This essay was written in 2005 and published in Blue Moon, the Whitman College literary magazine, in 2006. My dear friend Dr. Lindsay Troyer kindly emailed me scans of the essay, making it possible to share it here.

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The zipper on my shorts got stuck yesterday. I sewed up the front of my shorts with serene, even stitches placed half inch apart. The beer-belly is gone, consumed by bronchitis and displaced by too much wine and too little solid food. Thank you, college, for the alcoholism. Wearing a ratty shirt into which I have chewed several holes, I look like I feel and I live. I am still homeless. The forecast said it would rain, but it is high noon already and everything is just fine, thank you.

My ears pop as the cars leave the peopled valley and its highway and start to climb. Suddenly evergreen trees intrude; the friendly dark brown of tilled earth, the charcoal of burned fields, and the sedating gold of wheat expanses distance and become miniatures in car mirrors. Christmas trees are farmed here, which is fitting, because Santa is fat. The horizon constantly shifts, drops shamelessly into hazy blue crotch of the valleys, then soars to dense crowned ridges of eagle-winged mountains. A mirror of the home I left, this is a land of dramatic colors: trees, skies, leaves, shadows, rock spilling on a mountainside, and earth skinned under forest trails. You want to pick the verdure of the conifers and juggle it in the thin blue air of a gelatinous sky. You want to wet your face in the damp skein where mountain meets clouds. We are in the Oregon of young mountains and old firs, of damp earth and the musky smell of woody rot becoming life again, living dust so elegantly going back to life-giving dust, and it still doesn’t look like it will rain today. I am already hungry; the crisp air doesn’t help because it clears my mind and makes me hungrier in the stomach, hungrier in my veins and my eyes.

The road is being made straighter near Tollgate; once it was possible to fly off one of the bends and soar above the valley, but they have cut harder into the mountain to make the road straighter. I remember fantasizing about a take-off a year ago when we went camping in the Wallowas. I am sure every imaginative child secretly wishes his mother to step on the gas a bit harder when the vista wraps itself around mountainsides; there are plenty of images to encourage such a fantasy: birds and comic book heroes and Bush landing on a warship. They are making the road straighter and I don’t like it, but I have no right to complain because I can’t drive, and whoever is driving (Sarah) doesn’t appreciate my fantasy. It is a new car she is driving, democratically fuelled in Milton-Freewater, and we are going to Jubilee Lake for a day in the water. We’d better not soar off, not even accidentally. Act your age, you stupid oaf! I have to strangle the child within to keep it from whimpering. She has to return in time to work, so we’d better not want to fly. I think Stefan is asleep, or, he could be meditating. In either case, he is quiet.

Sarah translates Shakira’s new album instead. Shakira is a dark haired woman and it shows in her songs, in the way she talks about love and the man she loves. I am falling in love with her, because she can love so intently, with so much abandon. Somehow the girls I fall for are forever busy scribbling precise blocks of life into their schedule books, whereas I haven’t owned a watch since I traded one for alcohol some six years ago. Thank you, Kathmandu, for the alcoholism, and the habit of vagrancy. I am falling for Shakira. Oregon, not of the desert scrubs or subterranean potentials of biological disasters and nuclear holocaust, but of mountains that wrap around ascending columns of clear air, eastern Oregon unfolds languidly; ears pop once, ears pop again, keeping tandem with the car jolting over speed-breakers where there needn’t be any. “Men at Work,” signs proclaim, but there isn’t a single man at work in sight. We keep pace with the car before us, we dance with the road, we slip into shadows and come out to let the sun play on our arms again, and Shakira is crooning about heartbreak.

Come break my heart, Shakira, I say aloud. I am mended enough to ask for more of the same from which I’d fled a few months ago. Like moth to a flame some clichés never die—like a man desperate for his quenching poison I return. Serenity is dull. I want a storm within, and I find my storm spilling from Shakira’s throat.

It is 12 miles to the lake from the highway. There is a spot where the road bends around the mountain once more. It is my favorite spot along the drive. I have told Sarah earlier that I will ask her to stop there, so we pull over. Tuan pulls over behind us; everybody gets out. It is a beautiful day, and the day knows it. The mountains are patchy where fire has shaved them and where forest trails snake, but otherwise the view bears very little of man’s signature. Stefan points at the remains of a deer. The meat is all gone: consumed, rotted. The skeleton isn’t bleached white yet, but it is getting there; strong summer sun is working on it. I breathe the dead doe’s farts; or the fog snorted by its ancestors. What does Shakira sing with? I pick a stone and throw it into the valley below us. I have always thrown stones into emptiness.

Asphalt ends and we are on a gravel road; mammoth RVs signal their approach with giant billows of dust. To be near nature Mister and his Old Missus carry their entire house, complete with a satellite dish on the roof: who cares for wind in a forest or pine rubbing against itself? Britney Spears is on TV. Three dollars at the gate—again, but this time only by accident, we pay democratically and we are at the campground. I want to go to the opposite side of the lake, away from the fishermen with their beer and chairs, away from toddlers and pre-pubescent attention seekers. Tuan and I carry the inflatable raft and the food and take long strides; the girls trail behind and I become impatient. I feel the pull of a place which I know to exist but I have not seen yet. I am afraid that the magic won’t last and the place will not wait; if I miss the beat, it will not identify itself to me. I can’t afford that. I have been homeless for too long now, and there is a corner on the opposite shore of this lake that is tugging at me. My grandmother cut my umbilical cord into three pieces; I know exactly where each piece went: she was a poet, she vested me with metaphors. First into the hot ashes of the family hearth: for good food to find me as long as fire exists. Second under the flat stone where village elders met before government came to the village: for me to find a seat among the wise, wherever I go. Father was instructed to bury the third piece in the King’s courtyard: for me to make my home by the king’s throne, for me to thirst for power. By the time of my birth the palace had been converted into a museum; the Kings had long lived in a new house where one day there would be a massacre. Father dropped me on the cobblestones as innocuously as he could; I was likely swept up by a municipality employee in her pre-dawn round. That escaped piece of my umbilical cord, which was meant by my grandmother to anchor me to a home, is a ghost now. It appears and disappears with its own will: it is pulling me to the other side of the lake. I know I will be found there.

The spot doesn’t find me. We hastily inflate the raft and jump in once we reach a familiar corner. I haven’t taken the time to pause and regard the lake, but I am in the water. It is warm where the water is shallow, it is colder where it is deeper, and since I can’t venture any farther than my toes can keep my nose in the air, I don’t know how cold the coldest depth of the lake is. My right ear was carved two years ago to patch the eardrum (Mommy wouldn’t like it because I eventually swallowed a piece of the cartilage, minor instance of self-cannibalism, major violation of Dharma); every time I duck into the water I can feel a channel of water rush into my brain because the surgeon incised a circle around the eardrum and severed all nerve endings there, fooling them into bringing into existence an opening, a skeletal void with its mouth sucking on my brain. But I want to swim. Although I don’t have the confidence that I won’t drown, I can float. Our mothers were bags of water. We floated in water before we gasped air. We blinked in water before we blinked in light. I cling to the raft and float with my eyes in the water. It is murky and cold, the sun is feeble on my ears. Huyen is hitting the water with plastic oars. Waves break the serenity of sunlight streaming to the bottom of the lake.

