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Ncell Nepal Literature Festival-2012 Special Edition
ISSUE- 07 | SEPTEMBER 2012
ISSUE 07 | SEPTEMBER 2012
THE NEW MODELS IN TOWN
Left to right: Hiranya Kumari Pathak Geeta Keshari Dhruba Chandra Gautam Durga Lal Shrestha Bairagi Kainla Photograph by Kishor Kayastha
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"NO MAN IS WELL READ UNTIL HE'S READ"
BE HERE THE MOST ECLECTIC BOOKSTORE IN TOWN
20-23 September 2012
NEPAL'S FIRST INTERNATIONAL LITERARY EXTRAVAGANZA
NEPAL LITERATURE FESTIVAL
20-23 SEPTEMBER. 2012, KATHMANDU
Join us. Entry is free. 11 am-6 pm daily Nepal Academy Kamaladi, Kathmandu
bookworm Gyan Mandala (Near St. Mary's School), Jhamsikhel-3, Lalitpur Phone No.: 01-5546812, www.bookwormonthenet.com
PARTICIPATING AUTHORS AAKAR ANIL ABHAYA SHRESTHA ABHI SUBEDI ADVAITA KALA AJAY DIXIT AJAYA BHADRA KHANAL AKHILESH UPADHYAY AMAR NYAUPANE AMISH TRIPATHI ANBIKA GIRI ANIL SHAH ANIRUDRA THAPA ASHESH MALLA BASANTA BASNET BASANTA PRAKASH BASANTA THAPA BASUDEV ADHIKARI BHUPEEN VYAKUL BHUPENDRA KHADKA BIKRAM SUBBA BIPLAV DHAKAL BISHNU SAPKOTA BUDDHISAGAR CHAITANYA MISHRA CHANDRA GHIMIRE CK LAL DAYAHANG RAI DEEPAK ADHIKARI DHANANJAY SHARMA DHARMA ADHIKARI DHRUBA CHANDRA GAUTAM DINESH KAFLE DURGA GHIMIRE GANESH RASIK GEETA TRIPATHI GHANSHYAM BHUSAL GIRISH GIRI BHUWAN DHUNGANA GOVINDA BARTAMAN HARI ADHIKARI HARI SHARMA
JAGADISH GHIMIRE JHARANA BAJRACHARYA KHAGENDRA LAMICHHANE KHAGENDRA SANGRAULA GOVINDA RAJ BHATTARAI KIRAN KHAREL KISHOR PAHADI KISHORE NEPAL KRISHNA GYANWALI KRISHNA SHARBAHARI KUNDA DIXIT KURCHI DASGUPTA LAXMAN P. GAUTAM MADHAV POKHREL MAHESH B. SHAH MAHESH POUDEL MANA PRASAD SUBBA MANJUL MANU MANJIL MOHAN MAINALI MOMILA NAGENDRA THAPA NARAYAN DHAKAL NARAYAN SHRESTHA NARAYAN WAGLE NAVARAJ LAMSAL NAYAN RAJ PANDEY NISHCHAL BASNET PRANAY RANA PRATYOUSH ONTA RAAMESH KOIRALA RABAT RAJAN MUKARUNG RAJEEV D JOSHI RAJENDRA THAPA RAJNEESH RAMAN GHIMIRE RAMESH DHUNGEL RAMESH KSHITIZ RAMESH RANJAN
RICHA BHATTARAI ROCHAK GHIMIRE ROSHAN SHERCHAN SAGUNA SHAH SANAT WASTI SANAT REGMI SARAD PRADHAN SAROJ DHITAL SARUBHAKTA SEEMA AAVAAS SEWA BHATTARAI SHARADA SHARMA SHARMILA KHADKA DAHAL SHASWAT PARAJULI SARAT CHANDRA WASTI SHEKHAR KHAREL SHIVANI SINGH THARU SHRAWAN MUKARANG SHYALPA TENZIN RINPOCHE SITAL KADAMBINI SUDARSHAN GHIMIRE SUDHEER SHARMA SULOCHANA MANANDHAR SUNIL GANGOPADHYAY SUNIL POKHREL SURAJ VAIDYA SURESH KIRAN SURESH RAJ SHARMA TEJESHWAR BABU GONGHA TSERING RITAR SHERPA UJJWAL ACHARYA UJJWAL GHIMIRE USHA SHERCHAN VINAYA KASAJU VINOD MEHTA VIPLOB DHAKAL YANGESH YUBARAJ GHIMIRE YUBRAJ KHATIWADA YUG PATHAK
Panelists and programs subject to change
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Few days to go
FOR MORE UPDATES & INFORMATION LOG ON TO www.nepalliteraturefestival.com
9/16/2012 8:31:48 PM
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CONTENTS SPOTTING SUMAN GHIMIRE RABINDRA ADHIKARI SANAT REGMI KALPANA BANTAWA GOPI KRISHNA DHUNGANA KRISHNA DHARABASI SHANKAR TIWARI DIL BHUSAN PATHAK GROWING UP HOW I CAME TO BOOKS BY JUGAL BHURTEL
SUNLIGHT IS ONLINE BY SHRADHA MUKHIYA THE CENTRAL ZOO BY TSERING YANGZOM
12-16
18
PROFILE CHRONICLER OF THE KATHMANDU UNDERWORLD BY DINESH KAFLE 20 HUMBLED BY A FAILURE BY AJIT BARAL 26 SHORT TAKE KALYAN GAUTAM
46
Q&A PASI KOISTINEN KAMAL MANI DIXIT SUBIN BHATTARAI
48 50 102
COVER STORY PAYING HOMAGE TO WRITERS 52 ON BAIRAGI KAINLA BY BIPLAV DHAKAL 53 ON DHRUBA CHANDRA GAUTAM BY GIRISH GIRI 54 ON DURGA L. SHRESTHA BY ANI CHHOYING DOLMA 55 ON GEETA KESHARI BY RAJANI DHAKAL 56 ON HIRANYA KUMARI PATHAK BY GEETA TRIPATHI 57 PHOTO TRIBUTE BY KISHOR KAYASTHA FICTION PLUM BLOSSOMS IN THE FALL BY PRANAYA RANA WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO THE SHARMA FAMILY BY SAMRAT UPADHYAY
58-64
66-68 72-68
POEM ABERDEEN FOR MICHAEL BY SUMAN SUBBA SINGING YOU: THE ONLY SONG I KNOW BY TIKU GAUCHAN FROM MEMORY BY AYUSHMA REGMI YESTERDAY BY PRATEEBHA TULADHAR OPINION CONFESSIONS OF A BOOKAHOLIC BY BISWAS BARAL DON'T JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS FILM BY DIPENDRA LAMA
78-81 82-84
67 74-75 81-82 84
71 98-99
FEATURE FRIENDS, UNINTERRUPTED BY RICHA BHATTARAI
86-88
BYTE WRITERSPEAK INDRA BAHADHUR RAI IRA TRIVEDI MARK TULLY AMISH TRIPATHI ADVAITA KALA
90 91 93 94 94 97
FAVORITE READ THE BOOK I LOVE THE MOST BY KUMAR LAMSAL
100
WHY I WRITE MAHESH BIKRAM SHAH
103
BOOK BYTE NARAYAN WAGLE
104
ISSUE- 07 | SEPTEMBER 2012
DEAR READER, www.fineprint.com.np fineprint@wlink.com.np
We at Read like to make reading and writing glamorous by doing interesting things.
GPO: 19041 Tel: 4008603, 4008578
In the previous issue, which came out last year, on the eve of the Ncell Nepal Literature Festival2011, we had put actor Rajesh Hamal on the
PUBLISHER & CEO NIRAJ BHARI
cover. An actor—and not a writer—on the cover of a magazine that purports to be a books magazine—that caught many by surprise. But our idea was to draw people’s attention
EDITOR
to Rajesh Hamal, the reader and not Rajesh
AJIT BARAL
Hamal, the actor, thereby encouraging them to take up reading.
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
In this issue, we have put a group of imminent
DINESH KAFLE
writers on the cover, treating them like celebrities. But it was not easy executing the cover. First, we
tribute to the greatest lyrical poet that Nepal
were not sure who and how many writers to put
has produced, Madhav Prasad Ghimire; the
on the cover. So we decided to select seven
first time anyone had done so. Many people
writers over sixty at random, but making the
appreciated it so much that we have decided
selection as much representative as possible in
to continue honoring—pictorially, of course—
terms of gender and caste. Second, it was hard
an individual who has played an important role
PRODUCTION
to convince some of them why we could not just
in furthering our understanding of Nepali art, literature and culture. In this issue, we have
TIRTHA NEPAL
take their pictures at their homes and why we had to take them to Chobhar, a place where film
chosen Satya Mohan Joshi, Nepal’s foremost
stars, rather than writers, are taken for a shoot.
culture expert, for the honor.
Third, when the day of the photo shoot came,
We took Joshi to the Patan Museum, a place
one of the writers, Modnath Prashit remained
he knows like the back of his hand, for a photo
bedridden with the flu, and another writer,
shoot. As we walked around looking for right
DISTRIBUTION
Bhuwan Dhungana, excused herself from the
places to take pictures, he regaled us with tales
photo shoot, as her doctor had advised her to
of things at the museum. Half an hour we spent
ABHIMANYU HUMAGAIN
take complete rest having fainted in a program
there was like going on a cultural tour of the
the day before. We thought about postponing
past.
OFFICE ASSISTANTS
the photo shoot, but we had to go ahead with it,
This issue is thicker than previous issues and
SANTOSH THAPA
as the preparation for it had already been made
contains stories by Samrat Upadhyay, Tsering
PRAVESH ADHIKARI
and we had to rush the magazine to press.
Yangzom, Pranaya Rana and Shradha Mukhiya,
We wanted to have a two-fold cover to give
and poems by Prateebha Tuladhar, Suman
importance to the selected writers, in recognition
Subba, Tiku Gauchan, Ayushma Regmi and
of their contribution to the promotion of Nepali
Tenzin Tsundue, apart from the usual features.
literature. And we wanted the cover to look rich.
The issue should be worth reading.
SOALTEE MARGA BAPHAL
So we placed two sofas on a hillock in Chobhar,
Happy reading and enjoy the Festival!
TEL: 4282829, 4030578
sat the writers down and took wide-angle shots of them, with the hills and clouds and setting sun in the backdrop. The result is all there for
Ajit Baral
you to see.
Editor
In the previous issue, we had paid a pictorial
GRAPHIC DESIGN SUBARNA HUMAGAI
MARKETING AND SALES MOHAN OJHA
PRINTED AT PRESS MEDIA
EXPOSURE
GLIMPSES OF THE NCELL NEPAL LITERATURE FESTIVAL-2011
READ.SPOTTING
What Kathmandu
is reading
NEPAL'S FIRST INTERNATIONAL LITERARY EXTRAVAGANZA
On the Ncell Nepal Literature Festival-2011
Suman Ghimire President, Readers' Club, Nepal I read whenever I can take time off my regular work. I like to discuss the books that I have read with friends at the Readers' Club, Nepal, which is a leading book club in the country. At the Club, we discuss on recently published Nepali books on a weekly basis. So I cannot avoid reading them. Pandulipi by Krishna Dharawasi, Loo by Nayan Raj Pandey, Aamaako Mutu by Raamesh Koirala, Open Secret By KP Dhungana, Mera Jiwanka Panaharu by Gaura Prasai, Walliko Dairy by Manisha Gauchan and Swoastitwoko Khoj edited by ArcahnaThapa are some of the Nepali books that I read recently. Currently, I am reading Nepal Nepa in Transition: From Fro People's War to Fragile Peace and Pax Indica: Indica India and the World of the t Twentyfirst Century by Shashi Tharoor. The demand for the first book had increased dramatically after SD S Muni, one on of the con contributors to the book, said that th former king Tribhuvan Tr was rea ready to hand Nepal over ov to India.
Rabindra Adhikari, Youth Political Leader There is a growing disconnect between today's youths and books. It is time that we encouraged youths to take up books. One of the ways to do that is to organize literature festivals. They help make a nation culturally rich. They help us understand the writing trend. They also help bring readers together in one place. Imagine hundreds of readers coming together in one place and talking about books they have liked or disliked! Literature is not a profit-generating field. But without it a country becomes culturally very poor. So one should support literary initiatives. It is heartening that a private sector has come up to support the Ncell Nepal Literature Festival without looking at profit and loss.
INAUGURAL ATTRACTION Formed in 1997, Sukarma is Nepal's most sought-after folkclassical outfit comprising three talented instrumentalists: Dhrubesh Chandra Regmi, Pramod Upadhyay and Shyam Nepali, all of whom belong to illustrious gharanas. Sukarma has received the coveted Kalashree Samman, among others and was the Goodwill Ambassador of Nepal Tourism Year 2011. They will perform during the inaugural session of the Festival on 20 September (4 Asoj).
SPOTTING.READ
THE NCELL NEPAL LITERATURE FESTIVAL WILL BE HELD FROM 20-23 SEPTEMBER
On the Ncell Nepal Literature Festival-2011
What Kathmandu
is reading
Kalpana Bantawa Writer. Her debut novel is coming out this year.
Sanat Regmi, Member Secretary, Nepal Academy The Bookworm Trust must be appreciated for organizing the festival. Actually, we [Nepal Academy] should have been organizing a festival like this one, but we have budgetary constraints. The government money is barely sufficient to pay for our staff and we cannot seek funding from corporate sectors. The festival will play an important role in promoting a reading culture. It will inspire youths to take up writing. It will give readers, young and old alike, a chance to meet and listen to their favorite writers.
Releasing at the Ncell Nepal Literature Festival -2012 SAKAS Author: Jagadish Ghimire
KUNSANGA KAKAKA KATHA (PART I & II)
Publisher: Jagdish
Author: Khagendra Sangraula
Ghimire Pratisthan
Publisher:
Launch Date: Asoj 4
Bibek Shreejanshil
Time: 3-4 pm
Launch Date: Asoj 5
Venue: Academy Hall
Time: 4-5 pm Venue: Academy Hall
I read mostly during my lunch hours and in the evening after I get back home. I recently read Loo by Nayan Raj Pandey, Aamaako Mutu by Raamesh Koirala, Lamppostbata Khaseko Joon by Manu Manjil and Seto Dharatee by Amar Neupane— books which were well received by readers. I am currently reading two books—Jon Krakauer’s Into thin Air and Paramahansa Yogananda's Yogiko Aatmakatha. I had heard about Into thin Air from friends and picked it after I found it in a bookshop. It is an account of an Everest expedition, in which two-thirds of the expedition members succumb. I had read the he Aatmakatha after er borrowing from a friend a few years rs ago. I bought it recently ntly to have it in my collection. Now I am reading it again because I have forgotten much of it. One should read this book for spiritual development.
e h t n i e lb l i t w s r e i f W , l l a h a t k a , bh y u m n e a d h B ca A l a p e N , r o e flo h t g n i e r dur u t a r e it lL a p e N l 12 Ncel 0 2 l a v i Fest
bookworm THE BOOKSTORE
NEPAL LITERATURE FESTIVAL WILL BE HELD AT THE NEPAL ACADEMY, KAMALADI, KATHMANDU
SPOTTING.READ
On the Ncell Nepal Literature Festival-2011
What Kathmandu
is reading
Gopi Krishna Dhungana, Journalist, Annapurna Post
Krishna Dharabasi, Writer Organized by the private sector, the Ncell Nepal Literature Festival was an unprecedented literary event in Nepal. The Festival was significant for us writers, as we got a chance to meet readers and publishers and listen to and interact with each other. I launched my own book at the Festival and was able to reach out to a larger audience. The best thing about the Festival was the informal style in which the sessions were conducted. Last year’s Festival went very well and we are eagerly waiting for the second edition. The challenge for the organizer is to give continuity to it.
Releasing at the Ncell Nepal Literature Festival -2012 RATNA BRIHAT NEPALI SAMALOCHANA (Two parts: Saidhantic Khanda Ra Prayogik Khanda) Editors: Rajendra Subedi and Dr. Laxman Prasad Gautam Publisher: Ratna Books Launch Date: Asoj 5 Time: 12-1 pm Venue: Academy Hall
EK PATAK TOKYO Author: Bhisma Upreti Publisher: Ratna Books Launch Date: Asoj 6 Time: 12-1 pm Venue: Academy Hall
The good thing about being a journalist is that one gets free review copies. So I don't usually have to buy books. I read many books at a time. Currently, I am reading Diwaswopna by Jijubhai, Swoastitwoko Khoj edited by Archana Thapa and Pandulipi by Krishna Dharabasi and Open Secret by journalist KP Dhungana. I have a full-time job and am busy putting together a collection of ghazals (Aafai Bhitra) and a collection of poems (Ma Bhitrako Ma) and children stories. So, of late, I am finding it difficult to read through the books.
READ.SPOTTING
What Kathmandu
is reading
THE PROGRAMS WILL GO ON FROM 11 AM. TO 6 PM.
On the Ncell Nepal Literature Festival-2011
Shankar Tiwari Socio-political activist & freelance journalist I don't have a full-time job. So I always have time for books. I usually read books related to political science, sociology and economics, but I also do read fiction on and off. I choose to read fiction during long-haul travels, and serious academic books, which demand grater concentration, when at home. I recently read Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky and am presently reading Democracy and Difference by Seyla Benhabib, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory by Bhikhu Parekh and The Philosophical discourse on Modernism by JĂźrgen Habermas. I am reading the first two books to understand how the growing political differences that we are witnessing in post-2006 Nepal can be better addressed and the third to be well versed on modernism.
Dil Bhusan Pathak, Media Person It is a very good initiative and I congratulate the organizing team for it. Lots of youths and diverse groups of people were present at the Festival, which proves that it was the need of the time. The Festival provides exposure to literature, which is essential for the development of people and society. I appreciate Ncell’s support for the Festival. The support shows that Ncell is serious about its responsibility towards society.
