. It is doing some very valuable work in Nepal. Currently, it’s working with Open Learning Exchange, Nepal, to provide computer-based education to all of Nepali children. I was happy and humbled to be supporting COMMITTED in doing what is clearly encouraging work that’s providing tangible benefits to underprivileged communities in Nepal.

What was the most interesting question from the audience and what was your answer?

The most interesting question was from a waiter at The Himalayan Heritage restaurant in Washington, D.C., where one of the readings was held. The young man had read all of my books and asked me whether the decrease in depiction of sex in my subsequent books after Arresting God in Kathmandu had to do with any external pressure or criticism I might have faced. I was struck by how eloquent, and forthright, the young man was. I answered that I was younger when I wrote Arresting, and that a writer’s interest and focus can, and should, change with books. I also cautioned him not to discount erotic scenes from my forthcoming books entirely.

What is your thought on art as an instrument of social change? Are you for Art for Art’s sake?

I advocate neither art for art’s sake nor art for social change. Art that’s merely self-reflective can be experienced as narcissist and closed; on the other hand, art that’s geared toward social change can also become pedantic and propagandist. On the whole, I do believe what Nobel Prize-winner writer Nadine Gordimer, quoting Barthes, has said: that a writer’s enterprise is his “essential gesture as a social being,” that the creative act is not isolated and self-enclosed, that “history evidences it, ideology demands it, society exacts it.” Art, if used properly, can provide both aesthetic pleasure and be a tool for social change.

Can you tell us about your upcoming novel Queen’s Pond?

The Queen’s Pond (now named Buddha’s Orphans) charts the life-history of two characters from their childhood to old age, and in the process covers several decades of recent Nepali history. It’s the story of an orphan haunted by visions of his mother who abandoned him, of a young woman who abandons her life of privilege to marry for love—of a country’s rapid, whirlwind transformations. It’s the longest work I’ve written; it was close to 800 pages in its original draft, but now it’s whittled down to a little bit more than 500.

Your last book was titled The Royal Ghosts, your upcoming novel is The Queen’s Pond? Why this fixation on royalty? (at a time when Nepal’s been declared a republic)

The Queen’s Pond is a reference to Rani Pokhari, not to the royalty that was booted out of the palace.

On your visit to Nepal two years ago, you mentioned about The Queen’s Pond saying “it’s baffling me.” You hinted that the form is new. Can you elaborate on this?

The Queen’s Pond grew out of my desire to write a novel that played with narrative time, that moved back and forth through the history of my characters. My previous novel, The Guru of Love, had been a strictly chronological affair, with a plot structure that was linear and uncomplicated, and with three characters around which the story revolved. The Guru of Love was the perfect tale for a first-time novelist. But for my second novel I wanted something that’d use the capacity of the novel form to stretch our conventional notions of time, especially in relation to Nepali history. In retrospect, it seems that I wanted to demonstrate that our lives are intertwined with lives from the past, that “life repeats itself,” if you will. For this reason writing the novel was difficult and challenging. And at that time when I talked to you, I was still struggling with it.

The recession is hitting every industry in the US. Is book publishing affected?

Certainly. If anything, it’s even more difficult to get published in the current economic environment. The big American publishers are suffering, and mid-sized publishers are faring badly. Literary fiction in particular is not doing well.

Tell us about your upcoming visit to Nepal.

I will be visiting Nepal the first two weeks of July, and I will be bringing with me two of my graduate creative writing students from Indiana University, poet Magda Sokolowski and fiction writer Andres Sanabria, for a literary/cultural trip. The trip is a result of a grant provided to me by Indiana University, and the project is titled, “The Writer in the World: Cultural Space and Displacement.” During their stay in Nepal, Magda and Andres will, apart from visiting cultural sites, conduct writing workshops with some school children as well as participate in literary interactions. Once they return to the U.S. they will write creative pieces that address their transformative experience. It’s the first time this has happened in our program, so the students here are very excited.

Links: My piece on Samrat published at OhmyNews International
An old blog post after the release of The Royal Ghosts

Check out pieces written by Magda and Andres after their Nepal trip:
Pic courtesy: COMMITTED.