I doggie-paddle to the shore, climb up the slippery side and sit on a seasoned trunk of pine. I hug my knees and shiver. There is laughter everywhere, but there is no place to sit on the ground. There is no grass on the embankment, and there is no rock to dry on. The sun is past the zenith—it looks at us from the west now, and it makes the other side of the lake into a shimmering apparition. There is a family of four in a plastic boat with an electric motor. They cut the water cleanly and whiz past inflatable rafts with flimsy oars. Dad is cautioning his giggling pair of teenage girls; his attention lapses away from the fishing line trailing behind him. He did not come to fish, or he wouldn’t have brought his daughters. In Orwell’s Coming Up For Air, Fatty Bowling wonders if he exists solely to procreate and then take care of his offspring for the rest of his life. No, that can’t be, he decides, because there are moments when he is absolutely convinced that his own selfish existence is of equal importance, if not more so. That’s your fishing line, daddy-o, I think. Will I have offspring, fruits of my loin? Right now, I just want to dry off the lake that clings to my skin. América makes good rice, so I steal a few mouthfuls from her. Sarah comes to the shore. I ask her if she wants to go for a walk.

The northeastern corner of the lake is a meadow gently sloping into the lake. They blocked the southern end to create Jubilee Lake, which must have been a small creek otherwise. It must have been a swampy deer pasture once, now it is the most popular recreational destination in Umatilla National Forest. Sarah says it would be interesting to watch how many different kinds of animals come to this corner to drink water during the night. She shows me huckleberries, and it makes me giddy to finally meet the berries the boy is named after. I pick a few. Some are sweet, some still tart. Indian paintbrushes are in bloom. The swamp smells fecund. It is a hundred times more teeming, more bursting with life than the slippery carpet of needles under pine trees that surround the lake. There are actual birds singing, not schools of mallards jaded by human presence, but birds that dip and start, flit from grass to branch, call and answer, flash colors and cock heads, warble and cry. I realize that I am seeing a sparrow after years. I cannot believe myself. There must be sparrows in Walla Walla, I think. But I only see crows, and the ubiquitous ducks that never fly away, just get fatter and fatter. As Sarah tells me about a family camping trip she made as a child, a family of unleashed pre-pubescent siblings and feebly protesting, unenthusiastically disciplining parents pass us. The vista opens to the lake again, and I can feel the power of the moment: Orwell would call it the feeling of being suddenly shoved up against reality. It is the spot where I am buried; it is the spot that was pulling me. It has found me. I look across the lake, and I look at the sky.

The lake sways dry reeds with gentle slaps that soothe the thoughts inside my closed eyes. The soil is damp under me, and the sun gets progressively sharper. I open my eyes: Sarah is breathing very gently, the same rhythm of serenity that shallow waves impart to this corner. Her friendship has been my calm refuge this summer. The wind carries layered voices to us, but the wind also tip-toes around this bend, cautious because Sarah is asleep, cautious because the Indian paintbrushes bob with their own conversation. A cloud passes between the lake and the sun, the wind teases by getting just a fraction colder, but the gold returns and insects warm up to the sun again and the day matures with its sounds of families and friends with love and relish in their throats, the air rushing through the rush, birds, so many birds of all kinds calling and answering, insects crawling under the soil. I can hear the fishes that Stefan and Tuan are trying to catch with their bare hands some two hundred yards away. I wait for the place to say something to me. I remember other places a rock overlooking the confluence of Marshyangdi and Daraundi, a large Bodhi tree with a cold spring in its gnarled roots, a damp cave in a sand quarry, the Saraswati temple where eucalyptus falls in a hundred shades of red and brown. There is a sound to every mystery in the universe; every place is a mystery; if I can collect the sound of each place where my truant umbilical cord has surfaced, perhaps I can compose my celestial mantra, a barcode birth name war cry epitaph unique to me. Perhaps then I can articulate away the ghostly shroud around the self that uproots me, perhaps I can finally speak the mystery of me.

I wake up because my back is burning. The damp soil soothes it, and the sun on my chest warms my inside. The sun must penetrate through the gap between my ribs and illuminate the thumping heart, the expanding lungs, and the thin treasure of emptiness that holds them in place. I have felt that emptiness threaten me so often that it is now my dearest attachment. Sometimes, it wants to expand and swallow me whole; and sometimes it wants to collapse and disappear, leaving nothing between heart and lungs, no space for a new song to vault, no corner to bury the treasure of a newfound love for a person. I want a stable, reciprocal relationship with the emptiness in me: I want it to house new madness and purge old hurt. It purrs in the sun and it spreads evenly inside me, under my skin, around my eyeballs, on the tips of my hair. Now Oregon can embrace me and find empty space to inhabit with its green mountains and sage-brush flats, wide Columbia and fast cold creeks, its many songs of aboriginality and fleeting new footfalls of immigrants cautiously calling the strange names of unfamiliar places. My umbilical cord is hopping from this shore to another, from Jubilee Lake to Maxwell Lake in the Wallowas, always in the open, always in the light.

We return to the raft. Tuan and Stefan have caught two nervous crawfishes that are as transparent as murky water. If they’d caught a dozen, I would have wanted to eat them, but there are only two. They are our pets for the moment. We watch them scurry and burrow, lift mud and murk and try camouflage. It is time to leave. Those that can swim want to swim across; Huyen and I will take the raft, refuge and respite for the brave ones. An empty gallon jar of Carlo Rossi serves as a floatation device now—Stefan brought drinking water in it. América keeps coming back to the raft, Sarah is eager to get to the other shore. Tuan and Stefan climb on the raft and dive off. Huyen paddles furiously to correct the direction. Sarah is swimming across and I want to stay close to her, just in case she needs to rest, but she runs long distance, she is steel and capability and she is fine in the water. I throw Carlo Rossi to América, it works, it is a miracle, and she laughs. We are in the middle of the lake. My toes can’t touch the bottom.

I slip into the water and let the cold grip me. This is it. There is laughter on the crests of the small waves that rise and dip; there is laughter in the air lighted by the north. There is warmth and laughter in the fingers of the afternoon streaming from the west to touch my pupils. But there is no laughter in me, because this is it. At the rate my body is depleting, at the rate I am consuming myself by not eating proper, I don’t have too long before disaster descends upon my being. At the rate the days pass, at the rate I breathe through time, my calm will end with the summer. I don’t want this afternoon to end. This is the light and air that constitute me. This afternoon in eastern Oregon is luminous in my skin.

They won’t miss me, I am sure, because the shifting surface of the lake brings their laughter and grunts to me and my name is not in any of the sounds they make—huckleberries and sparrows, Douglas fir and juniper, crawfish and grass, my friends in the lake. In no sound is there a call for me; nowhere is a fraction of the celestial mantra composed of a dead doe’s farts, or the ache of wings opening on a new car as it soars off an asphalt squiggle. I am under the raft. The lake pushes me up, the raft pushes me into the water; I remember the gulf between Archimedes and Orwell. How long can I hold my breath? Can I hold my sense of love for longer than that? Gibran said one must be willingly hurt by one’s sense of love, but now I think Gibran was talking pretty nonsense. I just want light and air.

I don’t want to be found. From under its belly, the raft looks eerily translucent; the sun still manages to create shadows under it, and so the sun must be here. I flip on my back to press my face into the raft. This is where I want to sleep. I grab the raft’s cord as it floats before my face. Shafts of sun dig into the green murk of the lake, but there is no bottom, only the raft that I am pressed against. And that is my stretched skin, the chart of my fears and my attachments. Don’t call for me; continue with your slaps on water, your laughs over the waves. I am in a womb of absent light and absent air. Jubilee Lake is pressing into my ribcage; Oregon is spilling into my blind eyes. I won’t come out, because I know a petty mystery of the universe—one small moment stretches as infinitely large as the sum of the time that exists before being, and the fathomless well that is after-being, and my moment is captive here, captive now, in the illuminated shadow of the raft. I am a vagrant and an alcoholic. I want the taste of Shakira’s gyrating hips in my mouth. I want to stay here. I can ask the universe for special favors. I can stretch this moment for ever.