Releasing at the Ncell Nepal Literature Festival -2012 AUTOCRATIC MONARCHY: Politics in Panchayat Nepal Author: L.S. Baral Editors: Pratyoush Onta and Lokranjan Parajuli Publisher: Martin Chautari Launch Date: Asoj 6 Time: 4-5 pm Venue: Academy Hall
NEPALI NIYATRA Editor: Byakul Pathak Publisher: Ratna Books Date: Asoj 7 Time: 12-1 pm Venue: Academy Hall
BOOK BYTE.READ
September 2012 |READ 17
READ.GROWING UP
How I Came to Books I was told that the story was feeble and the author too 'loud'. I was not pleased with the verdict, but in hindsight, I was fortunately rescued by the then chief editor of the Garima monthly Bishnu Bibhu Ghimire from becoming a copy-cat writer. BY JUGAL BHURTEL
I
came from a very modest family and didn’t go to a good school. So I didn’t have access to books and remained shut out from the amazing world of books much of my school life. Until 1982, when I passed out of school, my reading, apart from textbooks, was limited to cheap Hindi pulp fiction and cartoons. To me, pulp fiction and cartoons constituted literature. Cheap Hindi pulp fiction was a rage back then. One of my uncles used to buy dozens of pulp fiction books, and I would steal them and read on the sly. This reading gradually turned me into a voracious reader. Unfortunately, Chandragadhi, my home town, had no libraries or book clubs to satisfy the hunger of a young reader. After my SLC I came to Kathmandu to pursue higher studies. Kathmandu had a few libraries, including the
18 READ | September 2012
Indian Library. I used to frequent it regularly. I started off by reading Hindi poetry and light humor and then turned to books written in an anchalik language, like the ones written by the celebrated Hindi novelist Phanishwar Nath Renu. I found novels with anchalik themes both easier to read and closer to life. Influenced by Renu, I even wrote a short story imitating his language and style, and submitted it to the Garima monthly. It was, however, politely rejected. I was told that the story was feeble and the author too 'loud'. I was not pleased with the verdict, but in hindsight, I was fortunately rescued by the then chief editor of the Garima monthly Bishnu Bibhu Ghimire from becoming a copy-cat writer. This was when I was introduced to books by the gifted BP Koirala, philosophical Lekhnath Paudel, witty Bhupi Sherchan, lyrical Madhav Ghimire, powerful Gopal Prasad Rimal and Vedic scholar Madan Mani Dixit. But still my exposure to literature was awfully inadequate and limited to Nepali, Hindi and a few Urdu books.
After graduating from Engineering College in Pulchowk, I was selected by the Ministry of Education for higher studies in the former Soviet Union. The first few months in Moscow State University of Civil Engineering reminded me of the inadequacy of our school education system. I was ignorant of almost everything that I needed to know if I were to pursue my studies successfully, and also to become a reasonable human being. I knew I had to study harder and read much more than than my Russian classmates. Russians take to reading when still a child. By the time they leave school, they would have read not just Russian writers like Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Lermontov, Chekhov, Gogol, Yesenin, Pasternak, Bulgakov, Sholokhov, Gorky, but also writers from other countries: Maupassant, Hugo, Dumas, Shakespeare, Dickens, Hemingway, Twain, Goethe, Kafka and so on. No wonder I came across as ill-read in front of my classmates. Just to avoid get-
ting mortified while discussing literature in front of Russian girls, I began to explore classics of both Russian and world literature. I read them in Russian as finding books in English was virtually impossible in Mosco back then. One's taste in books, apparently, changes with time. I used to read a lot of fiction then, but now I prefer nonfiction. I enjoy reading books on environment, history, politics, economy, and autobiographies. For the last couple of years I have been writing on Lenin and Leninism, the legacy of October coup, the brutal regime of Stalin, socialism and related philosophy. That requires reading a great deal of Russian history— something which I have been doing lately. The great Canadian writer Yann Martel says, “Reading is a way of getting beyond the confines of your own narrow life”. I agree. Books have made me more tolerant, sympathetic and open to new people and ideas. Bhurtel has a PhD in Environmental Engineering and Management and is a widely read political analyst.
BOOK BYTE.READ READVERTORIAL
READ.PROFILE
Chronicler of the Kathmandu
Underworld A former minister and influential leader of the Rastriya Prajatantra Party, Mirza Dilsad Beg was killed on 29 June 1998 in Sifal, Kathmandu. More than a decade later, on 7 February 2010, media entrepreneur Jamim Shah was gunned down in Lazimpat in broad daylight. The state investigations into these murders (and also other high profile murders committed in Nepal) reported that these murders had links with the Mumbai underworld. But these investigations left many questions unanswered, which prompted crime reporter KP Dhungana to write a book unraveling the murders. In Open Secret, Dhungana reveals why Nepal has become the hub of transnational crimes, why the murders were committed and on whose bidding. Here is a profile of the man. TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPH BY DINESH KAFLE
20 READ | September 2012
PROFILE.READ
September 2012 |READ 21
Photograph : Arpan Shrestha
M
any think that thirteen is an unlucky number, but not the journalist-turned-author KP Dhungana. His debut nonfiction, Open Secret, has sold an unprecedented 5,000 copies in just thirteen days, creating a new landmark in Nepali publishing. A gripping account of seven high profile murders—including that of former minister Mirza Dilshad Beg and media entrepreneur Jamim Shah—committed in Nepal, which is becoming a safe haven for transnational crimes, Open Secret lays bare the secrets behind those murders. One of the finest crime reporters working today, Dhungana became a journalist by chance. He had wanted to become a lawyer and had planned to do a Bachelor in Law after completing a Bachelor in Sociology and Nepali literature. "I was always interested in crime and security issues, which is why I wanted to study law and become a lawyer," says the 32-year old. However, his ambition took a different turn when he went on to do a Diploma in Journalism at Media Point as per the suggestion of one his English teachers at Ratna Rajya Campus. After his diploma, he interned at Rajdhani where he chose to report on the beat of his interest—crime. But he was assigned to report on development issues when he later joined the paper as a staff reporter. It was only after he joined the tabloid Naya Patrika that he again got a chance to work on the subject he liked the way he liked—that is, write in-depth crime stories. "It was out of my sheer interest in issues related to crime that I worked on the crime beat though the image of a crime reporter was not good", says the author who is now a crime reporter at Nagarik Daily. He adds, "Even when I was aware that crime reporting was considered to be subordinate to political reporting, I continued to do crime reporting with a belief that crime is intricately related to the social, political and judicial condition of the country and should be dealt with seriously". Reporting on crime wasn't easy though, as he had to cultivate relationships with criminals and the police for inside information. Dhungana began by interviewing the gangsters of Kathmandu. The first gangster he interviewed was the infamous Chakre Milan. Contrary to his assumption that a don must be scary to look, he found Milan affable and unassuming. And he innocently asked Chakre Milan, "You don't quite look like a don". The don replied: "Do you want me to show you a hundred guns right away?" It was only then that Dhungana understood the gravity of what he had just said. When the interview got published in Naya Patrika, he received wide accolades—and also threatening phone calls
PROFILE.READ from the rivals of Chakre Milan, notably Dipak Manangey. He interviewed Manangey too—and also Kumar Ghaintey and Ganesh Lama. These gangsters would make a good book. That Dhungana knows. But he is not in a hurry to write it. "Writing a book isn't easy," he says. He had no intention of writing a book. And he wouldn't have written Open Secret if the recent murders that he had reported on hadn't had connections with murders committed in a more distant past and the involvement of the Mumbai underworld in the murders hadn't been evident. While researching the murder of Jamim Shah in 2010, it struck him that the murder might have a connection with the murder of Mirza Dilshad Beg committed in 1998. As he dug more, it became apparent that the murder was connected with several other murders. This connection, he thought, should be made public. That's when he decided to write the book. In the course of writing the book, he interviewed almost five hundred people without revealing his intention. "Many people who gave me interviews did not know that I was writing a book," says the author, "otherwise they wouldn't have revealed their secrets to me." While interviewing, he would keep the pen and the recorder away to encourage interviewees to be more forthcoming. No wonder he once had to keep going to the Johns saying that he had a diarrhea and wrote down on napkin paper the information a policeman he was interviewing had shared with him lest he forgot it. This way of interviewing made the task of writing the book a lot more easier. Dhungana had started writing the book in 2010. Just when he had finished the first draft Younus Ansari was shot inside the central jail, and he had to begin research on the incident. When this was done, Faizan Ahmad was killed in Kathmandu, and he had to incorporate the killing into the book. So it took him a long time to complete the book. The book has been worth the wait, though: it's not just flying off the shelves, but also getting rave reviews. However, as happens with every book, it has a fair number of critics. They say that the book does not have anything new to offer. Dhungana refutes such criticism by saying that his intention was not to express his personal views on a certain event or provide extraordinary information that no one was aware of. He was rather concerned about making public information—information that the common people had the right to know—that lay buried in government files or in the memories of police officers involved in the investigations of murders. "I was interested in disseminating the truths and not sensationalizing the murders," he says. "I've not written anything that cannot be verified."
"Even when crime reporting was considered to be subordinate to political reporting, I continued to do crime reporting with a belief that crime is intricately related to the social, political and judicial condition of the country."
September 2012 |READ 23
READ.BOOK BYTE
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BOOK BYTE.READ
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kmfOglk|G6 a'S; September 2012 |READ 25
HUMBLED BY A FAILURE JHARANA BAJRACHARYA SHOT INTO FAME AFTER SHE WAS CROWNED MISS NEPAL AT AGE 16. SHE SHOT INTO EVEN BIGGER FAME WHEN, WITHOUT HER DESIRING IT, SHE WAS OFFERED ONE FILM AFTER ANOTHER. MORE THAN TWO DOZEN FILMS LATER, SHE SUDDENLY DISAPPEARED FROM THE SPOTLIGHT AND TURNED INTO A BIT OF MYSTERY. HERE AJIT BARAL TRIES TO DEBUNK THE MYSTERY SURROUNDING HER. PHOTOGRAPHS BY KISHOR KAYASTHA
READ.PROFILE
We were at a bookstore. Jharana Bajracharya and I. She was browsing books; I tailing her for this profile. She picked up Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson from one of the shelves and began to flip through it. After some time she exclaimed— “Wah.” I craned my neck to read the sentence that seemed to have enthused her: “Life is like a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keeping moving.” “I think I should buy this book,” she said. It struck me as an odd book for her to buy. She is wont to read spiritual books rather than biographies. So I asked her, “Why this book?” “Einstein was a spiritual person, who admired Buddhism. He had even said, ‘If there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism.’ Also, there is some connection between Einstein’s theory of relativity and Buddhism, as both try to investigate the matter.” I let the conversation taper off, having not read Einstein or Buddhism. She bought Eisentein and another book, The Power of a Positive No: How to Say No and Still Get to Yes by William Ury, paid the bill and said, “Shall we.” We went to a coffee shop across the bookstore for a chat. That day she had looked like a person who has renounced everything. She hadn't put on any makeup. Not even kajol, forget about eye shadow, eye liner, lipstick, foundation, etc. Her hair was wiry. And her dress was, well, very, very understated. Anyone who had seen her that day would have had a hard time believing that she was Jharana Bajracharya, Miss Nepal 1997 and a popular actress who
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has played in more than thirty films and countless music videos and advertisements. You would not expect her to look ascetic! But ascetic she looks. And why? We will come to that later. She was sixteen and just out of school and had all the time in the world. Just to keep her occupied, her mother asked her if she wanted to participate in the Miss Nepal competition. She said yes, and a few months after she won the Miss Nepal title. She hadn’t expected to win the title. She had thought that she might be the first runner up at best, behind tall, fair and beautiful Meenakshi Bandana Rana. But when Rana’s name was announced as the first runner she thought, maybe she would be the winner. Crowned Miss Nepal, she got a chance to participate in Miss Word in Seychelles. She was first taken to London where she stayed in the Hilton, sharing a room with Miss Malaysia. In the morning, all the Miss World participants would congregate for breakfast, all decked out in their finest. There were girls from countries like the USA or Venezuela, where girls are groomed from early on to compete in Miss World. But she was a bumbling 16 year old. She couldn't but feel intimidated by them. From London they were taken to Seychelles on a private plane. An hour before the landing they were told to get ready. “Imagine a plane full of 85 girls putting on their makeup,” Jharana says, with a twinkle in her eyes. Jharana was knocked out of Miss World early. But it gave her a much needed exposure. This exposure, she says, is something that she cannot still comprehend. Back in Nepal, she was offered the role of the heroine in
PROFILE.READ Hatiyar, a film directed by Prakash Sayami. The film didn't do well but it, in turn, brought her to the notice of other directors, who queued up to have her sign their films. Suddenly she was thrown into the world of glitter and glamor. In college, she was the focus of attention. Her classmates would be extra-friendly with her and her teachers, extra-caring. This didn't make the task of studying any easier. On top of that she had film commitments. She couldn't balance her study and her professional commitments and dropped out of college. However, professionally she did fine, doing one film after another—Bhutukkai Bhayeni, Siundoko Sindur, Anjuli, Bhai Tika, Maya Garchhu Ma, Chahanchhu Ma Timilai, Pareni Maya Jalaima, Feri Arko Saino—and became one of the most sought after actresses in the Nepali film industry. The attention and adulation that she received without doing much had gone into head. She thought she was soaring high, and higher she wanted to soar. She was young and inexperienced. She didn't know if she had what it takes to get into Bollywood. Yet she packed her bags and off she went to Bombay, the city of dreams, to try her luck in Bollywood Breaking into Bollywood wasn't easy, as she later found out. She did a cameo in Love in Nepal (but she had signed for this film long before she left for Bombay) and acted in a few commercials. But good offers weren't forthcoming. Still, she persevered and continued socializing with the Bollywood people with the hope of getting one good role to burst onto the Bollywood scene. In one of the Bollywood parties, she was introduced to one of the producers who later went on to produce London Dreams, starring Salman Khan, Ajay Devgn and Asin. He told her to meet him at his office the next day. Excited, she went to meet him. After initial pleasantries he told her that he would cast her in London Dreams if she slept with him. "A short, fatso Shikh asking me to sleep with him… imagine!" she said. No way she would have slept with him. "If that is what it takes to break into a film, I wouldn't do a film," she told herself and stormed out of the office. She remained in Bombay, though, frequenting the bookstores looking for books to wheel away time. Books gave her company, like they did when she was growing up. She had come to books when she was still a child. She recalls reading Tintin, Asterix and Archie, phantoms comics. She later
graduated to Nancy Drews and the like. A loner by nature, Jharana didn't like to go out and play with friends. Instead, she would pick up a book from the library her father had built and remain curled up with it. But her reading was limited to the Mills and Boon variety. And it was only in Bombay that she started to read books of a different kind, that is, books that provided answers to questions about life. At that time, she was increasingly being insecure and beginning to lose her bearing and think that cinema was all she knew and that she couldn't start life outside cinema. This is when she got hold of a book by the spiritual philosopher Echkart Tolle, The Power of Now. It taught her that the past and future are illusions and one should live in the present, the eternal present, and the ego self or the mind is not the true self, and that one needs to dismantle one’s ego to live an awakened life. It also drove her into a spiritual journey, which has led her to Buddhism, Yoga, Vipasyana. She is so thoroughly into spirituality now that she reads mostly books which are spiritual, like Crazy Wisdom and Cutting through Spiritual Materialism. These books, by Chogyam Trungpa, teach one how to embark on a spiritual path. Why does she read only spiritual books or novels with a spiritual bent like The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho? And not novels like A Suitable Boy, which lies unread by her bedside. Is she going through a crisis in life and trying to seek guidance on living from those books? Maybe. She says, “When one encounters a problem, one starts to look for a solution.” The crisis in her life began when she went to Bombay to find success, but all see found was failure. However, she says, this was a beautiful failure. "Had I not gone to Bombay, I wouldn't have understood how ephemeral glamor, popularity is; I would have caged myself in the celebritydom; and I would have been less happy now." This failure humbled her, made her modest and simple. That explains why she now looks like any ordinary woman, and not like a woman who has been on the top of the Nepali glamour world. But she could not overcome that failure. After she returned from Bombay, she laid low for two and a half years, spurning film offers, until her close director friend Alok Nembang coaxed her into playing in a film he was making: Kohi Mero. Now she is beginning to accept offers. It seems she wants to move on. For she knows, “Life is like a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keeping moving.”
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READ.SHORT TAKE
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g]kfn cGt/f{li6«o ck/fwLsf] lqm8f:yn alg/x]sf] / ck/fwsf] l;qmLdf /fhgLlts kf6L{x¿, k|x/L k|zf;g, Goflos lgsfo / :yfgLo ck/fwLx¿ uf“l;Psf 5g\ eGg] phfu/ ug{ k':ts ;kmn 5 .
– P;P;kL /d]z v/]n
The # number 1 bestseller
b]ze/ pknAw 5 .
kmfOglk|G6 a'S;
dnfO{ nfU5 of] k':ts Pp6f lxdfnL b]zsf] n]vsn] g]kfnL efiffdf n]v]sf] klxnf] cf/f]x0f bz{g -‘lkmnf];kmL ckm SnfOlDaª’_ xf] . lxdfn cf/f]x0fsf] hl6n cj:yfx¿df cl8P/ hLjgnfO{ cg]s sf]0faf6 x]l/Psf] csf]{ k':ts xfd|f] ;flxTodf 5 h:tf] dnfO{ nfUb}g . 5 eg] klg of] :t/sf] cf/f]x0f pkGof; cfh;Dd csf]{ 5}g .