Between the Assassinations

Below is my piece on Aravind Adiga’s short story collection Between the Assassinations published at The Kathmandu Post:

The stories of Kittur

Deepak Adhikari

Set in the period between the killings of two Indian prime ministers (Indira Gandhi in 1984 and Rajiv Gandhi in 1991), Between the Assassinations weaves the tales of Kittur, a small town in India’s south-western coast, in between Goa and Calicut. Although Aravind Adiga wrote these stories before The White Tiger, which won the 2008 Booker Prize, they came out only after his debut novel.

A collection of twelve untitled short stories, Between the Assassinations is populated with characters that range from an illiterate Muslim teenager working at a train station, a terrorist who lures him into a potential act of terror, a rich, half-caste student who decides to explode a bomb in a college to an editor unable to come to terms with truth. There are little misunderstandings and twists of fate, like the one where a young boy looking for a bride ends up with a mysterious disease. But the most important character in the book is the town itself.

Kittur with its diversity, its social fabric woven in each story, is almost personified. It is given a lifelike quality. It also plays a central role in each story, its presence is felt everywhere. Every story is preceded by an introduction of the setting. For instance, in the first story, the train station is introduced thus: “The arches of the train station frame your first view of Kittur as you come in as a passenger on a Madras Mail (arrival early morning) or the West Coast Express (arrival afternoon). The station is dim, dirty, and littered with discarded lunch bags that stray dogs poke their noses into; in the evenings, the rats come out.” What follows is Ziauddin’s struggle to find work in a hostile town. A chance encounter with a ‘stranger’ leads to his complicity in a possible terror attack.

Like RK Narayan, another South Indian novelist who set most of his stories in Malgudi, an imaginary town, Adiga has clinically examined the life and characteristics of this real South Indian town. The book unravels the characters’ frustration, corruption, faltering relationships and search for elusive truth. But unlike Narayan, whose stories are set during a rather peaceful period of colonial India, Adiga depicts an India replete with cruelty, banality and division along ethnic and religious lines. Adiga’s fictional world is more complex and therefore more authentic than that of Narayan, who centered his stories on the simple life of a small town that seemed unaware of the world outside its boundary.

However, Adiga’s characters are also everymen who grapple with life’s challenges. One such character is Abbasi. When the story opens, Abbasi is entertaining an official from the Electricity Board (“He was a fat, black man in a blue safari suit, with a steel ballpoint pen in its pocket”). Abbasi, a Muslim “with a streak of grey in his beard which he did not attempt to dye”, runs a factory that produces export-quality shirts.

But the most important task for him seems to be bribing corrupt government officials (“Corruption. There is no end to it in this country.”) Abbasi laments that “ever since Mrs. Gandhi died, this country is falling apart.” He then drives his white Ambassador to Canara Club to play snooker and have drinks with friends. After many pegs of whisky, he realizes he cannot go home for fear of his wife’s nagging. He drives to the port where he meets smugglers, car thieves and thugs. He feels at home with them because “while they sipped tea, nothing would happen to Abbasi.” Camaraderie among Muslims has pervaded the area: “The sense of solidarity among Muslims at the port had deepened since the riots.” Through the character of Abbasi, Adiga has uncovered the all-pervasive corruption that has plagued Indian bureaucracy.

Mixing reportage and narrative (Adiga is a former Time magazine correspondent), the Indian author creates a big canvas with a wide range of finely drawn characters. A chronology dating from 31 October 1984 to 21 May 1991 is included at the end of the book.

The stories in this collection delve deeper into the extraordinary transformation of India. What emerges is a group portrait of individuals whose lives are shaped and damaged by casteism, corruption, terrorism, injustice, communal riots, extreme poverty and underdevelopment. Adiga offers a microcosm of India that is brutal, and hence credible.

In fact, Adiga’s short story collection is more nuanced than his better known novel. Every fiction writer struggles with form i.e. whether to write long fiction or short. For Adiga, the verdict is out: the short story is his forte.