Perseverance is a matter of factoring out time. I am still under the raft, and I refuse to come up for air. This is me coming up for air. I know now how my ghostly umbilical cord manifests its magic. I have seen the skeleton of a doe and I have tasted huckleberries. I have seen the sun hesitate on Sarah’s arm, only because she was asleep. I will wait here, wait for this moment to stretch to such thinness that the universe will tear a door through it. I will swim right through that opening. I will be gone, and you know it. But, before that, I want to come up for air once, and be blinded by the light which fills this sky.

—

Prawin Adhikari is a writer, translator and editor. He is the author of Budhani (2025), Folk Gods (2019) and The Vanishing Act (2014). He has also translated Nobel laureate Han Kang’s The Vegetarian into Nepali. He recently translated Bhekh Bahadur Thapa’s A Life in Public Service into English.

Politics has gone the kimchi way, which is to say, everyday it rots a little, excites a little. The paralysis born of small insights is diluted by another set of insights into the comedy of terrors that fills each hour of news. Each politician excites more envy for his skills as a theatrical actor than for his professional achievement. Diwas tells me we disagree on everything, and that contrarian habit becomes the farthest reach of my civic ambition. The mind turns to events more important: waiting for the humid mulch of May to lift; waiting for a beauty-queen to pause mid-sentence and giggle; sucking on the teat of trite wit and anticipating the satisfaction that comes from ending a sentence.

When Diwas says we should go crowd hunting, it feels decadent, nourishing with the froth of all excitement, frivolously revolutionary. But, when Alston and Diwas meet me by the Post Office in Sundhara on a Monday afternoon, we find nothing of the throbbing masses, no reverberations in the air of red salutes and red fists. Instead, it is one-size-fits-all rayon socks by the dozen and a dump of cheap pumps in gold pleather, and Bollywood movie comic books. Alston and Diwas walked all the way from Sanepa, and I took a micro-bus to Sahid Gate, but there is no political disturbance, no action to be had. The most refreshing aspect of the new political atmosphere is the restraint shown by my fellow citizens. It makes me feel cheap for wanting to watch the opposite happen: something less surprising and more violent, less mindful and more bloodthirsty.

On Tuesday, Thamel is so quiet that we have to wake up the napping employees at a popular hangout. Yagya and Rahul are meeting after seven, eight years, but soon their conversation runs dry, because, in the age of Facebook and Twitter, there is no private thought, even if private life is protected. There is talk about women and marriage, nothing that leads anywhere. There is a bigger circus that commands attention: cricket! The film of sweat that separates the body from the seat becomes stickier, saltier; the world shrinks to the swing of a bat or the leather of a white ball describing an arc with its lazy spin. Activity reduces to speculation about scores and the finger raised to get the bar’s attention. It is a fast-scoring game with screaming fans and cheerleaders who flash their smiles and red silk underwear, but everything happens inside the protected box.

A murmur rises, beating a rhythm with slogans, approaching from an indeterminate direction. At first, it mingles naturally with the noise in the cricket stadium, but soon it filters in through the windows, around the door, riding the excitement on the faces of the restaurant staff. As the murmur gets closer, it becomes chopped into smaller choruses, each led by a voice inching towards a torn, hoarse whisper. It is a sea of red, hammer and sickle, and endlessly marching past. Restaurant employees run to bolt the street entrance from the inside, then idle by the walls, fingers laced into the meshed wire fence, watching passively, bickering about the number of people, the direction in which Prachanda’s resignation will take the country. The procession is decidedly not paisa-vasool; it is too precise to have been driven or derailed by passion: there is no thrill of terror.

On Wednesday morning there is a fresh perspective on the new political scenario: since the Maoists are no longer in the government, this year’s Miss Nepal competition can be organized without the usual fear. Of course, the beauty queen making this observation doesn’t foresee Prachanda’s press conference, through which he makes it clear that this resignation is a mere change of diet until he heads the next government. What is both exciting and disappointing is the realization that the bite has been taken out of the political barking. There aren’t nearly enough drumbeats of doom.

Thus the day coils into itself, it begets a fresh habit for unattached details, looks for minutiae while postponing acknowledgement of the political reality. What sounds like lonely dogs barking across the neighborhood compounds into a swollen caterpillar of a julus writhing its way through a silenced neighborhood. And what sounds like anger and self-righteousness bounding down an alley reveals as nothing more than the neighborhood dogs barking to defend their piss-lined shrines. By the time another large julus passes outside a sekuwa joint in Nayabazaar, ears perk but the conversation doesn’t pause. The julus plays itself to the mind: a throng driven by no particular crisis, and much too studied in the art of the julus.

But all of this seems distant, like a circus being performed on a separate planet. In the everyday, small changes happen without screaming for attention: the streets are easier to navigate; there are fresh vegetables in the market; newly-wed friends finally arrive in Kathmandu from Dang because the roads open. Sacks of parwar inspire a prayer of thanks and women leafing through fresh saag smile at each other, secure in the knowledge that there is plenty to go around. And that says a lot about the simple priorities of the simple people. Let the naked ambitions of the political parties continue to make a fool of each unworthy one of them. Today there will be fresh, inexpensive tarkari to look forward to, and that is enough. That is more satisfying than the next videotape, next unconstitutional shenanigan, or the next inevitable act of terror.

—

Prawin Adhikari is a writer, translator and editor. He is the author of Budhani (2025), Folk Gods (2019) and The Vanishing Act (2014). He has also translated Nobel laureate Han Kang’s The Vegetarian into Nepali. He recently translated Bhekh Bahadur Thapa’s A Life in Public Service into English.

Bandipur and I go back a long way: the slate on the roof of the house I was born in had come from the quarry in Bandipur; my father had studied there as a child, and returned after his MA to teach there and politically organize his students. Every Tihar, my grandfather’s elder sister – whom everybody called Didi, and who still walks the cobbled chowk in Bandipur, leaning on her cane and grinning ear to ear – brought as koseli sacks of orange and peanuts from her fields in Bandipur. But, before 2010, I had only been there once, while I was still in high school, and I had misremembered the village – for the better, since I remembered it being more spacious, more bridal in its riot of bougainvillea, with more children playing about and a cooler breeze than that I encountered in 2010. On my first visit, I had been dragged along as my father made a stop there with a politician, a few weeks before the election. I was my father’s son, and the only people I met belonged to the same political party, making the same sort of bland remarks that local politicians make.

But in 2010 I had gone there to reconnoiter the village for a screenplay adapted from a novella I’d written sometime in the summer of 2003. The novella, based on true events, had been set in Khaireni, where I was born and raised, while the screenplay had been shifted to Bandipur. This was a reactionary instinct on my part: Khaireni had urbanized in a way that rendered it unrecognizable to someone looking at it through a lens of nostalgia. The direction of progress chosen by my villagers didn’t suit my plans for a story based there. Bandipur, on the other hand, had acquired a quaint charm and monetized it: there were potted bougainvilleas, but only around tourist lodges and boutique hotels. The children played with the noisiest zeal when blonde volunteers with diverse European accents taught them nursery rhymes. But, Bandipur still retained a certain charm that had gone from the decrepit to the cured. It would do handsomely for the setting of the dark thriller that I had written. Over five days in March of 2010, I paced up and down the central chowk and imagined where a particular scene would be set.