– dg' dlGhn
ahf/df pknAw 5 .
t/ s;f]s;f] 3fd 8'a]kl5 d klg aN5' wKk dft]sf] ;fFem pHoflnP/ d jl/kl/ a;]/ lkm:; xfF:5 . a6'jf cfP/ 38L x]5{ d]/} pHofnfdf s'g} a]3/ afnsn] sfvem}+ ;'Gb/ pHofnf] e"ld e]6\5 . kf]lvlbG5' PsfGtdf d klg 5ftL / s}n]sfxLF t ;fFRr} ToxLF sf]xL cfP/ af;} a:5 sdnfO{ yfxf 5 ls obfsbf of] ;x/sf] 5]p Pp6f NofDkkf]:6af6 nuftf/ h"gsf] pHofnf] v:5 . -NofDkkf]:6_
NofDk–kf]:6af6 v;]sf] h"g sljsf] vf; klxrfg p;n] n]v]sf sljtfaf6 dfq algg ;S5 . dg' dlGhnsf sfJodf cfljisf/ x'G5, plQmsf] cToGt df}lns /rgf x'G5 clg sflns r]tgf x'G5 . pgsf sljtfdf oyfly{s ;Gbe{sf ;/n ljifo / ljDasf] k|of]u x'G5 . – cle ;'j]bL
dg' dlGhn
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38 READ | September 2012
BOOK BYTE.READ
Ps df]x/ ufO{ k|z:t 5g\ . rf}tf/f]d'lg tn kmfF6df r/fpg hfg'k5{ . uPF . ufO{ x]g{] c? uf]7fnfx? klg 5g\ . sf]xL v]Nb} 5g\ cg]s v]n . sf]xL ufpFb} 5g\ cg]s uLt . sf]xL gfRb} 5g\ cg]s gfr . d s] u?F < dfly rf}tf/fdf l76f x'g} nfu]sf s]6fx? 5g\, k9\b} u/]h:tf, n]Vt} u/]h:tf . d uPkl5 pgLx? cln c;xhh:tf eP . ltgLx?sf] c;xhtfn] d 6Ss cl8PF . hfpFm ls ghfpFm ePF . cfkm};Fu cNdlnPF . uf]ljGbsf cfFvf ddfly k/] . tL d';'Ss xfF;] . Tof] xF;fO dnfO{ :jfutåf/h:t} nfUof] . lgDtf] gkfO{ cfPsL s]6LnfO{ u/]sf] :jfuth:t} . d pgLx?glhs} k'u]F . – …dnfO{ lg sv/f l;sfOb]cf] g .Ú – …cfDbf] /r t ltDnfO{ Û sv/f elgxfNof} .Ú – …eGg cf/ ef], n]Vg cfDb}g Û sv/f eGg hfg]/ ef] < b]Vtf lrlGbgF ÛÚ – …sv/f lrg]l; SofRof}{ <Ú – …ufO{ x]lb{gF .Ú – …s] x]Rof}{ t lg <Ú – …df:6/gL x'Gr' / ltdf]/\c:t} s]6fx/\nfO{ k9fDr' ÛÚ tL xfF;] . d ltgLx?hlt xfFl;gF . – …s]6Lx/\nfO{ k9flDbgf} <Ú – …;Kk}nfO{ k9fDr' ÛÚ ltgLx?n] w"n]kf6L klg NofPsf /x]5g\ . Pp6f k'/fgf] lstfa klg . w"n]kf6Ldf dnfO{ n]Vg lbPgg\ . dfu]sf] eP lbGy] ls s'lGg . dflugF . d}n] e'OFnfO{ g} w"n]kf6L agfPF . e'OF, ltgLx?n] NofPsf] sf7sf] ;fgf] w"n]kf6LeGbf slQ 7"nf] w"n]kf6L xf] eGg] s'/fsf] af]w eof] dnfO{ . e'OFnfO{ w"n]kf6L / 5]:sfnfO{ snd agfpg uf]ljGbn] g} l;sfPsf x'g\ .
September 2012 |READ 39
c?n] TolQ jf:tf gu/] klg uf]ljGbn] d]/f] jf:tf u/] . pgsf] jf:tfn] d]/f] xft ;dfP/ s / v l;sfpg vf]h] . t/, s / v d cfkm}n] n]vF] . – …hfgL /Rof} t ÛÚ – …s / v dfq} t xf] .Ú – …s;/L hfGof} <Ú – …la:of{} < cl:t g} ltDn] g} l;sfsf t xf} lg .Ú – …s:tf] ;Dh]sL . ltDnfO{ kGg cfDr ÛÚ d dVv ePF / pgnfO{ x]/]F . pgn] u, 3 / ª n]Vg l;sfP . d]/f] xft ;dfP/ w]/}a]/;Dd l;sfP . ªdf k'u]kl5 pgn] eg] – …ª eg]sf] ltdL xf} ÛÚ – …s;/L <Ú gfsfyf]KnL ª eg]/ pgn] d]/f] gfssf] b]a|]lt/ kf]/fsf] Kjfndf rf]/ cf}Fnfn] b]vfP, hxfF d]/f] gfs 5]8]sf] Kjfn 5 . /, Kjfndf km'nL km'n]sf] 5 . pgsf] gfs 5]8]sf] 5}g . lsgeg], pgL s]6fdfG5] x'g\ . To;kl5 d s]6L x'F eGg] s'/fsf] cem a9L af]w eof] dnfO{ . uf]ljGbn] af]w u/fOlbP . sfgdf klg b;afx| 7fpFdf 5]8\g] rng – 9'ª\u|L, df8a/L, l;gd'Gb|L nufpg] 7fpF . gfsdf klg b'O{ 7fpFdf 5]8\g] rng – km'nL / a'nfsL nufpg] 7fpF . s]6fx?sf] t sfg dfq 5]8] k'Uof] . nf]tLdf PsPs Kjfn . b'O{cf]6f ;fgf d'Gb|L nufpg] 7fpF . Tof] klg l76f] ePkl5 nufpg'kb{}g . dnfO{ nfUof], cfOdfO{ eg]sf] w]/} 7fpFdf 5]l8g] hft /x]5 . p;n] hLjgdf w]/} 5]l8g'k5{ . cfdf a]nfa]nfdf eGg'x'G5 – xfdL 5f]/Lx? rfNgf]h:tf] x'g'k5{ cg]s 7fpFdf 5]l8P/ . tgdf klg 5]l8P/, dgdf klg 5]l8P/ . /, hLjgsf] ToxL rfNgf]n] e';, 9'ª\uf, kmf]xf]/ 5fg]/ ;kmf s'/f dfq lbg ;Sg'k5{, cfˆgf] nf]Ug], 5f]/f5f]/L, cfkmGt / ;dfhnfO{ . sb]lv ª;Dd k6sk6s n]v]F w"n]e'OFdf . dnfO{ n]Vg cfPh:t} eof] . w]/}k6s n]v]/ cfk"m;Dd k'¥ofP/ 5f]8]F d}n] –ª . uf]ljGbnfO{ eg]F – …d ª eP ltdL s] lg <Ú d}n] sb]lv ª;Ddsf cIf/ b]vfP/ eg]F . pgL bª\u k/] . s]xL af]Ng ;s]gg\ . km]l/km]l/ ;f]lw/x]F . cgsgfpFb} cfsfzlt/ x]/] .
d';'Ss xfF;] / eg] – …u .Ú – …s;/L <Ú – …lsgeg], d]/f] gfd uf]ljGb xf] ÛÚ of] s'/f d}n] ;f]r]s} lyOgF . ;f]r]sL lyPF, pgn] 3 eGnfg\ . 3/h:tf] 3 . lsgeg], pgL nf]Ug]dfG5] . 3/ agfpg] dfG5], h'g 3/df pgL b'nxL NofpF5g\ . o:t}df tLgtn] a"9L s/fOg\ . pgL uf]7fnfx?;Fu l/;fpFb} cfOg\ . – …ltdf]? s] x]g{ cfsf xF < ofF ltdf]/\sf 8fDgfn] ;Kk} ds} vf/ ;vfk kf/] .Ú d bf}l8Fb} cfˆgf ufO{ x]g{ uPF . nf=== Û geGb} xfd|} ufO{n] ltgsf ds} vfPsf /x]5g\ . pgn] dnfO{ v'a ufnL ul/g\ . /, elgg\ – …klVn;\ tFnfO{ ÛÚ klVn;\ tFnfO{ eg]sf] s] xf] dnfO{ yfxf ePg . ca s] ug{] eg]sL x'g\ ltgn] < ltgL ufpFs} cln ghftL / 5'b| cfOdfO{df ulglG5g\ . dnfO{ 8/ nfUof] . d}n] w"n]e'OFdf n]Vg l;s]sLn] klVn;\ eg]sL x'g\ ls, pgsf ds} xfd|f ufO{n] vfP/ < 8/ nfUof] . ufpFdf s]xL a"9fa"9Lx?sf] d'vaf6 w]/}k6s ;'g]sL 5' – 5f]/Ln] k9] eg] kf]Onf hfG5g\, af]S;L x'G5g\ / ax'nfpF5g\ . ;f]r]F – lstfadf kf]Onf hfg] tl/sf l;sfOPsf] x'G5 Sof/] . d Tof] kf]Onf hfg l;sfpg] kf7afx]s c? kf7x? dfq k9\5' . k9] klg kf]Onf hfGgF . lax] eO;s]sL afx'gsL 5f]/Ln] o:tf] ;f]Rg} ;lStgF Û lstfadf af]S;LdGq klg l;sfOPsf] x'Fbf] /x]5 Sof/] Û Tof] dGq;Fu eg] v'a 8/ nfUof] . af]S;LdGq t d s'g} xfntdf klg k9\lbgF . d t /fd|f/fd|f syf, sljtf, hLjgL dfq k9\5' . 1fgsf s'/f k9\5' . df:6/gL x'g] s'/f dfq k9\5' . kf]Onf hfg], af]S;L x'g] / ax'nfpg] s'/f k9\lbgF . cfdf eGg'x'G5 – 5f]/Lsf] sfd b'gf6k/L ufF:g', aQL sfTg', 3/ ;DxfNg', :jf:gL x'g', 5f]/f5f]/L kfpg', cfdf x'g', a'xf/L x'g', 3/ kl/jf/nfO{ ;Gt'i6 kfg{' xf] . oL ;a} s'/fx?sf dfemdf d 5' . o; s'/fn] dnfO{ lrlGtt agfof] . s] o:tf s'/f lstfadf x'Fb}gg\ < tL klg d k9\5' . ;fFem ufO{x? uf]7df x'Ng dfq s] nfu]sL lyPF tLgtn] a"9L s/fpFb} xfd|f] cfFugdf cfOxflng\ . d]/f] t ;ftf]k'Tnf] p8Øf] . 6f]n} yls{g] u/L s/fpg yflng\
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– …P 7"nL Û ltD/f ufO{n] xfD/f ;Kk} ds} vfP . o:tf s]6\s]6LnfO{ uf]7fnf] k7f/ x'Gr < ufO{ kfNg ;SgLn] Pp6f ultnf] uf]7fnf] k7fDg ;lsGg <Ú cfdf bª\u k/]/ dlt/ x]g{'eof] . d}n] e'OFlt/ x]/]F . l/;fP/ alnof] af]nLdf xkfg{'eof] – …ufO{ x]l/g;\ < hlQ eg] lg gnfDgL oNnfO{ Û slQ s/fDg kgL{ xf] < ;f/} ufnkf/f eO{ P of] t ÛÚ d s]xL gaf]nL a'9Lcf}Fnfn] e'OF sf]6Øfpg yfn]F . tL cem} s8\lsg yflng\ – …s] x]tL{ lbgel/ rf}tf/fF a;]/ s]6fx/\;F k8]/ xf] ls v]n]/ a:r] ltD/L 5f]/L . s] ufO{ x]tL{, clg vfGg t ufO{n] ds} <Ú ToxL a]nfdf af klg cfpg'eof], cFufnf]el/ kfv'/L 3fF;sf] ef/L lnP/ . as]gf{] e}F;Ln] b"w lbPsf] /x]g5 . b"w kmsfpg . s] eof] eg]/ afn] klg s§Ldf xft /fv]/ dnfO{ / tL a"9LnfO{ kfn}kfnf] x]g{'eof] . afn] dlt/ kms{]/ xKsfpFb} eGg'eof] – …v'?v'? ufO{ gx]/]/ sNn] tFnfO{ rf}tf/fF a;]/ s]6fx/\;F e'NgL egf], eg\ t < cfsf{n] jrg nfDbf t, d/]c:tf] nfDr dnfO{ ÛÚ d p:t} r'krfk . To;kl5 afn] pgLlt/ kmls{P/ eGg'eof] – …slt 8G8f ltg{'kr{ eGg' t lbbL < s] s/fDg'pGr ufO{n] rf/f]6f a'6f ds} vfcf] eg]/ < d'G5]n] vfsf] xf] / < ufO{n] vfsf] xf] Û kz'n] em'Ss]/ vfsf] xf] ÛÚ pgn] 7"n} 8G8f eg]e}mF elgg\ – …Ps df]c/ lt/ . k"/} u/f] ;vfk kfl/r{ . ltg{} kr{ Ps df]c/ t ÛÚ afn] s]xL gaf]nL O:6sf]6sf] leqL vNtLaf6 k};fsf] y}nL lemSg'eof] . y}nLaf6 Ps df]x/ lemSg'eof] / ykSs ltgsf xftdf lbg'eof] . ltgL r'krfk nfu]/ uOg\ . To;kl5 dnfO{ afcfdf b'j}n] kfn}kfnf] ufnL ug{'eof] . d r'krfk nfu]F . dnfO{ eg] dgdgdf nfUof] – Tof] Ps df]x/ ufO{n] ds} vfPsf] 8G8f xf]Og, d}n] u'?;Fu k9]sf] z'Ns ltg{'ePsf] xf] afn] Û
– cd/ Gof}kfg]sf] k':ts ;]tf] w/tLaf6 ;fef/ c+z
42 READ | September 2012
BOOK BYTE.READ
cd/ Gof}kfg] September 2012 |READ 43
kmfOglk|G6 a'S;
/fi6«efiff k|j4{gdf xfd|f] k|of; /d]z /Ghgsf] d}lynL pkGof;
;ªf]/ clwsf/ ;F jl~rt ;dfhs ;ª\3if{ cf cGtå{Gås syf cl5 . ldlynf–dw]zs ;dsfnLg ;dfhs Plxd] lrq0f e]6t . z:qd] ;dfwfg b]vafs dgf]j[lQ;F hgd} t eofjx l:ylts hLjGt b:tfj]h cl5 O{ pkGof; . ldlynfs u|fDo hLjgs ljnIf0f s;Lbfsf/L cf ;xh gf6sLo ;+jfb ;xhlxF kf7ss]F jzLe"t s˜ n]afs Ifdtf /v}t cl5 . …;ªf]/Ú g]kfns ;dsfnLg ;flxTod] åGåsfns >]i7 s[lt k|dfl0ft xPt ;] ljZjf; cl5 .
ahf/df pknAw 5 .
READ.SHORT TAKE
WRITING IS TORTURE Kalyan Gautam, better known as Dear Kalyan, is the author, most recently, of Radio Chhap Salai. A long-time radio presenter currently working at Image FM, Kalyan talked with the Read Team. Excerpts:
How long have you been writing?
For as long as I can remember! I wrote my first novel, Sushma, when I was 16. I was just out of school then. How did you come to writing?
I am not sure how and why I was drawn to writing. Though my mother hadn't had any formal education, she used to write and recite poems in a very mellifluous voice. That must have kindled my interest in writing. Why do you write?
Because it is really satisfying to see your work leave a lasting impression on your readers and help transform society. Also, it is always gratifying to think that your work will be read or remembered by many long after you are dead. How long did it take you to finish Radio Chhap Salai?
It took me almost three years to write and revise it. I also spent some time in the research. Is writing difficult?
Writing is torture. You have to persevere and constantly remind yourself that the writing is going well. You are under constant pressure to not do injustice to your characters. Though you pick your characters from daily walks of life, it is really difficult to write about them. 46 READ | September 2012
Can you do without writing now?
No, I cannot help but write. It has become an integral part of my life, let's say, like bread and butter. Once you are into writing, you always have the urge to give something new to your readers, and you are always in the lookout for stories. Anything that strikes me, I note it down on a piece of paper. The next thing, then, is to write. What else? Is it possible to survive by writing?
It's very difficult. The Nepali book market is not big enough to be able to survive by writing. But of late, the number of readers is growing, the publishing industry is showing signs of being professional. A few years down the line, things might be better for writers. What is coming next?
I am working on a novel, which has as its backdrop the ten-year Maoist insurgency. It's a story of a man, who is tortured by both the state forces and the Maoists. I am in the initial phase of writing and it will take long to come out.
BOOK BYTE.READ
September 2012 |READ 47
READ.Q & A
Q & A with Pasi Koistinen Pasi joined Telia Sonera as a director in 1998 and came to Nepal as the CEO of Ncell in May 2009. Prior to this, he served in top managerial positions in diverse fields such as hospitality business, advertising agency, telecom service in countries like Finland, Singapore and China. The Read team had sent him a list of questions, teasing out his reading habit. Here are the answers as he wrote them:
When and where do you like to read?
Since my work consumes most of my time, I read mostly while traveling. As my job needs a lot of travel, I utilize long flight hours by reading. It also helps me spend long transit hours. I feel it is the best time to read as I can concentrate and focus. I do read at home in the evening after a long day's work. It helps me relax. I admit that I am not into much of educational reading now. What was the last truly great book you read?
I recently read Layla, a book about a Kurdish girl written by Jari Tervo, who is a major name in current Finnish literature. He writes traditional plotdriven prose, which reads like a detective story and is humoristic. Often he includes autobiographical elements. I recently finished reading the Biography of Jean Sibelius. He was a Finnish composer of the later Romantic period. His music played an important role in the formation of the
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Finnish national identity. I am reading Andre Agassi's biography currently. What is your favorite literary genre?
I prefer reading biographies. What do you prefer? A physical book or e-book?
I believe nothing can replace a real book in hand. We have been used to it and and it has become a part of us. But I prefer reading articles online; it's easier to get short, quick information from the internet. Do you prefer a book that makes you laugh or the one that makes you cry?
Reading with a smile on your face is always fun. What you used to read as a child?
There is a library in every village in Finland, which is built with tax money. So children in Finland start to read early. Like most of them, I loved reading adventure books. Do you remember the last book you put
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down without finishing?
Yes, a book on Urho Kekkonen, who was the former president of Finland. The book was written by Jari Tervo. What is the funniest book you have ever read?
There is a book by Arto Passilina. A movie was made on that book and was a huge success. A former journalist turned comic novelist, Passilina is one of the most successful novelists of Finland. The book tells the story of a frustrated journalist who, after nearly killing a hare with his car, decides to live with the hare in the wilderness. It was adapted twice into feature films. First in Finland in 1977 and in 2006, Marc Rivière, a French director, made Le Lièvre de Vatanen. If you could meet any writer, who would it be?
I would have loved to meet Jack Welch Jr. He was Chairman and CEO of General Electric between 1981 and 2001. During his tenure at GE, the company's value rose by an unbelievable 4,000 percent. What do you plan to read next?
Bhagvad Gita and the biography of Benetton, a business family.
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Guardian of the Nepali Language Born in 1986 BS, Kamal Mani Dixit has been furthering the Nepali language ever since he helped establish the Madan Puruskar, the oldest and most prestigious literary award given to a work of literature. He has written, edited and compiled 75 books and is now the chairman of the Madan Puruskar and Madan Puruskar Guthi. Why did you establish the Madan Puruskar? It's not the Dixits, but Rani Jagadamba, who established the Madan Puruskar. But my parents and I did have a contribution in its establishment, as it was we who had requested her to institute a literary award in the name of her deceased husband Madan Shamshere Rana. When was it established? It was established in 2012 BS. What was the objective behind establishing the award? It was established to promote Nepali literature and is given annually to a book that contributes most to the promotion of the Nepali language. Earlier we used to give four awardsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; one award each to prose, poetry, social science and philosophy. What was the prize money then? Four thousand rupees. Now it's two lakh rupees.
Is the process of selecting the award still the same or has it changed? No, it is still the same, even though the country has seen many changes since the award was instituted. The best Nepali book published in the year is given the prize after a careful selection process. Contrary to what many people think, Kamal Mani Dixit doesn't decide who gets the puruskar; he just hands over the prize. Why and when was the Madan Puruskar Pustakalaya established? It was established a year and half after the Madan Puruskar was established. I used to buy books from the age of ten with money saved from my tiffin allowance. In time, I had a collection of about two hundreds books which I gave to the library. It was called Madan Puruskarko Pustakalaya then. It was meant to be an archive. Now the Pustakalaya holds the largest collection of books written in the
Nepali language [the details of which can be accessed on the internet]. But many say that the library is off-limits to the common people? It's a library in name only. Actually, it's an archive and we don't allow access to Tom, Dick and Harry, lest they damage the archival materials. But we do give access to people who really want to do research in Nepali. Find me a genuine researcher who was denied entry to the library and I will reward you. What accounts for your passion for the Nepali language? I don't know. Maybe it was in my blood, my passion for the Nepali language. Maybe the environment at home shaped it. The Dixit families were all literary from way back. What should be done to promote the Nepali language? Who am I to say what should be done and who should do what to promote the Nepali language? We don't preach; we do.
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PAYING HOMAGE TO WRITERS TEXT BY READ TEAM PHOTOGRAPHS BY KISHOR KAYASTHA
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he master of epigrams Amar Nyaupane once said in an interview that the writers of earlier generations are headstreams, and the writers of a younger generation, rivers. How true. Just as headstreams feed rivers, senior writers feed their younger counterparts. When you look back at the time when senior writers wrote, you will find it remarkable that they wrote at all. When they were writing, there were a very few publishing houses, if at all, and most of them had to self-publish. The book market was very small and book distribution networks non-existent. The quality of printing was awful and binding very poor. The initial print run wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t more than 500 copies, and most of these had to be given away to friends and relatives for free. Yet, they wrote, even if that meant living in penury. And because senior writers wrote, those after them followed suit, opening up the whole new possibilities. Now the Nepali publishing scene looks promising. New publishers are coming up and publishing has become competitive. Publishers are showing signs of being professional. The production quality has gone up. There has been a marked improvement in the way books are designed and laid out. The readership is growing and books are beginning to sell in greater numbers. The quality of writing has gone up. And we as a nation have become culturally more vibrant. Our senior writers deserve credit for this. The least we can do for them is, honor them for their labor of love. In the following pages, we pay tribute five of the most distinguished Nepali writers who have devoted their lives to furthering Nepali literature.
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COVER BOOKSTORY BYTE.READ
BAIRAGI KAINLA BY BIPLAV DHAKAL Bairagi Kainla is a unique mythical figure in Nepali poetry, who has left some deep meanings and messages for both wordsmiths and readers. A book as thin as a pamphlet and a few scattered poemsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;these are what constitute the whole world of words created by him. But through this, he connected society and culture with the heart of the word. He redefined the values of the ancient Greek, the Aryan and the Kirati Civilizations. More importantly, he valued the integrity and freedom of man. His poems like 'A Saawaatko Baila Utsav', 'Mateko Manchheko Bhashan', 'Haat Bharne Manis', 'Parvat', 'Ganga Neelo Bagchhu' have created unusual waves in Nepali literature. The discourse and choreography of these poems have found a solid foundation. These poems challenge those who undermine the power and value of poetry and make less potent the virility of words. When he reached the apex of words and consciousness, he admirably retired from poetry. This is a message to the world. It is far better to keep silent than to continue playing with clumsy words, knowing well that one has become listless, shriveled.
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READ.COVER STORY
DHRUBA CHANDRA GAUTAM BY GIRISH GIRI Dhruba Chandra Gautam used to publish a magazine from Kathmandu called Kalilo when I was young. I don’t know how I got hold of it in Birgunj. But it had a strong influence on me and I sent a few stories and poems to the magazine. At that time, I didn’t know that he was a famous litterateur. Later, he and my father happened to work for a newspaper. He would stop by our house whenever he came to Birgunj. In 2050 BS when I was asked to coordinate the Birgunj special issue for the Kantipur daily, I requested him to write the cover story introducing Birgunj. He didn’t just write the cover piece but also sent me a poem and an article. That was the beginning of our friendship. An experimental writer, Gautam has tried his hand at every genre. But he is mostly known for his novels, namely Alikhit and Kattel Sirko Chotpatak. The characters in his novels come alive. Even minor characters stay put in your mind. I think we will have to wait for a while before a writer who can outdo him in describing events and circumstances emerges on the Nepali literature scene. Gautam is special to me for other
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reasons as well. Born in the Madhesh, I grew up roaming the “dehats” and “saraiyas” of the plains. So my literary taste is slightly different, and no one can satisfy my taste, except Gautam. We have become intimate with many of his characters, whether it be the Naagbaba who romances with the
widow of Birhinpur Barewa or Matiya, the village girl who is dumbfounded when she is unexpectedly kissed by an urban bloke. My proximity with him is growing by the day. Sometimes we go on a journey—both geographical and intellectual. During that journey, the smell of Birgunj lingers on.
COVER STORY.READ
DURGA LAL SHRESTHA BY ANI CHHOYING DOLMA Durga Lal Shrestha was already famous before I met him. There is no poet or lyricist better than him, especially, in the Nepal Bhasa. I met him in 2003, through the musician Nhyoo Bajracharya. I had wanted Durga Lal dai to write a song for my guru. He kindly agreed and wrote the song "Gurujee Lakhaun Pranaam". Since then he has written the lyrics of all the songs that I have sung, except a song or two. There are some people who deliberately use difficult words to flaunt their intellectuality. Durga Lal dai is not one of them. He uses simple and beautiful words to express complex thoughts. Very few people can do that. Durga Lal dai's songs have spiritual depths. One cannot find such depths in songs written by others. He has the ability to express things just the way he likes. Though he writes mostly in Nepali, his command over the Nepali language is perfect. He is the most understood yet underestimated writer in Nepali literature. It is only apparently that he is living a familial life; he is in fact a guru. Personally, I consider him as a gyani, an enlightened one. He is such a modest person that even when he scolds, he does so with love. He has come as a blessing in my life. He gives speech to my thoughts. Without him, I fear I will forget how to speak at all.
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GEETA KESHARI BY RAJANI DHAKAL Geeta Keshari is beautiful and gentle and very hardworking. She completes work on time and is adapt at making others do her bidding, maybe because she has many years of experience working in the bureaucracy. She has a good leadership quality, because of which she has been able to run a womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s literary organization, Gunjan, smoothly. Geeta Keshari has been writing for the last fifty years. Known mostly as a writer of fiction, she has authored fifteen novels, including Kashingar (2034), Saugat (2046), Aawaz (2047) Badalindo Kshitiz (2066), and her latest Fakrindo Kopila (2069) and three collections of short stories, including Lahar. Her fiction raises issues of women's discrimination in familial, social, political, bureaucratic spheres, and depicts the struggles of human life. Her women characters are bold and assertive. She puts forth new thoughts about women rights through literature. Her writing is traditional and descriptive and her language is very plain yet it has certain piquancy to it.
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HIRANYA KUMARI PATHAK BY GEETA TRIPATHI I do not quite recall when I first met Hiranya Kumari Pathak, but today, as both of us eddy down the choppy waters of literary creation, I feel that my relationship with her has been eternal, like my relationship with the sun and the rain. Only that she is nearer to the literary sea, and I am far behind. She started writing stories around 2018 or 2019 and quickly established herself as a modern story-writer. Her stories written in a span of fifty years have been collected in three books: Mohachakra (2050), Shunyawat (2057) and Duswapna (2068). Pathak's stories are idealistic yet realistic. She has also written absurdist stories with women's problems at the center. Her strength lies in connecting child, youth and adult psychology with socio-cultural consciousness. Her writing is lively, as she poignantly depicts the time we are living in. While reading her stories, I feel that I am caged within the manuscript of my own time and circumstances; that she is issuing an ordinance from the court of humanity for the freedom of people like meâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; an ordinance which finds resonance in human sentiments.
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SATYA MOHAN JOSHI TEXT BY UJJWAL PRASAIN PHOTOGRAPHS BY KISHOR KAYASTHA Born in 1920, Satya Mohan Joshi is Nepal’s foremost culture expert and writer. He has devoted his entire life for the preservation of Nepali art and culture. As a young researcher with a government affiliated institution, he had to go to villages outside Kathmandu to survey the entrepreneurial potential of all industries in Nepal. He would work during the day and attend different religious and cultural events like Rodhi Ghar, BhajanKirtan and Ghatu in the evening, which piqued his interest in Nepali folk songs. He compiled these songs in Haamro Lok Sanskriti, which won him the first Madan Puraskar in 1956.
Later, after he gave up his job at the Department of Archaeology and Culture, he started studying the old coins he collected for the department. The study resulted in the publication of Nepali Rastriya Mudra, which won him another Madan Puraskar in 1960. Still later, he went to the Sinja valley, on a sponsorship of the then Royal Nepal Academy, to research on the valley’s language, geography, culture and socio-economics. His research was later published in Karnali Lok Sanskriti, a magnum opus of five volumes, which won him yet another Madan Puraskar, making him the only writer to have won the prize thrice.
In 1962, the Chinese government hired him to teach the Nepali language to Chinese students. These Chinese would later run radio shows in Nepali in Peking Radio. One of his students invited him back to China in 1978, and Joshi stayed on for more than two years researching the artist Arniko and his works. This research led to the publication of Kalakar Arniko and an epic in the Nepal Bhasa, Jayaprakash. It is not just his scholarly depth but also his indefatigable attitude, which serves as an inspiration to the young—a man who works hard, perseveres and who has not lost his spirit even at the age of 92. He is truly a living legend.
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PLUM
BLOSSOMS
IN THE FALL
quite know what she believed. She accepted life without resignation, without the lifelessness of someone who had given up. She danced through life like a ballerina balanced precariously I don’t think she believed in a history written in the stars. I don’t on toes. She visited me for the think she believed in a god. I don’t quite know what she believed. last time two days ago (or maybe it was three) and although She accepted life without resignation, without the lifelessness of she made no mention of finality someone who had given up. and goodbyes, I knew it was the end. She was wearing a blue dress that day, blue like the sky BY PRANAYA RANA peeking out from beneath dark pregnant monsoon clouds, here are days when all I do is watch the rain, Prablue like the waters of the Trishuli, full and anxious nudging the rivchi told me more than once, as if it were a new erbanks, blue like my hospital gown, blue like the eyes of my first sentiment she was sharing each time. Each time, love, blue like fire, blue like melancholy. Now, when I close my eyes, she would look out the double windows next to my I can still see her standing at the entrance to my spare, sterile room, hospital bed and stare wistfully at some distant framed in the doorway like a painting. Behind my closed eyelids, she thing I could not see. She would remain like that, walks over to me, slowly and deliberately, as if weighing every step. her hair blowing a little in the breeze, her eyes vacuous and affixed She reaches for my forehead and just when I expect to feel the cool at infinity, barely breathing, barely moving. And then she would turn, of her palm against my own clammy, feverish skin, I open my eyes like a statue come to life and stare into my eyes as if there was someand there is no one there. thing there too. As if that distant point she had been staring had been Two days ago, it was Monday maybe. There is no sense of time transposed somewhere within my rheumy-red eyes. She would stare in this place. Or rather, there is an obsessive, impending time to until I felt desolate and drained, as if the lush green that I imagined this place. On my walks through this hospital’s maze-like corridors, I inside me was but an arid lifeless desert compared to the world that often come across men and women staring at clocks, marking each must’ve existed behind her eyes. Then, as if breaking a spell that she second with a blink. These time-keepers come in all shapes and herself had cast, Prachi would reach over and take my hand. Her sizes, although there are never any children. I’ve myself never paid eyes would release me from their hypnotist gaze and linger fleetingly much attention to time. What do seconds and minutes matter when here and there, on my hand, on her hand, on my arm, on her arm. I each breath could very easily be your last? After a while, the parahad ideas then, of collapsing into her arms and weeping uncontrollanoia goes away, the nervousness and fear all dissipate and there is bly like an infant, of clutching her so tight that all that was in me would nothing but a dead calm, a complete neutrality with the world. You make its way into her like molecules across a permeable membrane. could easily be a rock, a millenia-old tree, a crab, even a moth, hurI wished for this osmosis each time our skin met, each time her lined tling into the flames. After a while, everything is as it should be. palms enfolded mine and each time her distant eyes met my own. That day, Prachi in her blue dress, spoke to me of home. She told me how home to her seemed everywhere and nowhere and yet, She would smile a half-smile, one that although reached her eyes, she always seemed to come back to one specific place. She told me seemed to conceal a deep, insurmountable sadness, something how her window was like a picture frame, a television screen even born of accidents and coincidences, over and over again. No, it and that the clouds rolling by were like actors in a cosmic drama. wasn’t fate and it wasn’t destiny. I don’t think she believed in a hisThere were heroes and villains, there was murder and birth, there tory written in the stars. I don’t think she believed in a god. I don’t she was and there I was. She told me how she spent days under
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POEM the covers. I’m lazy, she said as an excuse, as if I could not make out what dark things hid behind that innocuous justification. I imagined her warmth, the safety of that warm cocoon, the blankets that often feel like walls that keep everyone out. She told me of her dog, how she would wrap herself around Prachi’s feet, the sadness so palpable she could smell it, like the rank festering stench of a long suffering wound. She told me of drinking coffee so hot it scalded your tongue and left you unable to taste. The drink was a salve, an ointment that brought out whatever was rooted deepest in your being, the things that you wish never to think about, memories that you avoid for fear they will lead you down a dark rabbit-hole from which you might never emerge unscathed. She talked longer that day. She avoided my eyes, even though she sat at the edge of my bed and drew patterns in the sheets. She never spoke of hope or dreams or the will to survive, things that everyone else who came to see me often spoke about. Confronted with the possibility of death, they seemed to falter, founder like fish on land. They grasped at straws, speaking of television shows I had no time to watch and books I had no interest in reading. They told me the world was still out there but I never really believed them. To me, the world was disintegrating as fast as my body. When one organ failed, a continent disappeared. The world was in ruins and it was all my doing. I felt no guilt. It was my world and I could do with it as I pleased Prachi never spoke of the world out there. As far as she was concerned, she and I were the only inhabitants to an otherwise empty world. Sure, there were animals and plants and all manner of things that lived or seemed to come alive, like the rain and the clouds and the sun and the moon and the city itself, breathing like a gently sleeping woman, a rumbling in and an easy out. That day, she gently pushed me aside and lay beside me on the bed. She closed her eyes and described how her femur was breaking in two, her brain swimming in an aneurysm, her blood thin and inefficient. She told me her breathing was inadequate, her limbs as if made out of wood, her eyes bloodshot and her skin palpitating heat. She said she was completely unable to move. She told me the pain was almost too much to bear, she could not cry so instead she began gently to laugh. Then, she opened her eyes and looked at me, at a point in between my eyes and said that the bed was clearly intended for me, not for her. I felt a surge of happiness, the first in months, of unadulterated happiness, not contingent upon survival or medicine or white-robed doctors with clipboards; it broke through walls like a raging flood. I looked into her eyes and when she looked away, I knew it would be for the last time. Later that same day, we went for a walk. She threaded her fingers through mine and led me down the hospital garden. She didn’t offer support, no shoulder to lean on and not an arm around my waist to keep me up. She led me gently, like a lover. We sat at a bench and watched as pretty young nurses in white smocks strolled by. We watched as a family exited the emergency room, the mother supported on two sides by her sisters. She collapsed close-by, wailing and howling like King Lear at that cosmic indifference that had first taken her husband, then her father and now her only son. Her body contorted as if caught in a seizure, her eyes were wild with pain and anger and her fingernails bloody. Her body attempted to give release to a purely
ABERDEEN FOR MICHAEL SUMAN SUBBA
I read you again, Stevens, last night but I did not dream of Ramon as I did all those years ago. A granite city. The cry of gulls. Cathedrals with shut doors. Plaintive melodies of an alien youth. I no longer listen to the Stranglers anymore, with the friend who brewed his own beer. He was a depressive. A manic one. And the tall girl with the falling red hair never became my lover. She reminds me. Just reminds me. A granite city. Russian sailors with news from Vladivostock and tattoos on their arms that said anchor, my love. The poem Ramon, but the poem made me. With you, the executioner of your own rage for order blessed by the sea, the harbour the lilting nights, that shook with questions of love and words forever, under those northern lights.
READ.FICTION emotional pain and it failed, horribly. Prachi watched and I wondered why I had never cried like that. I lay in bed until late that day, wishing for sleep that never came. I wondered if Prachi was awake too, maybe staring out at the same sky. I turned and tried to find the outline her body must have made when she had laid in my bed, pretending to be me. I found nothing but traced an imaginary silhouette anyway, marking invisible limbs with the tip of my finger. I thought I smelled her in the sheets, like white plum blossoms during fall. In the days since, my body has grown weaker. It aches and strains against my being, as if already ready to give up. I don’t have the will to fight anymore, to try to make sense of my illness, to not waste away and leave nothing behind. It is as if my body feels Prachi’s absence, as if without her, it refuses to try anymore. When I opened my eyes this morning, my vision was blank. It was not the reddish-black of closed eyelids but the complete darkness of nothingness. Slowly, light seeped in, illuminating the room and bringing my rods and cones back to life. When I could see again, I realised my arms and legs were unresponsive and my body felt as if it were being drained. I closed my eyes once again and tried not to think of the paralysis. I wondered if this was the end, if this was how I would go, silently and without a whimper. The beeping machines would stop and a silence would permeate the room. A body alive makes sounds, a heartbeat, the rustling of air as it passes through the nose and into the lungs, bones and joints that creak and bend. What scared me more than anything was the silence, the nothingness. After death, I would take anything, even heaven or hell, just not nothing. Prachi left herself behind with me. Ever since the very first day she had wandered into my hospital room, looking for a long-lost friend, she made a habit of leaving herself with me. I had been reading Lolita that day, the words dancing around in my brain like marionettes on strings. Absently, we had begun to talk about Nabokov. After a five minute conversation, Prachi left, only to return a half hour later. She brought me juice and cigarettes as offerings, claiming she didn’t know which one I would prefer. I took the cigarettes. I smoked out of the window with the door closed behind me. Prachi passed no judgement. I knew I was dying, a cigarette would not hasten the inevitable. I think she understood it too. Although she didn’t smoke, she never once batted away the tendrils of smoke. She watched me intently and only spoke once I had finished my cigarette. We talked of books, the one thing we had already realised we had in common. But our conversation meandered like a slowly winding river and that first time, already, she told me of her nightmares. There were dark things that hid beneath her eyelids and came out hungry and angry when she closed them. There were phantoms in her childhood, many things, like monsters under your bed, that only came out at night under the cover of darkness. There was one whose breath she would often feel on her neck. His blank face so close to hers, she would awaken with a start and be unable to speak for hours as she lay in bed recollecting it all. There were scars and wounds so deep that they left marks invisible to the eye. There were hospital beds and morphine injections and betrayal after betrayal. Later, lying in my own hospital bed, I thought I would gladly take a bullet for her, if it meant ensuring only happiness in her future. But she didn’t need a shield, she didn’t need cover. She walked out every day on a battlefield and gave up her body to a hail of bullets.