That movie was never made. But, from that dark tale came just the frothy cream of it: a minor character that seemed light enough to make anybody smile. Bhaskar Dhungana, who wrote and produced Kagbeni, and produced Sano Sansar, wanted to make a light comedy rooted in Nepaliness. (Incidentally, my very first contribution to Nepali cinema came as the bookending monologues in Karma’s voice in Sano Sansar, at about the one-minute mark into the film, and again at 2:18:15, written the day before its release and dubbed on the morning of!) Bhaskar dai and I had been toying with script ideas since 2008, and we had had our share of failures and success: the first project that we actually shot no longer exists, but a few other shorts that we worked on, with Bhaskar dai directing and he and I writing, are now on YouTube. The more accomplished of them – Falesne Jaro – even went to a few film festivals around the world. Even though it was shot over just a couple of days as a student film in Prague, it is photographed beautifully, and the minimalistic music heightens the sadness in the story. We wanted something just like that: shot beautifully, set to beautiful music, a story entirely Nepali.

How does one situate a story? As a writer of fiction and screenplays, I have struggled the most with setting. A story can be rendered entirely credible or otherwise just by its setting. By that we could be talking of set decoration, but also of the inflections and dialects the characters use. It could be about the skies and the mountains that form the backdrop for romance or strife – but it could also be the sole reason the morality implied in the story works or fails.

Setting is paramount. And our new story – Suntali – sought a setting halfway between essential hill-Nepal and Anywhere; halfway between fairytale and coarse reality. The behavior we wanted to bring to the characters needed to be universal in their zaniness, but their speech had to ring true in a local dialect. For this, the setting had to be at once of this world, and with the slightest switch in perspective, otherworldly. Bandipur seemed the obvious choice: although Jiri was mentioned a few times as an alternative, nobody from the team ever made it there to consider it as the setting. Plus, the story had raced ahead to include specific temples and trees and hills around Bandipur. It was simply too perfect a fit to pass on.

Ondra Belica, who had shot Falesne Jaro, came early to look at the location. Bhaskar dai and Ondra, along with other members of the production team, traveled to Bandipur to identify suitable locations. The screenplay had many unique locations, and save for a couple of locations, even scenes set in the same setting -say, a major character’s house – moved constantly within that setting. We had written scenes for which a window needed to align perfectly with the view of a shop, for instance, or a character’s room in a specific kind of a house had to look down a particular alley. These kinds of spatial unities make sense in a fiction-writer’s head, because he can always make things up without being restricted by reality. Film producers, on the other hand, prefer location descriptions to match pre-existing structures.

But, Bhaskar dai, Ondra and the team returned from Bandipur with meticulous photographs and floor plans for each available space, and with notes for edits. In an earlier version of the script, I had written a scene in an orange grove: imagine a pretty girl named Suntali, standing cross in an orange grove, pelting her lover with ripe oranges while accusing him of being a mindless dolt! And fighting and crying and hugging and making up and making out. With the golden glow of a sunset in the Himalayas lighting her hair afire as she tries to wipe her tears, half-laughing and half-crying, mad in love. Imagine that!

Yarp. You’ll have to imagine all of that, because, unbeknownst to me – rather, because I didn’t do a thorough enough job of researching the setting – a viral epidemic had decimated Bandipur’s famous orange groves a few years before we went there to shoot our movie. There was no orange grove in which Suntali would cavort. We’d be shooting just before monsoon – yarp, no mountains for mood-lighting either. Some other locations key to making the story work didn’t exist as I’d imagined them. We’d have to make do with what did exist, in what shape they existed, and yet transform them to serve our vision of the space.

A thorough rewriting of the script followed the final reconnoitering of the locations. Bhaskar dai had brought back information about every wall, every door and window, and which way they faced – now, sitting in Kathmandu, we could imagine how the light would play at what time of the day, and what shot would work and what wouldn’t. Even now, when I think of the line-by-line revision of every scene to conform with the floor-plans from the locations, I feel the burden of all the labor we put in.

After thoroughly combing through the screenplay (for our draft version 5.2), we picked a few scenes with which we would conduct the auditions. There was a set of logic behind these choices: in terms of how we wanted to use the space, which scenes gave the actors the most range to perform the nuances of their characters, etc. Sticking to the floor plan – or roughly sticking to it, as the rehearsal space allowed – we rehearsed scenes with the actors, especially the scenes that seemed most space-bound, most dependent upon the resources we had, and ones least adaptable on the fly.

Yet, the best laid schemes of mice and men, as the poet said.

When Suntali finally went to Bandipur to commence shooting, monsoon came early. Spaces that had seemed charming now proved crammed, the heat of lights stifling the cast and crew. A wall had to be moved by a few feet. How does one ask permission from the landlady to move a wall by a few feet? With the promise that it would back in its original position within a few days! A newly interested politician – in fact, one of the old politicians whom I had visited with my father during my first visit to Bandipur, and called Uncle – threatened to stop production if he wasn’t paid off. A village drunk objected to being denied free passage – especially when the camera was rolling – and threatened to pick a fight at every available opportunity. A third grader with her milk-teeth entirely dissolved by tooth-rot refused to quiet her fidgeting and insisted upon singing when silence-on-the-set was called. Villagers so eager to work as extras suddenly froze when ‘Action!’ was called. Teenagers cramming for end-of-term exams hid away from the windows and yelled whenever silence-on-the-set was called. Old ladies spent entire days diligently watching the actors, and only when evening came asked about when the dancing would take place. ‘No dancing in this film, Aama!’ They’d become crestfallen. ‘No dancing. And the hero sews dresses. What kind of a film is this?’

Despite the many problems the unit faced during the shoot, Bandipur has come alive beautifully onscreen. The colorful and intricate details of the Bindhyabasini temple at the eastern end of the chowk, the airy interior of the old library, the triangular wooden stairs in a Rana-era building that is now a college, the mud-plastered kitchens and wooden window-seats: Bandipur’s exteriors and interiors have been lit and photographed beautifully by Ondra. What I like best is the fact that the spaces come alive without the slightest exaggeration of trick of lighting – it is a reminder that the spaces we occupy, in all their ordinariness, are in fact magical and attractive, if one simply switches one’s perspective by a couple of degrees. The wooden posts in the middle of the room, the evening light filtering through wooden windows, the moss on stones and the dog curled in the middle of the street: these are at once uniquely ours, and universally recognizable. That syrupy quality of time that is an essence of Bandipur’s character is also captured in the languid movements of the villagers or of the children jumping and playing. But the quickness of gossip and intrigue – without which it is impossible to imagine village life in Nepal – is also present.

I dread to imagine what Suntali would look like without its setting of Bandipur. I am sure Jiri or any other of the many picturesque settings possible for it would have brought another set of beauty and charm to the finished work. But I still believe that this particular story belongs in that particular village – without its cars and motorbikes, without the accompanying noise, with its uniformly recessed shops and pine-crowned seat of the patron goddess. I am very aware of the work the production team – Jaya Shah, Prachanda M. Shrestha, with Sudipta Karki and Firoj Khadka – put in to ensure an uneventful shooting schedule. That required numerous negotiations and contracts, re-negotiations to manage the new-fangled greed of some individuals, making overtures of generosity to secure the cooperation of others. It was easy for me and Bhaskar dai to choose Bandipur as our setting for its charm and quirk and beauty. It wasn’t as easy for the producers to make it available for photography, for two schedules over separated by a few months.