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And undeterred, she walked on. A occasional stumble, sometimes a fall, a bruise, a scrape, a wound and many scars, but she kept on. She told me how something, what she didn’t know, had made her come back to my bedside. It wasn’t just the Lolita I held. Something else, she said. In that first moment she walked in, I wish I could’ve known just how the coming months would unfold. Once her presence became regular and frequent, I came to depend on her for too much. She would take my temperature and a put a hand to my forehead sometimes. Other times she would feed me my insanely colourful pills, watching as I washed each down with a mouthful of orange juice. And sometimes, I would wake up to find her sitting next to me, looking out the window and talking. Telling me a story, telling me about herself, telling me about myself, things that maybe she couldn’t say when she looked into my eyes. Once I woke to her talking of love. Losing it and having it taken away, because love can be taken away. It is not independent, no matter how much we might like to think that. It grows from people and when they leave, it leaves with them. And when they leave, they take large, heavy pieces of you with them. Each and every time, they take and take, until there is so little left inside you that you’re not even sure there’s anything there at all. And mending yourself each time, putting on a band-aid, wrapping bandages around yourself, vowing that this next time would be different. Vowing not to give yourself over so easy this next time. Trying to pretend like it didn’t hurt as much anymore, as if each time left you with another layer of scar tissue and now you can barely feel anything underneath it. But pretence too is hard, pretending there’s nothing there when your bones vibrate with excitement, when your stomach lurches with nervousness, when every breath seems to taste of something sweet in their presence. It happens again and again. It begins, it rises and it is lost. Each time, you say no more, please stop, it hurts too much. But how do you live without love? What then will inspire you? What then will you feed on in your moments of despair, when all the world stands against you, who will stand by your side, holding your hand and squeezing your fingers in between theirs, lifting your head so that your eyes will meet theirs. When you can’t go where you want to, who will take you there? All the while I pretended to be asleep. In the beginning, I don’t think she believed them when they told her I had no time, I had no chance. I think she believed she could save me, Or maybe not. Maybe she wasn’t as deluded as I was. I believed she could save me. If she couldn’t, what chance did I stand? Maybe she stopped coming to see me because she gave up, came to the conclusion that there was no saving to be done. Or maybe it depressed her that another would be leaving her soon, another love in an endlessly truncating life. Maybe she wanted to save herself the heartbreak, save herself the pain of holding a lifeless hand and crying over a body no longer breathing. Maybe she wouldn’t be able to stand the deafening silence. Now I sit and wait. It is all I can do. I sit and stare and wonder just where she is and what she is thinking. I wish I could have said something meaningful to her, something that would’ve maybe brought a smile to her face, one that maybe didn’t mask anything. I don’t know what I would’ve said. Maybe it would’ve all been inadequate. Maybe it would’ve all been in vain, maybe just a shot in the dark, maybe it wouldn’t even have been heard. But I wish I had tried. I could’ve held her close and whispered in her ear so no one else but she would’ve heard: “Don’t ever let them tell you that deserve it.”
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CONFESSIONS OF A
BOOKAHOLIC BY BISWAS BARAL Obsession of any kind is dangerous. When you are obsessed, you tend to push yourself beyond the normal limit, a little further each time, and before you know it, you are addicted to the object of your desire. You ignore other important tasks as your mind zooms in on this one thing that seems like the world to you. Reading wasn't my obsession as it is today when I was in school. In fact, I didn't like books. Whenever I saw Don Quixote, War and Peace, Brothers Karamazov—hah! those bulky classics—I used to wonder who on earth had the time to go through them? But despite my reservations, I did try to read Crime and Punishment, A Tale of Two Cities and a few others only to be bored to death by the time I got to page 10. Books were not my cup of tea. But something serendipitous happened when I was in class nine. While accompanying some of my more bookish friends to the AWON library at Kupondole, my attention was immediately hooked—not by the stacks upon stacks of what looked like an antique collection of tattered, mindnumbingly boring books, but by the glitzy, at-your-face Tintin and Spiderman comics. Not long after, I returned to the library to lay my hands on those eye-catching comics. I enrolled as a member and immediately headed to the comics section. I fished out a few comic books (Tintin, Batman, Spiderman) and was about to leave when a little paper tag at the top of a rack nearby caught my eyes: 'Mystery.' Umm, intriguing. From that rack, I picked at random Agatha Christie's Murder in Mesopotamia. To say that I wasn’t prepared for what happened next would be a huge
understatement. That night, as I lay on my bed reading it, something clicked. Never before in my life had I read 20 pages at a stretch. This one, I just could not put down. I was in total disbelief when I finished 50 pages. When I reached 100 pages, I felt like I had just conquered Mt. Everest. I clocked 150 pages. And then 200 pages. Three in the morning and I was still reading. At around four, a full seven hours into the read, I had finished the entire book. The next day I went to the AWON library and fetched two more Christies, which were done and dusted within four days. And within a year, I managed to read 40 of Christie’s most famous titles. The following year, I riffled through another 30. The rest of her 11 books that I could not find then, I read online a few years later. When I was done with all of Christies, I decided to stick to mystery, which seemed to be serving my crude sensibilities all right. I subsequently ran through all of Patricia Cornwells, P D James, Colin Dexters, Arthur Conan Doyles and Jeffery Archers, which were available in the library. And I loved them all. But something was missing. Although I had gobbled at least a hundred books, I felt they were not adding anything to my knowledge base, nor were they in any way helping me make sense of my turbulent world; they were no more than a handy diversion at best. With this realization, I grudgingly picked up A Tale of Two Cities again, one of the two books we had at home which I had abandoned a couple of years ago after nearly falling asleep through 10 pages. Once again, I had to push myself through the first few chapters (the English was difficult), but a quarter of the way through, the epic tale of love and sacrifice had me
My attention was hooked— not by stacks of an antique collection of tattered, mindnumbingly boring books, but by the glitzy, at-yourface Tintin and Spiderman comics.
in its grips. I was nearly in tears at the end. Next, I took up the other book we had at home: Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment I found it hard to read, not because of the complex language, but because of the difficulty I had in untangling a character as complex as Raskolnikov: Why was he unhappy all the time? Why did he have to murder his land lady? Whence cometh this infernal struggle between faith and nihilism? When I finished the book, my mind swarmed with a thousand questions. I have since read Crime and Punishment twice and come away with newer insights into human psyche each time. It was around that time that I realized I needed to read more, if nothing else than to better understand myself. And sometime in 2002 I downloaded a list of 100 greatest books of all time from a website and started trawling bookshops at Jamal, the little secondhand book stalls by the RNAC building and the ubiquitous used-book stores in Thamel for those illustrious titles. Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy, Miguel de Cervantes... the goodies in offer were endless, and I was only too happy to devour them, one after another. I have not stopped reading since. I don't recall many days in the last 10 years that I have spent without reading anything. More than once, I have gone to bed at the end of a long day only to be startled awake by the realization that I hadn't turned a single page that day and immediately flipped through whatever was at hand. Books are supposedly your best friends. In my case, they certainly have been, giving me company through some of the toughest periods of my life. I don't know if I would even be alive today had I not found succor from books during life's cruel twists and turns. Over the years, I have come to love reading, way over and above anything else. For this I would always be thankful to Agatha Christie. Baral is an op-ed editor at Republica.
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T
he Sharma family’s trip to Bombay didn’t go well. The Royal Nepal Airlines plane started acting funny after half an hour—a strange sound choked the left wing, and the plane began to hiccup—so they had to land in Patna, where the passengers were forced to stay in a hotel for the night. The mishap would have been tolerable had not twentyone-year-old Nilesh sauntered out of the hotel after dinner to “check out the territory” and within two minutes get mugged in an alley, where two hoodlums pocketed his wristwatch, his gold necklace, and the twenty thousand rupees Indian currency stashed in the inside pocket of the coat he had on that warm evening. “I told you to get traveler’s checks,” Mrs. Sharma shrieked when Nilesh came back, his face bruised and the arm of his coat ripped off. Mr. Sharma slapped him, for that’s what he often did to his children in situations where he felt helpless. Their eighteenyear-old daughter, Nilima, fat and smart, said, “Maybe this is a sign we should turn back.” She had strongly resisted the trip, saying she needed to study for her A-level exams, whereas everyone knew she didn’t want to be away from her Jitendra, who was so stunningly handsome, with a sleek body and a puff of hair on his forehead, that Mr. and Mrs. Sharma often wondered what he saw in their fat daughter. Mrs. Sharma was convinced Jitendra wanted to marry Nilima for her parents’ money, which didn’t make sense as the Sharma family wasn’t super rich. Mr. Sharma thought Jitendra wasn’t right in the head, and that the puff of hair hid an anomaly in his brain. Fortunately, the cash wrenched away from Nilesh wasn’t the only money they’d brought for the trip. Mrs. Sharma had another twenty thousand, which they hurriedly converted
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WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO THE SHARMA FAMILY MRS. SHARMA HAD ANOTHER TWENTY THOUSAND, WHICH THEY HURRIEDLY CONVERTED TO TRAVELER’S CHECKS AT THE AIRPORT BEFORE BOARDING THEIR PLANE TO BOMBAY THE NEXT MORNING. BY SAMRAT UPADHYAY to traveler’s checks at the airport before boarding their plane to Bombay the next morning. Throughout the ride, Mrs. Sharma berated Nilesh, who had recently dropped out of college and spent all his time in cinema halls, dreaming of becoming an actor. “Who will marry you like this, huh? So irresponsible. You’ll lose your wife during the wedding procession.” She mimicked him, “Oh, I lost my wife. I don’t know how it happened. One moment she was in my pocket, then these hoodlums came and snatched her away.” Mrs. Sharma laughed loud at her own impersonation, and a stewardess signaled to her to keep it down. Nilima was engrossed in a Stephen King novel, ignoring her mother’s rantings and her brother’s sullen face and timid objections. Mr. Sharma was reading the brochure on emergency steps to be taken should the plane plunge toward the earth. Yesterday’s jolts and screams had frightened him. He
didn’t want to die yet; at least not before making love to Kanti, his neighbor’s maid who smiled at him coquettishly and didn’t mind his sexual jokes. At the airport in Bombay, no one came to pick them up. They waited. Mr. Sharma called Ahuja’s home, but no answer. Nilima saw this as another indication that they should hop on the next flight back to Kathmandu. Nilesh got into a staring match with two big, unshaven Indian boys who appeared ready to come over and do something to him had Mrs. Sharma not scowled at them. After two hours of waiting the Sharmas decided to take a taxi to Andheri, where Ahuja lived. Mrs. Sharma said that they should take the train, but Nilima outright laughed at the idea. “I’d rather spend the night here at the airport than take the crowded, smelly train.” So they took a taxi. Mr. Sharma wondered what it’d be like to visit Bombay with Kanti. They could run away together
and live in one of the numerous shacks scattered throughout the city. She would wear skimpy clothes, her midriff showing, and he’d make love to her all day long and into the night. Mrs. Sharma worried about how she was going to get her fat, smart daughter and her stupid son married. A couple of offers had come for Nilima, but the boys had balked once they saw her, and Mrs. Sharma never heard anything further about the proposals. As for Nilesh, he’d acquired a reputation as a no-good loafer, so no proposal had even winked his way. In her mind Mrs. Sharma saw Nilima married to Jitendra, which gave her a shudder, and she saw unmarriageable Nilesh roaming the streets, getting into drugs and fights, ending up in jail. As the taxi crawled along the congested Bombay roads, Nilesh replayed last night’s mugging in his mind, over and over, but this time as soon as the muggers approached, Nilesh’s left foot shot
Illustration by Nhooja Tuladhar
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up like lightning, instantly cracking open one man’s jaw; Nilesh whirled and slammed, without looking, the back of his right fist on the second hoodlum’s nose, shattering it so a fountain of blood sprang forth and drenched a crowd of onlookers, who had miraculously appeared to see this brave young man in action and who now applauded as the two muggers crumpled to the
ground. With squinting eyes and small lips, like Bruce Lee, Nilesh asked, “Anyone else?” Nilesh fast-forwarded and rewound this scene over and over, perfecting his kick, making the muggers beg for mercy, and replacing the “Anyone else?” with a howl. Nilima turned another page of the novel: the family dog, it turned out, had supernatural powers. But was Rusty going to
use it to ward off the evil forces? Or was he going to join the dark side and destroy the family? Ahuja lived in a nice neighborhood in Andheri, on a quiet, tree-lined street. But no one was home—there was a giant padlock on the door. “They must have gone to the airport,” Mrs. Sharma said. “Let’s wait.” It was only after they’d waited for nearly two hours that a neigh-
bor came over and told them that the Ahujas had gone on a vacation to the mountainous Nainital for two weeks. “But that can’t be,” Mr. Sharma said. “He knew we were coming. I’d talked to him on the phone a week ago, and I’d sent him a telegram from Patna about our flight’s delay.” “You’re not the first one,” the neighbor said. “The Ahujas do
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READ.FICTION this to their relatives all the time.” The Sharmas dragged themselves into a taxi for a ride to a nearby hotel in Juhu Beach, which they knew would be heartchillingly expensive, but they were too tired and hot to go hunting for a cheap hotel. They stayed in Bombay for only three days, not only because money was running out but also because Ahuja’s betrayal had soured everything. Nilima showed very little interest in the sightseeing they did, except for the Hanging Gardens, which she thought were “fabulous.” Nilesh became obsessed with the transvestites who roamed the city in groups. He stared at them, commenting upon their “manly” features. One time he laughed loudly as they passed by, and the hinjadas circled the Sharma family and made threatening gestures. Only after Mr. Sharma handed them a hundred rupees did they leave, singing and clapping. Immediately Mrs. Sharma took off her sandal and smacked Nilesh on his head. On the flight back to Kathmandu, they hardly spoke to one another. The trip had turned Mrs. Sharma even more apprehensive about her children’s marriage prospects—they were either stubborn or stupid. Mr. Sharma could hardly breathe in anticipation of touching Kanti’s midriff, which he knew he had to do the next time they were together alone. Nilima was devouring another book she’d bought at the Bombay airport, a romantic thriller by Danielle Steele. Nilesh woke up from a short nap, scared. He had dreamt about making love to a transvestite and now had a terrific hard-on. He put the airline magazine on his lap so his mother, sitting next to him, wouldn’t notice. “That’s the last trip we’ll take as a family,” Mrs. Sharma declared as they entered their house. Mr. Sharma immediately went for a walk, hoping that he’d catch a glimpse of Kanti, hanging laundry or dusting a blanket, on her balcony, and that he’d quietly approach her. Nilesh went into his room to practice his drums. This was another of his dreams—to become a rock star. He’d tried guitar, but he couldn’t change chords fast enough and his fingers bled. With drums, all he needed to do was bang away, and there was a semblance of a beat. In his mind, women screamed and men danced as he played. The King of Drums, he was called. Nilima didn’t come home that night. She’d gone to see Jitendra soon after they reached home, and the two of them decided they missed each other so much that it was time to consummate their bond. “Let’s stay in a hotel tonight,” Nilima said. “It’ll
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throw a real scare into my parents. Maybe then they’ll stop badmouthing you and get us married.” “But they’ll be so worried,” Jitendra said. He was a sweet boy—he really loved Nilima and, by extension, her parents. But Nilima was too persuasive for him, and they ended up in a hotel in Thamel. Mr. Sharma did spot Kanti, not on her balcony but outside a shop in the neighborhood. She was talking with a man. Their body language told Mr. Sharma that this was more than a casual conversation. The man was young, about twenty-five, the same age as Kanti. With pangs of disappointment and anger, Mr. Sharma approached them. “How was Bombay?” Kanti asked when she saw him. Laughter was etched around her lips, and her eyes. “Don’t you have work at home?” Mr. Sharma asked sternly. “Why are you chatting here?” “I just came to buy something,” she said. “Go home, go home,” Mr. Sharma said. “Who is he? It’s not good to be standing here, chatting. It doesn’t look good.” The young man appeared indignant. “I’ll see you again,” he told Kanti and walked away. Kanti and Mr. Sharma began walking. He used his soothing, intimate voice, the one he’d never used on his wife, to mollify Kanti’s anger. “You shouldn’t do these types of things in public. It’ll only bring criticism from everyone, and might even get you fired. I’m a good man, so I won’t tell your employer. But someone else might not be so nice. I am nice because I like you so much. You’re a nice girl. And I’m a nice man. That’s what we have in common, and when people have things in common they can do many things together. I can teach you many things you didn’t even know existed. Who is that man? What can he give you that I can’t, huh? Tell me, what do you want? Just utter the word, and it’s yours.” Kanti, who was no fool, said, “What gift did you bring me from Bombay? I want a gold necklace.” They were nearing Kanti’s house. Mr. Sharma had to think fast. “Is that what you want? You are my queen, so you’ll get what you want. But you also have to do what I ask.” His hand touched her midriff. “We’ll see,” she said. “Let me see the necklace first,” and she slipped into her house. Nilesh knew what his father was up to. His room was on the third floor of their house, and commanded a view of the sur-
POEM
SINGING YOU: THE ONLY SONG I KNOW TIKU GAUCHAN
You didn't pull a fog over you. I lost the easy ability to believe. The song we made. Your presence: its matrix. Your presence: the only note. The forms outside offered nothing. Empty they arose; emptier they left me. I cobbled together a shell of you to stanch the emptying. I almost believed my own hypocrisy. I return to you. Ashamed. * Outside, I hear the noise, never the nuances. I am everyone's favorite fool. This sky is deeper than any river, I say, pretending depth. Continues in the next page >>
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I hear the snickers long after. Another day, another pretense shredded. In this emptiness, I want to dream of you smoothing the red webby veins of a tired eyeball. * How easily I create hope in the cheap charm of a bauble at hand. Sometimes, I can do this and you don't exist enough for there to be remorse. Sometimes, I drown your image, pretending karma's knots have release-points I must be granted. How easily I dismantle my own sanctuary. * Come to me like a white ray-fish pulsing through this dark. * Sing me something like sleep.
rounding alleys. He saw his father talking to the maid. Remembering his father’s slap in Patna, Nilesh wanted to go down and usher his mother outside so she could witness her husband’s desire. But Nilesh also remembered how she had berated him throughout the trip, and he thought—let her be ignorant of this, fun to watch her face when she finds out. Wouldn’t it be spectacular, Nilesh thought, if the maid became pregnant by his father and demanded a share of their property? He envisioned a little stepbrother looking exactly like his father—the same prominent Brahmin nose, the long earlobes. Nilesh laughed and went back to his drumming. By dinner, Mrs. Sharma had begun cursing Nilima. “At her age she should be helping me cook dinner so that when she gets married she won’t be an idiot in the kitchen. We’ve got to put a stop to this, do you hear me?” she addressed her husband, who was wondering if Kanti would be able to tell the difference between a gold-coated necklace and a real one. He concluded she would, and ate another mouthful of rice. “I don’t trust that Jitendra. What are you going to do about it?” Mrs. Sharma asked her husband, then turned to her son. “And you, loafer supreme, how can anyone call you an older brother when you don’t take care of your sister?” “What can I do?” Nilesh said. “Leave him alone,” Mr. Sharma said. “And leave us alone, at least for tonight. I don’t care what our daughter does. Just be quiet.” Mrs. Sharma was going to retort, but she thought the better of it, and they all ate their meal in silence. At ten o’clock that night, Mrs. Sharma called Jitendra’s house, something she’d never done before. When she identified herself, the man at the other end said, “Oh.” No, Jitendra wasn’t home, neither was Nilima. Jitendra had called and said he was going to a late-night party. Had he gone with Nilima? The man didn’t know. Mrs. Sharma didn’t ask him who he was— probably the boy’s father. She went to her bedroom and woke her husband, and the two of them made phone calls to Nilima’s friends. Then Mrs. Sharma woke Nilesh violently from his sleep, and sent him out to search for his sister in the neighborhood. They talked of going to the police station, decided against it; they talked of skinning Nilima alive were she to appear at the door shamefaced the next morning. Mrs. Sharma called Jitendra’s house again and argued with the sleepyvoiced father, telling him to keep his son
away from her daughter. By one o’clock they were exhausted. Mr. and Mrs. Sharma sat on the couch, Nilesh on the floor leaning against the wall. He really wanted to go upstairs to sleep but was afraid of his mother’s tongue-lashing. Nilima received a slap from her mother when she entered the house the next morning. “I want to marry him,” she told her mother, nursing her cheek. “I don’t care what you say—I won’t marry anyone else but Jitendra.” Helplessly Mrs. Sharma looked at her husband. “You’re still too young to be married,” Mr. Sharma said. “Why don’t you finish your A-level exams, then we can talk about it. But you can’t spend nights with him in hotels. People will spit at you, and tomorrow if he finds another girl, who’ll marry you?” “If you won’t marry us,” Nilima said, “we’ll have a court wedding. We’ve already decided.” Mrs. Sharma stepped forward to dole out another slap, but her husband stopped her. “Wait, daughter, what’s the hurry? Finish your exams first, then marry him. That’s all we’re saying.” Nilima considered. “Okay, but get us engaged now. And we’ll marry after my exams.” Mrs. Sharma left the room in a huff. Nilesh folded his arms and watched the back and forth between his father and his sister. He knew he was expected to be angry at his sister, probably even shove her around a bit, threaten to beat up Jitendra, but all he felt was admiration. She had a sense of defiance he himself lacked. She’d really shown them that they couldn’t push her around. Later, he went to her room. She was sitting in bed, doodling. “What did you do last night?” he asked. “What business is it of yours?” “Good, very good. My little sister is really grown-up now.” “I’m glad you noticed,” she said. “Did you . . . really . . . ? You don’t have to answer.” “You’re a strange brother. But yes, I did.” “Just to spite them?” he asked. “I don’t know. Now go and do your stupid things.” Mrs. Sharma called Jitendra’s father, Changu, and arranged for a meeting. That evening Mr. and Mrs. Sharma went to Jitendra’s house, a nice-looking building in New
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READ.FICTION Baneswor with a large yard and two cars. Mrs. Sharma told Changu what her daughter had said. “Frankly, we don’t think she should be married right now,” Mrs. Sharma said. Before, she would have added, “Especially to your son,” but the family’s obvious prosperity had softened her stance toward Jitendra. Instead, she said, “But what to do? Their eyes are fixed on each other.” “These young people,” Changu said. “Once their minds are made up, even Lord Indra’s dad Chandra can’t shake them.” There was silence, while they contemplated the mysterious ways of the young. Changu was smoking from a hookah. He took a long drag, then said, “Well, you’re a good family, and we also don’t have a bad name in town. If they want to get engaged, let them do it. If we don’t agree to this and they decide to elope, our noses will be cut.” His index finger mock-serrated the tip of his nose as illustration. On the way home, Mrs. Sharma said, “Well, at least they’re not poor. That was a nice house, and he seemed like a nice man.” Mr. Sharma nodded absent-mindedly. During the hustle-bustle of the engagement, he should be able to siphon off a few thousand rupees for the gold necklace. Perfect, oh, perfect, he thought. That damn Kanti. She had been avoiding coming to the balcony, as if challenging him about his gift. He had to get that gold necklace for her if he wanted to make any progress. The engagement date was fixed for three weeks later, with a promise from both Jitendra and Nilima that they would spend nights in their respective beds and that Nilima would study for her exams at least a few hours a day. Jitendra had to study for nothing. He’d failed his School Leaving Certificate exams twice, and everyone expected him to fail the third time, too. That her future son-in-law, like her son, was academically inept bothered Mrs. Sharma. “What is he going to become without even an SLC? A peon? How is he going to feed Nilima?” “She’s going to feed him,” Nilesh said. Lately, taking courage from his sister’s actions, he’d become bolder in talking to his mother. “Look who is talking,” Mrs. Sharma said. “Loafer, good-for-nothing. And what are you going to become? Who is going to marry you?” “If someone like you could find a husband,” Nilesh said, “why wouldn’t I find a wife?” Mr. Sharma laughed, and Mrs. Sharma tried to smack her son but he made a scary
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face and said, “Don’t you dare.” And Mrs. Sharma didn’t dare—she was losing control over her family, and she didn’t even know about Kanti yet. The incredibly handsome but SLCfailed boy got engaged to the fat, smart girl. Nilima was already pregnant, a fact she hid from everybody, even Jitendra. What she herself didn’t know was that the baby would be stillborn, and that it would break her heart, starting her on bouts of depression that would last a lifetime, and that Jitendra, the ever-devoted husband, would stick by her side until she died. They would not have another child. “I’m dry, I’m dry,” Nilima would cry late into the night, and Jitendra would soothe her with his soft voice emerging from those delicate lips. But for now Nilima was pregnant and happy, and she knew she would do well in her A-level exams because she was smart and knew everything. Mr. Sharma made love to Kanti two neighborhoods away in a small room that belonged to a carpenter who’d done odd jobs in his house. For his “hospitality,” the carpenter received five hundred rupees, with a strict warning not to divulge Mr. Sharma’s secret to anyone. Kanti had already received her necklace, a tenthousand-rupee affair he’d found in a shop in New Road. Mr. Sharma hadn’t felt so alive in years, certainly not all those times he’d slept with his wife. Kanti was adept at pleasing a man—her tongue did wonderful things to Mr. Sharma’s aging body. Loud noises—laughter, coughs, groans, and moans—emerged from his throat that afternoon, and he knew he would do it again and again and again with Kanti, and feel younger and younger. Little did Mr. Sharma know that he’d gotten Kanti pregnant right on that first day (the condom had broken during penetration), and she’d give birth to a baby boy who looked exactly like his father, as the other son had so faithfully intuited. That afternoon Mr. Sharma also didn’t know that Mrs. Sharma would eventually divorce him, something he couldn’t ever have imagined his wife doing to him. She’d put all their property in her name, then file for divorce, forcing him to live poorly with Kanti and their new son, shunned by friends, relatives, and even the carpenter on whose bed he’d manufactured his look-alike progeny. Mr. Sharma would deal with this ostracism with laughter on his lips and happiness in his heart. Every moment spent with Kanti would turn out to be heavenly bliss, even though Kanti’s midriff would sag after their son’s birth. Mr. Sharma would walk the streets with swagger. He would be proud of this incredible turn his life had taken.
Mrs. Sharma worried about Nilima. The A-level exams were only two weeks away, but Nilima had taken her engagement with Jitendra as a license to spend all day at his house. Mrs. Sharma cursed Changu for being so lenient, but she didn’t say anything for fear of spoiling the new in-law relationship. In a way, she was relieved about Nilima’s impending wedding. Jitendra was foolish and immature, but he doted on Nilima. Despite herself, Mrs. Sharma had grown to like Jitendra, who was always polite and sweet. Not like Nilesh, whose sullen face only aroused her anger. And Nilesh? What was going to happen to him? Defying everyone’s expectations, and surprising even himself, Nilesh would become one of the leading movie actors in the country. He’d haunt the dreams of young girls and boys, who would cover their bedroom walls with his posters and pray to him more than they prayed to Lord Ganesh. He’d ride a fancy BMW, and he would star in movies that would not only become blockbusters but also win him accolades from even the most bitter of critics. He would end up owning his own production company that would make one hit after another. No one could have predicted this, but this is how the world works. One moment, you are stuck, and then the moment expands, as if God were forcing it open with his pretty bare hands, and you find yourself in another dimension, and you are still you but the world around you has suddenly changed colors. Mrs. Sharma’s colors would change, too, but right now, wrapped in worries about her children, while her husband explored Kanti’s body in the carpenter’s bedroom, she didn’t know that after her divorce, she would discover, in the temple of Swayambhunath, a swami whose soft words would make sense of the suffering inflicted upon her by her husband. She would see, in a millisecond of remarkable clarity (God’s hand at work), that she had invited the suffering upon herself, that all suffering was self-induced, and—this is where her spiritual revolution would begin—that all of life was suffering. This insight would lead her to a place deep inside her where she would no longer feel her physical self. Her body would turn into air, and she would fly over the city, glimpsing into the lives of her one-time family, their suffering: “I want to die,” bedridden Nilima would say to her husband; Nilesh would laugh at a film clip in the air-conditioned auditorium in his luxury house, his arm around another man’s shoulder; Mr. Sharma would accompany his look-alike son to his first day in school. First published in Ploughshares.
READ.FICTION SUNLIGHT: EVERYONE IN THE CHAT ROOM SCRAMBLED TO GET THEIR SUNGLASSES WHEN I LOGGED IN, SO... BY SHRADHA MUKHIYA
SUNLIGHT IS
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FICTION.READ
Illustration by Nhooja Tuladhar
ONLINE
You are the music while the music lasts - T. S. Eliot Chamera: Are you really Sunlight? Sunlight: Everyone in the chat room scrambled to get their sunglasses when I logged in, so... Chamera: I believe you. I am a gullible bat. Sunlight: I thought bats were skeptical creatures. Chamera: You shouldn’t believe in rumors but it seems like you are encouraging suspicion in this case. Should I not be gullible? Sunlight: You should be, life isn’t fun when you run around wearing armor and play in glasshouses only. Chamera: True that. You know, I am not fond of the sunlight but I am detecting fondness growing for you. Sunlight: It just took 3 sentences, how disappointing! Chamera: Disappointing? You are rather gloomy for someone who is supposed to have a sunny disposition. Sunlight: Sunlight isn’t all peachy. Chamera: I am figuring that out, slowly. Sunlight: So, bat, amuse me. Chamera: Pay attention in that case. Sunlight: It is earned not demanded, I think. Chamera: I just got a message from the chat room moderator— everyone put their sunglasses on to avoid looking at you. Sunlight: Hah, that was almost funny. Chamera: And I think you are not as bright as you think you are. Sunlight: I figure you can see things in the dark, so all these assumptions are cute. Chamera: Bats are cute. Sunlight: I have never seen one, only dead ones. Chamera: Even dead ones are cute Sunlight: Rotting bats aren’t cute. Chamera: I won’t deny that. Sunlight: Would you deny being gay though?
Chamera: Paraphrase it please. Sunlight: You are talking to Sunlight, my name could be Surya. Chamera: Is your name Surya? Sunlight: No Chamera: That is my answer to your question. Sunlight: You are interesting Chamera: Despite coming from a bored Sunlight, I take that as a compliment. Sunlight: How can you assume I am bored? Chamera: Why would you be online talking to a complete stranger if you were not bored? Sunlight: So everyone in a chat room is bored? Chamera: Yes, bored and lonely. Sunlight: I could say the same for you. Chamera: I wouldn’t deny it if you did. Sunlight: But I am not bored. Chamera: What’s your excuse then? Sunlight: I am practicing typing. Chamera: Wow, my dark world just lit up in flames. Sunlight: Disgusting bat, how did that happen? Chamera: Sunlight has entered my heart. Sunlight: That is sad, from an evolutionary point of view. You will die soon now. Chamera: We are all dying anyway. But tell me about yourself, I am not familiar with the sunny world. Sunlight: Everything you have read in the books about me is true. Chamera: But tell me things the books don’t know about you. Sunlight: There are so many things I don’t know about myself. Chamera: You are just like a human, humans they say have to live with the curse of being conscious of one’s ignorance. Sunlight: You are a philosopher bat? Chamera: No, I merely reflect and not just breathe. That doesn’t make me a philosopher. Sunlight: You sure sound like
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READ.FICTION one. Chamera: I have a variety of sounds. Interested? Sunlight: I am not interested in such variety. Chamera: You insult evolution. Sunlight: I won’t be the first one or the last one to do so. So all that sexy clutter aside, what are you doing online here? Enlightening lesser beings? Chamera: I don’t have such pompous ideas. I am here to kill time, as time is killing me. Sunlight: I don’t blame you, we are all trying to do the same I guess. Chamera: Some of us are trying to score perhaps. Sunlight: Some of us? Chamera: You aren’t here to score? Sunlight: How can I do that? Chamera: You are already doing it. You’ve scored points in my dark heart. Sunlight: You are such a flirt. Chamera: I only speak the truth. Sunlight: Don’t flirt, I will block you. Chamera: I thought you wanted to practice typing. I am only helping you type more. Sunlight: So what’s your story? Chamera: My story, it really is just 72 kgs. Sunlight: Your 72 kgs’ story must have some alphabets worth its weight? Chamera: I am sure it does. Sunlight. You appear smart, I like it. I never thought I’d enjoy talking to a bat. Chamera: I am flattered. But I must accuse you of flirting too. Sunlight: The common sin has no guilt trip, sadly. But do tell me a story. Chamera: Ok, here is one. When I was small and went to temples, I used to think that all the statues of gods were results of taxidermy; only that if gods died they’d turn into stone. Sunlight: Hahaha, really? What about Pashupati’s Shiva Linga? Chamera: I had never seen anyone with a huge linga like that so I never thought about it. And before I could, I guess, I just grew up. Bubble burst. Sunlight: What joy! Chamera: You are a sadist. Sunlight: Well, bubbles bursting is always a joy. That doesn’t make me a sadist. Chamera: No, it is not. Being a child full of your own ideas is a joy, not the death of such bliss. Sunlight: Well, I am sorry for your loss then. Chamera: Thank you! Anyways, tell me something that I would never forget. Sunlight: Well, I shat in Tundhikhel once because I had to go really bad and the nearest toilet was maybe 10 minutes away.
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Chamera: You shat? Out in the open? Sunlight. Yeah, Pashupatinath ko shiva linga ko kassam ! Chamera: Seriously? The urgency must have been unbearable. Sunlight: Yes, it was a very serious matter. Time or patience wasn’t part of the solution. Chamera: Now every time I pass by Tundhikhel and come across any stench, you shall be vigorously remembered. Sunlight: Thank you, I am flattered. But tell me something about yourself too. Chamera: I saw you shitting that day, I was flying towards Bhardakali and there you were, in Tundhikhel, looking very happy. Sunlight: Very funny, I am laughing so hard I have lost hearing in both my ears. Chamera: Sarcasm is sexier than silicon boobs. But how old were you when Tundhikhel happened? Sunlight: Maybe 7 years old. Chamera: What? Now I am disappointed. I was expecting double digits that had square roots. Sunlight: Disappointment is a common and cheaper phenomenon than awe, bat. Chamera: Disappointment, it is a very egocentric event. But awe is wonderful. I am in awe of you, right about now though. Sunlight: Awe is over-rated. Chamera: A charming public defecator like you shouldn’t be so cynical about awe. Sunlight: I will be cynical about whatever I want, really. It is a free world. Chamera: You sound like a bitter feminist at times. Sunlight: Feminist have every reason to be bitter, provided all the evidence of the treatment of women. Chamera: Now I know you are a girl. Sunlight: Just because I sympathize with the plight of feminists, does that make me a girl? Chamera: Well, Nepalese men aren’t bitter feminists if at all. Sunlight: So that was a trap to find out if I was a girl or not. But what about you? Chamera: I am someone who is fond of bitter feminists if that is what you need to hear. Sunlight: It is time to go to bed and you are being a bore. I guess it is time to go to bed. Chamera: The sun is going to come up soon, how can you go to bed? Your work hours are approaching. Sunlight: Then it is time for you to go to bed. Chamera: That is going to happen sooner or later. You might not happen later so let me enjoy it while it lasts. Sunlight: I wonder how a bat which weighs 72 kgs lives.