And it was easy for us to march into Bandipur, some forty of us at any time, to shoot a movie we wanted. But the people of Bandipur had to tolerate us with our bright HMI lights, with the constant bustle well into the night, with the disruption of foot-traffic and ratyauli-song playing through the night. Their hospitality and generosity, even when they didn’t realize that being an extra requires repeating the same boring action over and over for an entire night – or even a couple of days – made the experience a lighter burden. Many of us made friends with the children and the lady who sold chow mien and sukuti.

I look forward to going back to Bandipur once the movie is released. So many villagers will be eager to see themselves in Suntali, most of them women who can’t travel to another town just to watch a movie. I hope to be present when they get to see themselves on a big screen, projected to be larger than life and filled with the color and vigor of twenty-four frames per second. I hope to be there when Bandipur rings with their applause and cheer for themselves and their chowk and lane and shrines and fields. I hope to be there when their faces will glow with a newfound awe for the space in which they have made their homes.

—

Prawin Adhikari is a writer, translator and editor. He is the author of Budhani (2025), Folk Gods (2019) and The Vanishing Act (2014). He has also translated Nobel laureate Han Kang’s The Vegetarian into Nepali. He recently translated Bhekh Bahadur Thapa’s A Life in Public Service into English.

But what if one does not have enough to save the life that provides him his subsistence? Who comes to save him from the emotional tumult? Who arrives to guarantee his livelihood? What does one do with the only piece of land on which is a small hut that is the only room of one’s own?

He is Premlalwa, but how many Premlalwas do we meet everyday. The eighty-years-old Madhesi man with his thirty-something-years-old cycle selling less than ten kilograms of mangoes everyday outside a pricey restaurant. The dhaka-topi-clad gardener who works thrice-a-week in an upscale neighborhood for five thousand rupees who has to commute for an hour each way by foot because he cannot afford the bus fare. The man who sets himself on fire because he cannot afford to pay the loan installment on his motorbike.

I have become twenty-seven years old. Ulaar has become twenty-eight. I have seen changes around me, mostly for the good. But Ulaar holds a particular lens intact for the viewers to gaze into. Ulaar is the microscope under which one witnesses the virus. The virus has never been eradicated — it only mutates. The disbalance that is the ulaar has never gone away. The periphery has barely been considered seriously by the center that Kathmandu is, and those of the periphery have to bear the brunt of such inconsideration. When one arrives in the capital for justice, as we see everyday in places like Maitighar, they get stuck in the rut of the capital. Justice becomes schizophrenic, the seekers of the abstract experience only paranoia.

And we the writers, too, choose to be corrupt. We ask for money in exchange for what they call a ‘good story’ (and we have believed them, sadly) — which, too, rarely materializes, and even if it does, so what? But maybe we could turn towards Nayan Raj Pandey and learn from him to keep our eyes and minds open. Not to be ridden by guilt for what cannot be changed easily and get webbed up in petty derision, but to make patience our friend to soak in and distill what appears; to imagine how things were, is, and can be; and to invigorate in readers the necessity to focus on the ulaar; and to never forget it, ever.

Get a copy here or listen to the audiobook.

Dusk settles around Ranipokhari. Tired faces line up around Tundikhel and search for toehold and grip on microbus floor and frame, to transport them away from the day’s grind to a home, the solace of walled and precious dark and quiet.

On Sunday, I was one in the crowd waiting for microbuses that run the route 23, weary of competitors vying for half of a seat, hoping for a spine-friendly posture and the absence of buttocks shoved into the face. I resented everybody else using our city’s savage modes of public transit.

The jut of an elbow and a hidden growl helped me find a seat. My hands searched across annoyed faces for something to hold. Behind me sat four happy buddies, shoulder-slapping and trash-talking. On my side sat two, video-swapping and trash-talking.

‘Rajesh said you were playing kauda? You lost three hundred to him? He owes me money, so he said you should pay me.’ Rajesh’s debtor turned dark with embarrassment, looked to his friends for support. The creditor brushed his hair with long, smooth nails and grinned.

They talked about a girl who saw one of them after months of silence and accused him of acting as if he didn’t recognized her. It wasn’t his fault that she had dyed her hair and looked ‘high class’. They talked about an attachment job gone awry. ‘He said seven hundred. I said – I get it done for five. I called Gautam. He said – come over, I’ll talk to my staff.’ The young man was discussing a document that would go with another document, both forged, to go with another set of documents, these genuine, to be submitted to an overseas employment agency, to be submitted to an embassy or consulate.

These were boys: their bodies still changing, too much swagger for their bravado to be genuine. But they dealt in girls and forged documents, talked about the devaluation of the dollar and the collapse of the international market, and how, if that interrupted construction activities in UAE, it would be difficult to live in Nepali villages.

On my side were two friends who chatted excitedly, volubly, within the rigid bubble of privacy that is dreamed up in a crowd of commuters. ‘Anil killed Mahesh and Biraj killed Anil. I was hiding behind the bridge with mortars. Biraj came over the bridge and killed Abhi and stole his shield. Then I killed Biraj. I was laughing so hard.’

‘Next time, give me a call, okay?’ The other boy was too busy, too busy with two cell phones flipped open, his thumbs models of ambidextrous mobile virtuosity, finding songs his friend wanted, exchanging them over Bluetooth. ‘I didn’t know I had this image,’ he’d say. ‘My memory is not as good as it used to be.’

‘Compressed?’

‘Used to be compressed. Something has gone wrong. Sometimes, I can’t find things in their proper place.’ There was more talk about video games. The boy with two cell phones had a pair of eyes frozen into a voracious portal for information intake to stimulate the brain. He glanced up once, not at anything in particular, but to make that squint of eyes and scrunch of nose that helps a nerd reposition his slippery glasses.

These boys lived in two very different worlds. For the group, the world was a gritty, urgent text into which they read dominance and defeat, tension and tenderness. They preferred the gray despair of forged documents and pseudo-prostitution over brightly rendered fantasy. They were perversely well versed in the flavors of local corruption. If nothing else, they had the fire in the belly to move the world that rattled them periodically.

The pair of boys was far more fluent in the jargons of their distractions than in jargons of a trade. They didn’t react to the inconveniences of their immediate surroundings – limbs and stale breath of fellow passengers, the damp squeeze between heaving bodies – with the same passion as they reacted to the wrong graphics card or the lack of hacked passwords. They were despairingly apolitical.

I couldn’t imagine sharing with any of them the notion of the world in which I exist. I was astounded by the gulf between the worlds of forgers and the video-game players. These are citizens of this country. The dialog between them shapes our yet-unwritten constitution. If they disagree about their shared world, they will take up guns and money to create realities that suit their notion of the world. What am I to do to reconcile them?

I am to write. About what I see and what I can’t, and to tease into full shape everything I don’t and can’t know. I understand we share the world with people who necessarily see a different world than the one we see. But we can tear open their minds and their hearts, and with some distance and some affection, list their contents that are common and contrasting to the junk that make up our minds and hearts. But then again, perhaps the boys are just boys. Perhaps I imagined the conflict between their worlds, and none of this intellectual posturing and justification is necessary. Perhaps I am to write, simply, without the pressure to explain in too much detail.

—

Prawin Adhikari is a writer, translator and editor. He is the author of Budhani (2025), Folk Gods (2019) and The Vanishing Act (2014). He has also translated Nobel laureate Han Kang’s The Vegetarian into Nepali. He recently translated Bhekh Bahadur Thapa’s A Life in Public Service into English.