POEM
FROM MEMORY AYUSHMA REGMI
first I knew memory then it was gone then it was wedded to the moon that i was not first we were invisible but substance hovered substance covered i lost my faith in language and then i saw it easy turn your head towards your toes look beneath the cold floor look beyond the naked door look and look until you see there is a bird inside your heart look at the star that greets your wart look when we ask how beautiful is the simple life that never makes itself understood to the most complicated creatures who refuse to see the straight in straight Continues in the next page >>
FICTION.READ Chamera: I breathe as often as I can. That is how I live. Sunlight: Never knew breathing was such an effort. Chamera: Oh, it is not an effort. Some people just don’t breathe. Sunlight: You are into ramdev? Chamera: Ramdev merely gives mortality a tv face. People are unhealthy, people are scared. He gives them a chance to claim their flag on long life mountain. I am not into Ramdev. I am talking about people who don’t live and just exist. Sunlight: Don’t you think all this intellectual notions of existentialism in life is a privilege for the bored bourgeois? Chamera: You are accusing facts about people just existing like numbers to be an intellectual notion? Let's not even get to the latter part of your accusation, it is reeking like a dirty old man’s soiled trousers. Sunlight: When you are born you aren’t given a choice to live or die. You have no option to be a son or a daughter. You have to make do with what you have got. Live, earn, eat, breed and die. You can’t accuse a laborer of just existing. So these notions of only existing are really for those with more time than they can handle. Chamera: I am not accusing laborers of just existing. I am not pointing fingers at anyone. I am merely saying it happens and it is sad. Sunlight: You haven’t answered my question still. Chamera: This is like a job interview for a social studies teacher who needs to be an expert in moral science. Sunlight: You have failed the interview and started to bore me. Chamera: Me, how? Just because I think the problem of people living like numbers and automatons is not just an intellectual notion but a social problem? Sunlight: Who cares about living like automatons when you don’t have the freedom to choose your life? Chamera: But no one has the freedom to choose their life. I don’t, you don’t. Sunlight: If that were the case, if there were no freedom then what is this problem about existentialism? Chamera: Not having the freedom to choose your life does not mean you don’t have the freedom to choose how you will make use of the life you’ve been handed. You can always make conscious choices, take risks, live. Isn’t that how life works? Sunlight: All these notions in terms of poverty is really piffle. Chamera: Poverty will always exist, along-
side life. I am talking about not merely being a slave to life. But living it. Sunlight: I still think there is too much ideology behind your ideas. Like reality is a bit stretched out. Chamera: You are way too cynical, bitter feminist! Sunlight: That is a possibility but the possibility of you being too wrapped up in a cloud is higher. Chamera: Now, that is mean. I hope you step on a lego in the dark. Sunlight: Hahaha, and I hope you step on a lego everyday for the rest of your life. Chamera: W could do that together. Sunlight: Not possible. Chamera: Why is it not possible? I demand an honest answer, bat’s heart warming answer in fact. Sunlight: You are demanding, like a mistress. Chamera: Is that bad? Sunlight: Are you high? Chamera: No, I am not high, I gave that up when I discovered sex. But why can’t we step on legos together? Sunlight: I have already stepped in legos. In fact, I live in legoland. Chamera: Is that a euphemism? Or is that a confession? Sunlight: None, it is a fact. Chamera: How is that a fact, unless you are the walls of a kindergarten or a mother. Sunlight: I am both. Chamera: REALLY? Sunlight: Really. Chamera: Wow- I am a bit stunned. Sunlight: You are impressed that I am a wall of a kindergarten? Chamera: I almost lost my will to live for a second. I guess I am going to have to continue living the life of a bat. Sunlight: I thought you liked it. I thought it was all a matter of choice, how you lived? Chamera: Now you are sprinkling salt in the wound. Sunlight: Hehe, listen I have to go now. It was fun talking to you, bat. Chamera: Just when I thought I’d found a spark, it burst into a thousand little pieces of stardust. Sunlight: You really are funny. Do take care of your 72 kgs of atoms. Chamera: I will try my best not to selfcombust. Sunlight: Do that, and yes, happy breathing!
they only terminate we listen to the voices in our head we walk upon the dead we manifest because we're too late to be you, be me we don't stop this talking eternal speaking, yapping, barking hopping with our words i worry this is what i worry about worry for worry if i wont make it i kill the bird in me roots and feathers, clawed paws i push the star afar i wait at the edge of beyond isit and wait and split.
[ Sunlight has logged off]
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READ.FICTION
THE CENTRAL ZOO OUTSIDE THE HOUSE WAS THE TOILET, A CERAMIC LATRINE DUG INTO THE GROUND AND A TAP, A HAND'S HEIGHT ABOVE THE GROUND. BESIDE THE OUTHOUSE WAS A CEMENT WASHING STATION WITH A TALL TAP RISING FROM A SPINDLY UPRIGHT PIPE FOR DISHES, BATHING AND LAUNDRY. BY TSERING YANGZOM
I
t was the beginning of summer and the young ticket seller at the Central Zoo had fallen asleep in his dark booth. Ngodup tapped the Nepali boy’s hand through the bars in the window and asked him to let him in. “Just one?” he asked slowly as his eyelids rose and sank. Ngodup smiled at the thought that he was just an ordinary visitor at the zoo. “I’m here to see the zookeeper.” “Dai, there are no jobs here either.” the boy said in a hurry and shooed Ngodup away. “No bhai, I came to see about a place to live.” “You Tibetans want to live in the zoo now?” Ngodup’s smile disappeared but he would not be angered today. Walking into the zoo, which had hardly changed in the five decades he lived in this city, he felt a comfort knowing that this could be his home. He took the first left past the empty Ferris wheel and the food canteens; he recalled how over the telephone, the zookeeper had instructed him to walk down past the antelope and skunks, until he came to the South wall where the elephants were kept. A one-story box with an unpainted cement façade built two years ago. It was the zoo’s first residential lot. Up until then however, the only residents to live there were single men who worked for the zoo, and even they had moved on.
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“Business is slow,” the zookeeper said as he showed Ngodup the house. “This is like a test. Like a test project.” The slight zookeeper shuffled around on the floor in his old paper-thin sandals. Ngodup wasn’t sure whether it was his family or the residential unit that was being tested. But a stroke of luck through a relative had given him word of the rental possibility, and he could not quite believe how comfortable the house seemed. After a few glances around the main floor, he began to think about who might lend him a pick-up truck to move their furniture. He would also need to contact the monastery to schedule a blessing and prayers. As he quietly trailed behind the zookeeper, who wore sandals that scraped wide lines through the dust, he pictured where they would lay his wife’s maroon and brown carpet. The zookeeper then took Ngodup upstairs onto the roof—the future second floor. Like many houses in Kathmandu, this house was also left unfinished, with knee-high walls and cement columns extending out to the sky from the ground floor. More money, it was always thought, would come about eventually for one to build a second floor. In the meantime, the people strung laundry lines between the columns and dried chillies on grass mats on the concrete roofs. “If we cut the rhinoceros enclosure over there in half, that’ll be a good place for two more apartments,” the zookeeper thought out-loud as he walked downstairs to the outhouse and cistern tap.
Outside the house was the toilet, a ceramic latrine dug into the ground and a tap, a hand's height above the ground. Beside the outhouse was a cement washing station with a tall tap rising from a spindly upright pipe for dishes, bathing and laundry. Ngodup turned the tap and after a few spatters and coughs, it let out a steady stream of water onto the two men’s dusty feet. Their brown skin poked out of the ashy film that was impossible to avoid in the city, and for a second they were relieved from the heat. Ngodup motioned to wash his hands but the zookeeper immediately turned the tap off. “Who are you going to live here with?” “My new wife and a little girl - her niece.” “New wife? At your age?” the zookeeper smiled – or rather he smirked. Ngodup and Pema had not yet made love. They would do so when they found their new home. Ngodup had felt a relief when, without any discussion, they came to this decision. He’d not made love to a woman since his first wife passed away, some thirteen years ago, and Pema never mentioned her romantic past. It did not matter to him, her past. When he was younger, he might’ve been immensely jealous at the thought of all the men she might’ve loved before him. A woman in her fiftieth year could have many men pass through her life. In his youth he would’ve compared himself to each of them, wanting to be the one she wanted the most, not just when they met, but the one she wanted most all along.
Illustration by Nhooja Tuladhar
FICTION.READ
Pema came into his life a year ago, knocking on his gates. By then the city was already unrecognizable, moving towards a hazy civil war in the villages and hills that encircled them. There were also the bold-faced daylight lootings of monasteries, days without electricity or water, and the noisy helicopters rapidly beating the air over the city. Though no one spoke of them, everyone knew those helicopters were filled with the injured soldiers. They were being taken to the army hospital, and the city dwellers who lived by the hospital knew intimately the almost sweet smell of the cremations coming from those high-walled grounds. So when the rapping of Pema’s knuckles broke Ngodup’s sleep one afternoon, instead of opening the gate, he ran up to his balcony to see what the commotion was. “Who are you?” he yelled from his balcony down to the street. “You don’t know me!” she shouted back. She was wearing a thick purple chuba which draped down to her ankles and a flow-
er-printed blouse on top. Next to her was a little girl, no more than seven years old, sucking diligently on her thumb and kicking the gate with her red gumboots. “What do you want then?” “If you have clothes to wash, I can do them for you.” “You’re not a thief?” “What am I going to do with your clothes?” she sounded offended. Ngodup couldn’t see her face well enough, but he knew the sound of an aggravated woman. “You can watch me as I wash them!” she yelled after a few moments. So he watched. Once a week for a year, sitting on a plastic chair beside the outdoor tap where she scrubbed away and her niece, Dechen, read her schoolbooks out-loud. Meanwhile the country around them continued to crumble into near-daily strikes and chaos. In the walls of his home, Ngodup and Pema and Dechen took to the simple purpose of laundry. ***
The air was restless and Pema could feel the weight of the clouds above her. They would unleash at any minute extending her day’s work into a second day. Thick drops of rain started falling quickly around her. She dropped her bag and ran into the house, up three floorsto the roof. She pulled the bed sheets that were spread across the balcony into a metal basin. The bed sheets that had taken the most work, scrubbed section-bysection under the tap and wrung dry with the help of the gatekeeper. Then she went down to the second floor balcony where she’d hung the bosses’ work clothes. The madam liked her to wash them first since they had to be ironed after drying. Finally Pema gathered the remaining clothes from the garden where Dechen, her niece, had begun to lay socks and smaller clothes over the bushes to dry. By then the rain was coming down and the two of them put the dripping basins of clothes inside the guest bathroom. Pema dried Dechen’s face and head with a hand towel. She placed the towel back smoothly on the rack and wiped the washroom floor dry with another towel. Before they left, she told the gatekeeper they would be back tomorrow to finish drying the clothes. He nodded wordlessly, padlocked the gates from inside and returned to his television. Walking down the hill to the square and boarding a bus to the Central Zoo, Pema held Dechen’s small hand tightly and gave her White Rabbit candy. Her sister’s daughter spoke rarely in the two years since she had taken her in. Pema had been nervous about agreeing to take care of her, but her sister was having enough trouble with her own ailments and her drunkard son. And perhaps everyone, even Dechen, knew that Pema had been lonely. Twenty minutes later, they arrived at their stop and walked across the large field in front of the zoo, where little boys were playing football in the mud. They quietly entered through a side entrance beside the main gates. The zookeeper didn’t want a noisy family, the type to announce to the world that they lived there. The zoo smelled of a mix between animal urine, roasted peanuts, and the banks of the man-made pond in its centre. It had been just a few days since they moved in, but all of their possessions, including their clothes, had already taken on that same smell. It was only when they were inside the gates that their clothes stopped smelling. Pema finally let go of Dechen’s hand andshe ran off to play by the statue of an old king. The rain had subsided and young couples reappeared, sitting on the iron benches and paddling around the green pond in plastic swans.
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READ.FICTION
POEM
YESTERDAY PRATEEBHA TULADHAR
there was the afternoon sun, Shradha's long legs Pooja's big curls and my eyebrowsthick like a paintbrush. we're girls who want our men to love us with our facial hair and all that we are girls who believe there is no such thing as promiscuity -either there is want or there isn't 'wants are sexier than needs' anyway likeShradha puts it so, yesterday we slipped on canvases that listed afternoon sex self-obsession and liberation that came from nudity we snacked on sushi and eggplant, gulped down teas from plastic cups and marveled at the boy with pouting, delicious-looking lips, who paints reflection, mangled desire and estrangement he is everymanbeautiful and abandon-bound yesterday, we thought we had arrested time, even as our breasts are fast sagging, skin shriveling up and hair asking for more than a barber's scissors
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Pema, meanwhile, slowly walked past the high chain link fences where the monkeys draped themselves. They lay across barren branches that looked as though they’d been peeled of all texture, like carrots. For years she had avoided this place. As a young woman she lived in a house just outside these walls, in a one bedroom flat with her family. Braiding friendship bracelets each day on the roof, knotting one end of the wool into her big toe and making diamonds and patterns with threads. Then stringing the bracelets from her fingers, she went to Thamel and peddled them to the tourists on the streets, saying phrases like “I come Tibet young,” “I refugee.” Unable to say more than those memorized lines. At night, as she slept beside her sister, they heard the animals in the zoo. The monkeys, the geese, the occasional elephant. But one sound above all others. The fierce roars of a lion. It called out for hours each night. And as her father snored nearby, Pema and her little sister joked that he was returning the lions’ cries. Pema met her future husband at nineteen. The only man she had ever made love to. In those months after their marriage, he had told her constantly that he was the luckiest man, that she was the most beautiful woman. As if everything had to be in those extremes. As they slept side by side, he caressed her shoulders. Then there were those sudden bursts of angry passion. He would tighten his grip on her body and breathe in deeply in his sleep, shaking from head to toe beside her. She would keep her eyes on the ceiling or the walls when she lay in bed with him, even as he made love to her. This infuriated him even more and he accused her of being a ghost who had replaced the girl he had fallen in love with. Eventually, his compliments were no longer for her, but other women he referred to in abstract. I could find a better wife than you in the streets, he said. Don’t you know how to make proper bhaklep? he asked. With time, the arguments became unnecessary. The pain felt constant but dull. And Pema lived beside him, grateful that she had never brought a child into this family. Her sister’s husband died of tuberculosis. And then Pema’s own husband died of liver failure in his early thirties. One day, with a little money in their dress-pouches and a newspaper cone full of peanuts, Pema and her sister went to the zoo, for the first time in their lives. They were women now, in their thirties, walking into the zoo they could never ask their parents to pay for as children.
He was still alive. He lived in a cage in the back of the compound. It had a concrete floor with cracks and puddles of urine. The iron bars were far from the fence where they stood. They leaned over to throw him peanuts. He was lying in the back, near a metal door. She could see his stomach rise and sink a little, but he was unmoved by their treats raining down on him. They whistled, they clapped, even snored like their father used to but he did not look at them. They couldn’t understand it. Where was the creature they had listened to every night? The one whose bellows sometimes still came into Pema’s dreams, morphing into thunder storms, motorcycles, waterfalls. The one they had feared and known. Then as they began to leave, the cage door snapped open. They saw the zookeeper through the small door, bending down and pushing a slab of meat out into the cage with an old broom. He pushed the meat closer and closer to the lion, expecting it to devour the meat, the broom, him. But as the lion lay unmoving, as he blinked slowly at the world, Pema realized that he no longer lived there. That he had not lived for very long. *** Ngodup greeted her at the door when she came in. “Sit down my dear; you’re drenched,” he said. “Oh yes,” she replied rather surprised to find herself dripping over her first husband’s carpet. He brought a towel and sat beside her, drying her long braided hair. Pema felt embarrassed by her grey hair. For years she had plucked the grey hairs, one or two at a time, and managed. But recently they had come in with a determination, and she felt her own body had become strange to her. She ought to henna it tomorrow morning, she thought and took the towel from Ngodup. But Ngodup put the towel down. He laid his fingers on her shoulders, then slid them down her arms. “Can I,” and “May I,” he whispered as he touched her body and began to take off her shoes, her socks, blouse. “Yes,” she responded to each whisper. She was swimming now, she was underwater. She thought about this man she had married so late in life, whose gentle body now felt so close to her own. She thought about how he had wanted to move them somewhere safe and guarded. How he’d found this place, and spoken for days of it with a rare show of pride. He had watched her for a year as she washed his clothes. He was a good man, alone like her. “Yes,” she whispered and let him touch the part of her that felt like a small ball burning.
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READ.FEATURE
Friends
Uninterrupted THE ARGUMENTS WE HAVE, THE DEBATES WE GET INTO, THE WAY WE SATIRIZE EACH OTHER—THESE MAKE PEOPLE THINK WE HAVE TURNED INTO FOES, THAT SOME SERIOUS PROBLEMS HAVE CROPPED UP BETWEEN US. BY RICHA BHATTARAI
T
he camaraderie between the poets Biplav Dhakal and Shrawan Mukarung is evident in the manner they peacefully share a plateful of Momos, pausing between morsels to banter with each other. Yet no two persons could be more different than these two. Dhakal is flamboyant, which is apparent from his flowery shirt, quick smiles, poetic repartees, easy friendliness. Mukarung, on the other hand, is conventional (not just in the way he dresses; he was wearing a more conventional checked shirt), talks less and smiles even lesser, though his thoughtfully pronounced opinions are wittier than Dhakal's. The tale of their friendship, and all the arguments and squabbles that go along with it, is well-known in the Nepali literary world. “Well, yes,” says Dhakal with a smile, “we do have our differences, who doesn't? We argue on all kinds of things. But then we always have our friendship to bind us and fall back upon, one that has lasted for more than two decades now. Isn't that so, kabi?” “Yes, yes,” the kabi answers, “friendships aren't easily created, after all. We have similar ideas and ideals that have held us together. If we had too many intellectual conflicts, we would surely have fought and drifted apart. We have contributed a lot to make this friendship work out. We respect each other and also our existence and beliefs. Ours is a deeply emotional bond.” The bond is obvious in their friendship, but don't they sometimes feel differences creep into them due to their different ethnic backgrounds, especially at a time when the country is poised to split along ethnic lines? “See, our backgrounds and our ways of thinking are evident in our writings too, but only the serious readers can dis-
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cover these strains. We don't deny such differences, but there is no need to harp on them either.” “True, true,” Dhakal says, “Whatever we have for the other is out there in the open, ready to be analyzed and discussed. The arguments we have, the debates we get into, the way we satirize each other—these make people think we have turned into foes, that some serious problems have cropped up between us.” But that is not the case. The way they talk about it, it seems as if theirs is a relationship that has lasted forever. They met for the first time in Jawalkhel in 2046 during a Rai festival. Mukarung says, “Biplav just pulled me away from the crowd and began heaping praises on my poems. You can imagine how happy I must have been listening to him praise me, as I had been a fan of his ever since I read his revolutionary poem 'Tiniharu Ranke Bhut Hoinan' when I was still in high school.”