The actor Arpan Thapa has created a niche for himself by playing rather intense characters in a variety of Nepali movies: from Murray Kerr’s jittery Sick City to the unreleased features Tandav and Suntali, he has proved himself capable of handling brooding, troubled souls. His directorial debut Mukhauta – for which he also wrote the screenplay along with Pratik Gurung – continues in the same vein. It is no exaggeration to say that it is a pastiche of his past roles, and also the best example of his preoccupation with a particular sort of a man: nursed on urban seediness, full of loud grimaces and bloody spittle, a man continuously at odds with the world around him, an undercurrent of violence behind an intense but unmoving mask.

The Nepali Brihat Shabdakosh doesn’t list this variation of the word – the entry there is for mukhauto, for a mask, a false visage that allows for obfuscation of intentions. (This is ostensibly the theme for the movie: the idea is repeated in numerous scenes where characters deliver lines built around the word, either beseeching or threatening another character to remove their mukhauta.) But the movie seems more of a masque – a dumb show where characters wear grotesque faces that allow them to be compressed into clichés usually seen only in the movies, with motives and expressions seen only in the movies, employed here to achieve an end feasible only in the movies. Which is to say – despite its protestations to otherwise, Mukhauta has no basis in reality, and therefore comes off as an exercise in fantasy alone, and therefore lacking the spine of reality which would have allowed the work to stand up to more meaningful scrutiny.

Saugat Malla and Dayahang Rai are perhaps the most reliable men acting in Nepali movies these days. And they have been wasted here: Malla by being given meaty scenes which require him to play a single tone of hysterics, and Rai, inexplicable, by being reduced to a voice. It is no secret that Malla can deliver caricatures very well – Haku Kale was but a caricature, and is now a part of Nepali cinema lore. But he is also capable of nuance and pathos, something we have witnessed on stage before. Here, he screams his way through. Even in the one scene that humanizes his Ravi to an extent, when he beseeches his father Mr. D for fatherly love, Malla is still screaming, still only an inch away from falling into B-movie villainy.

Rai has the most capable body among men acting today: the lightness with which he uses his somewhat portly frame, the unassuming fluidity of his movement – these allow him to inject menace or pathos into a scene with equal ease. In Mukhauta, however, he is limited in some scenes to acting from the dubbing-booth, and that is the audience’s loss. I am sure there are designs to use him in the sequel.

Rajesh Hamal, Robin Tamang and Sunil Thapa do nothing to help the movie along: their characters are cardboard cutouts without any trace of originality. Hamal indulges in what has become my pet peeve: the villain who laughs maniacally when he gets his evil ways. What is especially annoying is his habit of breaking the fourth wall when he laughs like that. Is that meant to implicate the audience complicit in his murderous designs toward conquering the Thamel underworld?

The most disturbing scene is perhaps the one where Saugat Malla attempts the pendulum between manic and pathetic: but his method for that actorly display includes punching the daylights out of a coked-out girlfriend/kept-woman played by Harshita Shrestha. As the woman got punched around and threatened with the loss of her life, the audience cheered. Perhaps they only saw Malla’s acting, and forgot that there was something truly horrific happening on screen, something that required the audience to accept that abuse and abasement of women is routine enough to not require a second glance. It is not enough to have her character gain access to the gangster’s ring (of power) at the end, and set her up for a meatier role in the sequel, to justify the narrative choices in this movie. Misogyny for the sake of it is no more a part of the narrative that it is an expression of the individuals behind the work. Same goes for racist remarks: it is disturbing that the narrator introduces Tamang’s character as Chepang, whereas it would have been a forgivable prejudice if another character in the story had used the word to introduce the old gangster’s character. Sure, a filmmaker can say that he made a movie entirely for entertainment, and that the thick presence of viewers at the ticket counter justifies thoughtlessness. But, that makes it impossible to take the movie or the people behind it very seriously. And when the entertainment derives from acts of unspeakable cruelty – which is not the same as stylized violence – it implicates not the characters perpetrating the action onscreen, but the people behind the camera, who could have paused to examine the values espoused by their cinematic choices, but didn’t.

Mukhauta has no commentary to make about anything. It could’ve been placed anywhere else in the world, and it wouldn’t suffer or improve as a work: such is its disconnection from its space. The timeline is so muddled that it takes a learned understanding of different tones and hues to know what is going on where and when. Nisha Adhikari’s character is a prop so carelessly sketched that: a) upon retching in the morning, she knows with certainty that she is pregnant; b) within a few more scenes, the baby is kicking in the womb; c) upon being captured, is discarded. Her lover goes into laborious slow-motion to kill everybody before cutting away to another unceremonious killing of an important character before returning to stare down at her. Adhikari’s bar-dancer character first dances, abruptly, then disappears for a few scenes until she reappears to be introduced properly – as a bar dancer. The chronological shifts are either very ambitious, or utterly, utterly confused, and therefore a strain on the mind. Narendra Mainali’s cinematography seems to have been ruined by the muddled timeline that required sequences to be rendered in black and white and through various other filters. After the gritty, mysterious frames of The Contagious Apparitions of Dambarey Dendrite, his work in Mukhauta seems a total waste of his talent.

After Tulasi Ghimire, perhaps Arpan Thapa is the next interesting writer-director-actor to have come along. But, there is little evidence in Mukhauta of his capabilities as a director, and as a writer. However, after sitting through two viewings of Mukhauta, I felt desperate to yell at the actresses in the movie and tell them – stop settling for such demeaning roles that add nothing to your work as actors, or to your growth as individuals! Maybe it is people like Nisha Adhikari and Harshita Shrestha who should be writing roles for themselves, instead of playing punching-bags and rape-dolls for men who want only to scream, smoke, and spill fake blood all over themselves. Mukhauta most audaciously sets itself up for a sequel – if one is to be inflicted upon us, let it be the opposite of this iteration; let me one that takes the failures of Mukhauta and brings us less slow-motion butchery, and more nuance and grounded emotions.

—

Prawin Adhikari is a writer, translator and editor. He is the author of Budhani (2025), Folk Gods (2019) and The Vanishing Act (2014). He has also translated Nobel laureate Han Kang’s The Vegetarian into Nepali. He recently translated Bhekh Bahadur Thapa’s A Life in Public Service into English.

Such expression is Of Ink and Breath. This little book carries the weight of the author Prabal B. Shah’s heart. It holds in its cradle the felt emotions of a father towards his son, but also his wife, his brother, and his aunts. It is a gift of love to those willing to open their hearts.

Rarely in this society of ours do we hear stories of a father’s love for their child, that too in a non-fictional form. Such task, one can assume, is not difficult, for what we love is what we can write about the easiest. Easy work might not be perfect, but one can be assured knowing what is in the heart is exactly what is on the paper. One then questions why fathers don’t write about their sons and daughters. But one also revels in the fact that Shah did exactly that, not out of literary need but of a personal calling.

The book is part poetry collection, part diary entries and part comparisons between the art of printmaking and fatherhood. As a printmaker, Shah finds similarities, differences, divergences, and convergences between the two arts. He does not slip into the comfortable narrative of simply aligning the two endeavors as one and the same. Instead, his reflection is of a meditative kind, bringing forth a more acute measuring of the two processes. Such weighing hence allows a unique vantage point to peek at the process of raising a child into a kind and loving young man.

A dry LangLyang review does no justice to the book, hence here are a few quotes from the book itself:

• “Before he leaves, he hugs both of us tight, warm, real. We haven’t hugged like this for years. Not since we were boys. For a moment, time folds two brothers, no words, just a knot shared and understood.”

• “[The guru] spoke of planets and alignments, of futures hinted at but never fixed. I listened quietly, aware that no chart could fully explain the weight of love I already felt.”

• “Our son was passed gently from one pair of arms to another, receiving affection without understanding its source. He soaked it all in effortlessly. […] He was the quiet sun around whom everyone revolved.”

• “It’s the silence of 3 AM, broken by a sigh, a breath, a heartbeat that is not mine but somehow now is.”

• “In these pages, you’ll find ink and love and breath. You’ll find fear and joy and doubt and beauty. You’ll find me, trying my best to be someone you could trust, someone you could one day understand.”

• “Fatherhood, like art, is an ongoing process, one of creation, connection, and constant becoming.”

• “Her love didn’t just soothe me; it challenged the very way I moved through the world. It is a strange and beautiful thing to be loved so well that you feel ashamed to be anything less than kind to others.”

• “All these emotions, these layers of ink and breath, are not mine alone. They are a debt of love I will spend the rest of my life paying forward.”

These decontextualized quotes, while beautiful in their own right, jump into a joyful liveliness within the book’s larger context. This is a much needed book for all, but mostly for boys and for men. Read it and gift it. It will only do good, better, best.

Contact the author here to get hold of a copy. Or if you are around the Sanepa area, slip inside Palate and ask for the author and/or the book.

Besieged is the word for how it felt. Trapped. Change was desperately the new sauce for vitality. Let it tang on the tip of the tongue, let a new tinkle be the ear’s new laugh. Let it come, what may come, and let it bring what dares come. Such was the need for friction, the need for flight. But, there was little distance to be covered on a fire built with no fuel. How far can a man run to escape work and detail, reversal and climax, sustained illusions of stillness that look into the soul?

Monsoon hasn’t come yet; the heat is unbearable. Roofs and walls fatten with the poison of the afternoon’s heat, make the nights infernal. Sleep becomes thin, unravels every minute, leaves holes in its dim shroud through which enter real and imagined worries. The panic of a night before a chemistry exam almost ten years ago erases the trunk of experience since then. Gone, the many years spent happily since, the few years of work and romance, of reading poems under a tree and writing poems on roofs, sunsets seen dangling from a cliff, peeking at a bird’s nest with friends and merlot. Gone, the welcome memories and maps of faces and bodies that spiced sleep. Sweat becomes the cold prison from which the mind looks outward, at the already too-bright sky, the loud remonstrations of neighbors laboring at hand pumps, and the knowledge that once more the reprieve has passed, once more, the cool dark night that should have been wrapped over eyelids has evaporated.

Desperate for something to hold, slapping the sweat in his thin hair, a man gazes westward and sees what? A road to nowhere. Mhepi, a pine-forested pubic mound, and arranged in a ring below it a skirt of heat darting up from blacktop roads. Immobile like swatted flies, shopkeepers paste their cheekbones to small squares of concrete on their floors, shifting every few minutes on their straw mats to cover another inch of untouched coolness. In a teashop that doesn’t sell tea, heat has wilted a girl, and sweat has wrinkled her into an unhappy hag. From the coldest part of the house, where she washes dirty dishes, a swarm of flies rises to hover inches away from new skin, testing the alien for signs of life, salt, nutrition dripping from nose-tip.

Thirty minutes pass. No fridge. No eatable that hasn’t been left out in the heat. One half of the shop is dark, the shutters pulled down, a fan roaring in a corner. A phone rings and a body stirs awake in another corner, crawls on all fours. It is a bitter, bitter man calling, angry at being duped: he paid good money to go somewhere. His money has disappeared, but the visa hasn’t arrived. He trusted her, a sister from his village, he trusted her to take care of him, and now he is a destitute, without enough money to pay the lodge for the night. She calms him, her voice beseeching, scolding with mild seduction. She leads him through an interrogation. She strokes the bold stripe of blonde highlight in her hair as she forces him to agree.

Tell me your story. She stares back, taps the table with a thin, chipped nail. I write stories, but today I can’t think of anything now, so I have come here hunting for stories. Tell me your story, and I will write it. She taps the table, asks me if I want anything else to drink. Where did that man want to go? You know, some Arabian fantasy, sun and sand and towers eclipsing man’s ability to see clearly. What happened to his money? Why didn’t his visa arrive? She stops tapping the table. What sort of stories would we tell? Interesting ones. Don’t hesitate. Tell me, anything, about you, about the business, about the neighborhood. She gets up, clears the table.

So much for something to hold. So much for tell me your story. A stray dog corners itself into a tight box of shadows between house, wall and utility pole. Back off, mongrel, it says with its panting and squirting over the new kingdom. After a minute of staring back and forth, the dog lowers its hindquarters with princely leisure, lets its testicles hover over the ground, seeking the coolest spot. The spectacle is concluded. Although it is later in the afternoon, the heat is just as unrelenting. Instead of the scorching sun overhead, it is the waft from the ground that stifles. A thirsty tongue can’t decide if it is a coarse log or a brittle wafer.

A boy brings an outmatched bicycle to the bridge over the Samakhusi sludge-run. There are three men sitting on the bridge, having surrendered in the fight against pre-monsoon heat. There is a stack of plastic envelopes, baggies, of all sizes, on the bike’s carrier. But the boy isn’t authorized to sell them: he stands guard by the bicycle and waits. Tell me your story, kid. I write stories, but I have nothing to write about today. He stares back, grabs the rails on the twelve-foot concrete bridge over Samakhusi and leans over. It is a ridiculous gesture. The water is barely four feet below, black and curdled, bubbling instead of foaming, moving only imperceptibly under the crust. No reasonable mind will be deceived into vertigo by that drop, or the rush of the river below. Tell me your story, kid. Treat me to a flake of your life. He looks to the other men sitting on the bridge. He can’t trust a man who sits on a bridge over Samakhusi, under Mhepi, asking for stories, asking for something to hold with his mind. He spits over the rail and watches the white blob float down, over an endless chasm, to splash and echo from the torrent a mile below.

—

Prawin Adhikari is a writer, translator and editor. He is the author of Budhani (2025), Folk Gods (2019) and The Vanishing Act (2014). He has also translated Nobel laureate Han Kang’s The Vegetarian into Nepali. He recently translated Bhekh Bahadur Thapa’s A Life in Public Service into English.

Lū follows Illaiya, a lonesome Hindu gunda-of-sorts, in his quest to confess his Bollywood-and-RamayanMahabharat-inspired love to Nushrat, a Muslim girl. But the journey is not merely of a singular protagonist, but of an entire village. The love-plot is simply an excuse to grip the readers into Lū’s world of Hindu-Muslim, India-Nepal, rich-poor interactions.

In two hundred fifty one pages, Pandey develops numerous characters of the Pattharpurwa village and transforms them into something-they-were-not. While creating individual character arc itself is a difficult ordeal for any writer, it is rarer in Nepali literature to witness just the protagonist become a completely different person. Pandey does this not only to Illaiya but to other characters including Radiolal, Bajrangi, Brijalal and Tutey Pandit. To top it off, Pandey has designed his characters to be extremely memorable for their quips and quirks. Illaiya is a hot-headed rogue, Radiolal is a wife-worshipping loverboy, Kareem is poor but claims his dignity, and Tutey Pandit is a God-evoking scamster. The radical shifts in their character traits towards the end of the novel makes each character worth following throughout the long-winding story.