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And happy he was. Dhakal says, “To put him at ease, I told him to imagine that he wasn’t there in front of me, and expressed my appreciation for his work. It was only later that I learnt he liked my poems too.” "Why did Mukarung's poems fascinated you so much?" I ask Dhakal, and he replies instantly, “Right from the beginning, Shrawan's poems identified the roots of Nepal's socio-cultural structure, and did great justice to them.” But when I ask him what he does not like about Mukarung's poems, he pauses for a bit, as if he is unwilling to comment on his friend's writing. But after pondering for a while, he says, “Sometimes, I feel as if Shrawan leaves empty spaces in the midst of his writings. But I could be wrong. Or he might have deliberately created these gaps to allow readers to interpret them.” Mukarung nods and says, “He doesn't mean to say that my poems are incomplete. Nothing is complete, after all, and there are
immense possibilities left open everywhere. I feel that if I do not leave spaces for the reader, they will not find themselves in my poems.” I also ask Mukarung to appraise Dhakal's poetry. A hitherto glib Mukarung goes quiet for a moment and says, “I am not the right person to talk about it.” Seeing Mukarung hesitate, Dhakal says, “Come on, don’t be modest, kabi.” Perhaps encouraged by this, Mukarung begins, "As a reader, I see his poetry transforming with his age — his first efforts at poetry carried strands of revolution and intellect, bound together with myths and symbols.” “Yes, yes,” Dhakal agrees, “Some readers found these poems so complex they accused me of borrowing words from the dictionary.” Mukarung nods, “That was his youthful phase. Later on, he experimented with concepts like existentialism and nihilism. I didn't enjoy the poems he wrote during that period, because they were too intellectual for my tastes. For me, the simpler the writing is, the better
September 2012 |READ 87
it is. I love his recent poems, which are mostly dialogues with one's times and society.” Dhakal agrees with Mukarung's appraisal. “I lost my way for a while in the middle, and let go of myself. But now I understand the need to plod my own path and not deviate from the task of spreading cultural harmony and well-being.” Both Dhakal and Mukarung are highly rated poets, but who do they think is more successful between of two? The question seems to flummox them for a bit, and they look at each other with raised eyebrows. “The very notion of success is problematic,” Mukarung says, skirting the question. “Who is more successful? A writer whose book sells in the thousands but writes sloppily or the one who is very literary but whose book doesn't sell many?” Dhakal responds modestly, “I would say Shrawan is a more successful; he has triumphed over history through his poems. Having said that, I believe each of us has our own journeys to complete.” Mukarung chides his friend with a quick repartee, “Don't talk as if you have attained Buddhism. We plough our own furrows, but a sense of competition does exist. There is this desire to write better than the other, but it is all quite healthy.” Despite the literary rivalry, what makes their friendship tick? The Bhojpure water that they shared in their childhood? I ask them in lighter vein. Maybe, they say, laughing. “The best thing about Shrawan is that even though he seems aggressive, he is actually extremely gentle, and pure at heart,” Dhakal says.
88 READ | September 2012
Mukarung nods, adding, “He too is like me—he doesn't judge me and doesn't think of me as some 'Jangi Kirantko Choro'.” Now that their fondness is established, I ask them if are there things they don’t like about each other. “What is it that I don't like about you, kabi?” Dhakal turns to Mukarung, and then adds diplomatically, “He has his quirks, weaknesses, shortcomings, that I have become used to. In fact, I find beauty in such things!” At this, Mukarung guffaws, and says, “Isn't this a little too much!” Eager to prove his point, Dhakal explains how boring life would have been without Shrawan’s little divergences, like his complete lack of formality and inhibition. “Those little divergences, these are the things that make one's presence felt," Dhakal says. “I do wish, though, that Shrawan was a bit more formal at times. He calls me at three in the morning. That's very irritating but we do end up chatting for hours.” Mukarung retaliates, “And I wish he was not so officious and formal all the time. I think our respective natures shine through our writings. He is disciplined, he edits and rewrites and polishes. I am much more relaxed, I don't even read poems after I finish writing them.” Mukarung pauses for a moment and looks at Dhakal, who is nodding, to gauze his reaction and then concludes with a poetic flourish, “He seems to be a bit too rigid in his writings, and I am too fluid. But these are our idiosyncrasies.” Bhattarai's collection of short stories, Fifteen and Three Quarters, was published last year. She is a sub-editor at The Himalayan Times.
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September 2012 |READ 89
WRITERSPEAK
T
he idea behind the Ncell Nepal Literature Festival is to reach out to literatures across bordersâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;geographical, linguistic and cultural. So we make it a point to invite international writers to the Festival. When writers from abroad come to attend the Festival, they come with certain notions of Nepal, its literature and people. They tell us something about their own writings and the literature of the countries they represent. They learn from the writers and readers here. Discover, through their own words, what the participating writers of the inaugural edition experienced and what they liked about the Festival. Discover, too, how excited the incoming writers are about attending this year's Festival and how they are looking forward to meeting their Nepali readers.
BYTE.READ Photograph : Rajan Kafle
INDRA BAHADUR RAI NOVELIST AND CRITIC The Festival has been a great learning opportunity for writers and readers alike. Though writing is done in solitude, a writer cannot but remain in the community of other writers. It is only in the coming together of writers that a writer feels his existence. In a literary festival, we meet a host of other writers and learn what they are writing. We also get a chance to meet our readers and receive constructive feedback on our writing. In Nepal, literary programs are usually limited to a few people and closed seminar halls, but a festival like the Ncell Nepal Literature Festival opens the way for a wide variety of people to come together for lively literary discussions. The organizers of this festival have done a great service to literature.
September 2012 |READ 91
READ.BYTE
IRA TRIVEDI
I attended the Ncell Nepal Literature Festival last year and it was a spectacular experience! It was fantastic interacting with my Nepali readers, and I was so happy to see such a deep interest in literature amongst the youth in Nepal. The Festival was organized very well too! It was one of my first visits to Kathmandu, and I absolutely loved it there, the weather, the landscape, the restaurants! I do hope to come back again for the Literature Festival.
92 READ | September 2012
Photograph : Rajiv Shrestha
Author of There is No Love on Wall Street, The Great Indian Love Story and What Would You Do to Save the World: Confessions of a Could-Have-Been Beauty Queen. Her forthcoming book is India in Love: Love, Sex and Marriage in 21st Century India
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Photograph : Rajan Kafle
MARK TULLY WRITER AND FORMER BBC HEAD FOR SOUTH ASIA I was delighted to be invited to take part in the Ncell Nepal Literature Festival. The presentations were fascinating, the discussions lively, and the audience responsive. I was particularly glad to learn something about writing in Nepal which is not sufficiently well known outside the country. It was also good to be able to make my own writing better known in Nepal. I wish the Literature Festival a long and prosperous future.
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AMISH TRIPATHI INTERNATIONAL AUTHOR PARTICIPATING AT THE NCELL NEPAL LITERATURE FESTIVAL - 2012. Described as the ‘Paulo Coelho of the East’ by Business World and a ‘People’s author like Jeffrey Archer’ by The Telegraph, Amish’s unique combination of crackling story-telling, religious symbolism and profound philosophies have made him an overnight publishing phenomenon. Released in March 2010, Amish’s Shiva Trilogy (of which two books, The Immortals of Meluha and The Secret of the Nagas have been published) has over 7,50,000 copies in print with gross retail sales of nearly Rs 17 crores. A graduate of IIM-Calcutta, Amish has worked for 14 years in the financial services industry before turning to full time writing. He lives in Mumbai with his wife Preeti and son Neel. You are attending the Ncell Nepal Literature Festival this September. How are you feeling?
I'm very excited. I've never been to Nepal before and I'm really looking forward to visiting this beautiful country. I also look forward to interacting with and learning from Nepali authors and thinkers.
What comes to your mind when you think of Nepal?
Massive mountains; beautiful and friendly people; Pashupatinath temple.
What would you want to say to the Festival audience?
I look forward to some stimulating discussions with all of you.
94 READ | September 2012
BYTE.READ
Now in hardcover
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ADVAITA KALA INTERNATIONAL AUTHOR PARTICIPATING AT THE NCELL NEPAL LITERATURE FESTIVAL 2012. Advaita Kala is the author of the bestselling novel Almost Single, which has sold over a hundred thousand copies and garnered widespread international attention, with the Washington Post calling it "cheeky new writing that breaks shackles." She is a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines and also writes on food. Her food column Epicurioisity appears in The Indian Express' Sunday Magazine â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Eye. She has also written film scripts for Anjaana Anjaani and Kahaani. You are attending the Ncell Nepal Literature Festival this September. How does it feel? It is like homecoming for me. I have spent five years in Kathmandu as a child. So Kathmandu is very dear to me and I have very special childhood memories of my time there. I think the Kathmandu of the 80s suited my personality; the free spiritedness of itâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;it made me some of what I am. I speak rudimentary Nepali. I used to live in Bishal Nagar; my father was with the Indian embassy. My next book is based in Kathmandu, so I was looking for an opportunity to visit the city. It is great that I have been invited for the Festival.
What comes to your mind when you think of Nepal? My house in Bishal Nagar, my dog, my family, picnics in Bhaktapur, cycling to school, shopping at Bluebird, streets of Thamel and Durbarmarg, the Nirulas, and the Annapurna Hotel where I learnt swimming. The list is endless. I suppose a more nuanced approach would have been possible if I didn't think of it as my childhood home, so my perspective is mostly nostalgic.
What would you want to say to the Festival audience? Well, I guess we will leave that to the Festival. I look forward to being there!.
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Don't Judge a Book by Its Film DIPENDRA LAMA IS A FILM CRITIC ASSOCIATED WITH NAGARIK DAILY. PHOTOGRAPH BY DINESH KAFLE In Nepal, films based on literary texts
dialogues, and looks play-like rather film-
get special attention and certain privilege;
like. When criticized for being so, Shah had
I don’t know why. Films based on books
said, "It’s natural for it to look like a play
aren’t necessarily good. If they were, most
as it was adapted from a play.” He might
of the film awards would have gone to such
have said that just to defend himself, but
films.
we don’t see other directors distinguishing
Some of the most acclaimed Nepali
the artistic difference between the crafts of
literary masterpieces such as Munamdan,
literature and film. No wonder most films
Shirishko Phool, Basain, Prempinda, Ma-
based on books look either like a play or
saan and Basanti have been made into
a novel.
films. The good thing about these films is,
It is only in Nepal that a good film has
they retain Nepali characteristics in con-
not been made out of a good book. In India
trast to other Nepali films which burrow
Satyajit Ray had successfully made films
everything from Bollywood. But they have
like 'Pather Panchali', 'Jalasa Ghar', 'Satranj
been marred by over-the-top acting, wrong
Ke Khiladi' out of books. In Hollywood, the
casting, over-dramatization, unnecessary
classic 'Godfather' trilogy, the superhero
songs and dances, and poor cinematogra-
films and the Harry Porter film series were
phy. And they have flopped miserably.
all based on books. The Irish playwright
It is not easy making a film based on
George Bernard Shaw had turned his own
a book, because when you turn a book,
play 'Pygmalion' into a film script, for which
let’s say Shirishko Phool, into a film, the
he won the biggest awards in literature and
viewer expects to see the imagination and
film, the Nobel and the Oscar.
storytelling technique of not just Parijat,
It is thus irrational to say that one should
the writer, but also of the director. Sadly,
not make a film based on a book. And it is
we don’t see our directors putting into their
equally unwise to evaluate a book on the
films the kind of creative and artistic efforts
basis of its film adaptation (or, for that mat-
that authors put into their books.
ter, the film on the basis of the book it is
A case in point is Neer Shah's 'Masaan,'
based on.) More so because, artistic and
which was based on Gopal Prasad Rimal's
aesthetic value of a book won’t be compro-
play of the same title. It has excessive in-
mised if the film based on that book does
door scenes, very few characters and long
not come out well.
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THE BOOK I LOVE THE MOST I have loved many books. For instance, Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, a non-fiction book about the evolution of science; Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner; most of BP Koirala's oeuvre; Shankar Lamichhane's Astract Chintan Pyaz and Bhupi Sherchan's poems. So it is difficult to pick one book as my favorite. But if I have to choose one, it will be Mohammad Younus' autobiography, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle against World Poverty. The book chronicles the establishment and evolution of Grameen, a micro-credit banking facility initiated by Younus to provide small loans to the poorest people of Bangladesh. I bought the book about a year and a half ago at a bookshop in Kathmandu. I had heard quite a bit about it from my friends and colleagues and had been thinking of reading it for a long time. I wanted to read it also because I am banker. I was aware of the work Younus was doing to uplift the lives of the downtrodden in Bangladesh and other developing countries. A scholar in his own right, Younus had translated his theory into practice and changed the lives of millions of people. I was startled to know that as small an amount as five takas could change the life of an individual. The book has had a deep impact on my thinking on corporate social responsibility. After reading it, I realized that people's lives can be changed through banking, and started to think what I could do as a corporate person to change people's lives. I now feel proud that our bank has taken an initiative to provide around twenty-five full scholarships along with a monthly stipend of two thousand rupees to school students from poor families.
| September 100 2012 0100 READ â&#x20AC;&#x201D; ISSUE 7
Photograph by Dinesh Kafle
KUMAR LAMSAL CEO, SANIMA BANK LTD.
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September 2012 |READ 101
What kind of stories do you like to write?
I like to write love stories. Why only love stories?
Maybe because I like love stories. And love sells! Your second book, a novel, is due out soon. What is it about?
As the title Summer Love suggests, it is about love (what else!). Purely a love story, it will resonate among young people. Why a novel on love?
There is a dearth of novels written around the theme of love in Nepali. It is high time someone wrote them. What are you working on at the moment?
I am putting together a collection of short stories. It is tentatively titled Dehradun Express. Will it also be about love?
Yes. Most of the stories in the collection will be about love. Will you be writing only love stories or...?
Guru of Love
A young, promising writer, Subin Bhattarai's collection of stories, Kathaki Patra, won him many young hearts. His writings, mostly about love and youth written in lucid prose, remind one of the bestselling Indian writer, Chetan Bhagat. Here is an excerpt from an interview with the writer whose debut novel, Summer Love, is coming in October. How did you come to writing?
I used to write poems from early on. In the free time after my SLC, I read all the books by BP Koirala. Doshi Chasma in particular had a huge influence on me, and I had wished I could write like him. I would write and tear what I wrote, and write again, with the hope that I would be able to write something decent someday. 102 READ | September 2012
Most of the stories in my first book, Kathaki Patra, were love stories. My second book, Summer Love, is also a love story. The third book that I am putting together will also have a fair number of love stories. So my fourth might as well be about love. But it would be interesting to see if I could move away from writing about love. You'd said somewhere that you like Chetan Bhagat's writings. How much of an influence has he been to your writing?
I have read all of his books and have liked them, but cannot say how much he has influenced my writing. I had started writing long before I read Chetan Bhagat. What is love in your opinion?
That's a difficult question to answer. It's hard to define love. Maybe that's why hundreds of books have been written on it. For me, it is a state of being in bliss.
WHY I WRITE.READ
Mahesh Bikram Shah
Mahesh Bikram Shah is the author of five books of short stories, including Sipahiki Swasni. His book Chhapamarko Chhoro won him the Madan Puruskar.
Did you a have good reading environment at home?
My father was an avid reader. He used to read mostly Nepali and Hindi social novels and thrillers. So, yes, we had a reading environment at home. I recall reading Hatimatai, Gulbakawali and Tota Mainako Katha as a child. I had read the Ramayana and the social novel 'Man' written by Liladhwaj Thapa when I was in class 5. Who inspired you to write?
My teacher Dhananjaya Timilsina is the real inspiration behind my taking up writing. He used to tell me that I
should become a writer. My parents might also have played some role in my turning into a writer. They encouraged me to participate in literary programs that we used to have at our school and my father, in particular, would correct my language whenever I sent him a letter and send it back to me. Of late, my wife has also played a vital role in making me a successful writer. What makes you want to write?
Initially, I started to write with the desire to participate in the literary programs at school. Now, the personal satisfaction and the recognition that I get from writing makes me want to write. Could you tell us about your writing process?
Ideas for stories come to me just like that. Whenever an idea comes to me, I frame the story in my mind and then write it down in a diary. I give it a complete shape in leisure.
Do you have a daily writing routine ?
No, I don't have a daily writing schedule. I have enough ideas for stories, which I give shape to when free. What was the best piece of advice given to you?
I didn't know that I had the habit of using too many Hindi words until Jeevan Nepal pointed that out to me. Now I am very conscious about not using them. What advice would you give to new writers?
Don't look for overnight fame. Read books and study the society that you live in. Without reading books and understanding the society you cannot write anything new. What are you working on now?
I am working on a collection of stories set in foreign countries. These will all be new to readers. I am planning to bring it out later this year. September 2012 |READ 103
READ.BOOK BYTE
Which books are you reading at present?
I just finished reading Modiain by BP Koirala and also its English translation done by Jaya Raj Acharya. I am going through IQ84 by Haruki Murakami and British Samrajyaka Nepali Mohora by Jhalak Subedi. What kind of books do you usually read?
Mostly the ones that are easy to read. They could be either fiction or non-fiction, but they have to engage and enlighten me. How many books do you read every month?
I cannot say for certain.
Photograph by Chandra Shekhar Karki
Which book has influenced you the most?
There are many books which have influenced me in one way or the other, notably those by BP Koirala, Parijat, Lain Singh Bangdel, Dhacha Gotame, Shankar Lamichhane, Harka Gurung, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus and VS Naipaul. Who are your favorite international writers?
Ernest Hemingway, VS Naipaul, Albert Camus, Pico Iyer, Mark Tully, etc. Would you want to recommend any books?
Ghamka Paila by Dhacha Gotame, Abstract Chintan Pyaz by Shankar Lamichhane and Outsider by Albert Camus. Who are your favorite Nepali authors and why?
When did you start to read?
Narayan Wagle is a former editor with Kantipur and Nagarik dailies and author of two novels, Palpasa CafĂŠ and Mayur Times. 104 READ | September 2012
I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t quite remember when I started to read. Really. I must have started reading much later in life, as there weren't any libraries and bookshops in the hills and valleys where I grew up. I used to read whatever I could lay my hands on, though. What is your favorite children book?
Bhakta Prasad Bhyaguto by Kanak Mani Dixit. But I didn't read it when I was a child.
BP Koirala, Parijat, Lainsing Bangdel, Dhacha Gotame, Shankar Lamichhane, Harka Gurung and Baburam Acharya for different reasons. Some of them for style and substance; others for craft and story. How do you select books?
I select books on the basis of news, reviews and recommendations. What are you working on at the moment?
I'm working on a collection of selected pieces from my "Coffee-Guff" column. It is taking me a long time to select the pieces, as I haven't archived them.