Pandey is a gem of Nepali literature. His characters in Lū represent the caste-ethnic diversity of the lower Rapti area — a place of Madheshi Muslims and Hindus, but also a few migrants from the hills. This is not a unique set-up in Nepali literature. However, Pandey goes well-beyond by not writing simply in the commonly used Pahade Nepali. His Nepali is that of the people, laden with localized expression particular to caste/ethnicity/religion/class and their intersections. Not only does he use dialogue with precision and care, but the narration, too, is rich in its ethnic vocabulary. One only wishes that a few words in the novel were not translated into Pahade Nepali for the ease of the folks-of-the-center. Reading should be as much for comfort as it should be for discomfort.

Lū is many things. Lū is witty. Lū is funny. Lū is sad. Lū will make you cry. Lū will dry your tears. Lū will wipe your tears. Lū will make you realize how little you know. But, Lū will also make you understand what it means to be a person of a place and what it takes to fight for it.

Pick up the book here. Unless… (In Illaiya style).

Jerryy, the last big hit among the ‘motorbike’ crowd, was a road-trip movie, at least the first half of it. Come to think of it, there have been quite a few such movies in the past few years. Most Nepali thrillers, it seems, have been stories of young men and women who travel, get into trouble. Among movies reviewed here, Chihaan featured a bunch of young men who travel to Pokhara for a weekend and end up gang-raping the woman who will come back to send them to their graves. Ek Din Ek Raat was a lot more sophisticated in the way it told its story, but it started similarly: a bunch of friends set out from Kathmandu, reach a place where they know not what they do, get into trouble, are finished off one by one.

Chhadke, written and directed by Nigam Shrestha, also starts with a journey: two men take the same bus to Chitawan, and their fates become intertwined. How they treat the forest determines the outcomes of their lives. But it is still the story of a journey: one man returns home and still sets off on the path of violence and crime. The other enters the jungle and finds the forest spirit within.

Kohi... Mero, directed by Alok Nembang (and disclosure: the screenplay written by me), also featured friends traveling to an exotic locale – across the Himals, to the lime-dashed alleys of Marpha and Kagbeni. But there the shtick was used weakly, to add to nothing but video choreography opportunities. At least in Jerryy there is the moment by the lake when Jerry is looking at the girl and seems to experience an internal change. The Zhingrana trailer playing at the theaters suggests a story-line similar to that of Ek Din Ek Raat: a group of friends travels to a strange locale, their trip ends in disaster.

In Talakjung vs Tulke, the protagonist is chased out of his village, and upon arriving at the city, changes outwardly, so that, upon his return to the village, he is able to say - ‘Bhanesi aafnai gaaunle ni chinenan!’ (Look – my own neighbors don’t recognize me anymore!) In Tsering Rhitar Sherpa’s Uma, the urban landscape allows for the muddle and mystery that makes possible the fatal confrontation between a brother his sister. Without the confusion of alleyways and crowds of faces in which to disappear, the interaction would have been different, direct, more emotional than ideological – which was the nature their interaction in their native village.

I don’t remember, from the Nepali movies I have seen in the past year, anything similar to Talakjung vs Tulke, which is to say, with protagonists who come to the city to be transformed. But it seems urban boys and girls are driving out in hordes to the countryside – be it the Terai or the hills or mountains – either to get devoured by local evils, or for a fundamental transformation.

There is nothing new about the genre in which protagonists travel far from their familiar surroundings, and are transformed in the process. All pilgrimages are that: arduous travel that turns the focus inward, forces the pilgrim to watch closely the divine within themselves, and come to a new understanding of their faith. But, how is the road-trip genre being used in Nepali movies, and what does the trend say about the makers and consumers of such fare?

It is possible to claim that Kathmandu fears whatever lies outside the rim of the mountains that cage the Valley in. It is also possible to claim that Kathmandu views the rest of the country as a tourist destination, and sees Nepalis from elsewhere as either servants who will bring food (Jerryy), or women to be seduced, raped, discarded (Chihaan), or as barely civilized barbarians whose rituals of blood and violence will somehow ruin the lives of the urban wanderers (Ek Din Ek Raat, Zhingrana). While none of the movies catering to the ‘motorbike’ crowd – young people who arrive at the cinema in their school uniform, riding a motorbike to each couple – have as sophisticated a political point to make as did Uma or Talakjung vs Tulke about the urban-rural divide, they do seem to have a current running through that unites them against the rural. The movies being made for the 18-24 year old Kathmandu boys and girls seem to hate the rest of the country either by thinking of it as a dangerous place where only disasters wait and where the locals are untrustworthy and opportunistic, or as the place from where the servant underclass arrives into the city. Forget about imagining the rest of the country in its nuances of linguistic and ethnic diversity or of the many, many grievances they might have against the city.

With the rise of the multiplex theater, the divide between movies aimed at a specific class or region and other classes and regions has been growing. That is tragic. Of course, there will always be many different kinds of audiences, and as long as they represent wallets capable of purchasing theater tickets, filmmakers will be discerning enough to match cinema fare to ticket fare. But to assume that the rural audience is not capable of understanding a movie in the same manner as the urban audience understand it is to discriminate in the worst of the ways, through a lowered expectation of intellectual and aesthetic capability. It is perfectly alright to make another Jerryy or Ladduu, but to refuse to look at the people who populate the picturesque countryside that serves as a rich brat’s playground is to fail as a political storyteller. It would be just as wrong to make a movie based in a village and only show a person from the cities as a purse of clichés – go back to the movies from the 90s and you’ll see this trope repeated endlessly. Let us hope that this artificial divide between the rural and the urban in Nepali movies will soon disappear.

—

Prawin Adhikari is a writer, translator and editor. He is the author of Budhani (2025), Folk Gods (2019) and The Vanishing Act (2014). He has also translated Nobel laureate Han Kang’s The Vegetarian into Nepali. He recently translated Bhekh Bahadur Thapa’s A Life in Public Service into English.

‘Imagine watching the sun rise over those mountains after an overnight rain,’ my fellow traveler in a Tata Sumo headed for Hetauda speaks slowly. He seems to be talking about something else than the mountains or the golden light of a December sunrise. ‘What is that?’ he asks as I thumb a crumpled ball of a pink ticket.

Kathmandu is behind us. The mountains of Makwanpur are ahead. Bright scars of new roads can be seen as far as the eye cares to search. Some scars are the white of sandstone and flint, and some scars are the ochre and red of freshly dug earth, but they look auspicious instead of offensive as they dissect the landscape. Pink tickets scattered on the dirt of the road are no more colorful than the fresh red of earth and the blue of the sky. I pass the ticket to him. He takes a look, wants to pass it back, and throws it away instead. It is nothing important, just a ticket given to vehicles passing through.

I hadn’t picked the pink ticket because the ticket interested me as much as because the person who handed them to drivers had caught my attention. Nobody questioned the small toll: drivers seemed unfazed by any number of colorful chits thrust into their hands by young men wearing combat fatigues. What is the tariff for? Why was the collector wearing a PLA uniform? I check to see if he carries a sidearm. He strolls over, cocks his head to a side as if to examine a peculiar specimen of a class enemy. He stands beside a carpenter who is finishing a window frame. They look at me after looking at each other. I realize that the carpenter is wearing similar trousers. ‘What is this for?’ I ask.

Perhaps I have become too sensitive to the details of this moment that I perceive as a confrontation: I sense a ripple of heads turning or lifting to look at me. The man in combat fatigues comes closer, looks at me as if he can’t understand the question, spits out the stalk of grass that had been hanging from the side of his mouth. I know what the pink chit says. It is just a receipt for road tolls, collected for the district of Makwanpur by a local contractor. The young man is just an employee with the contractor.

It takes me a while to decipher that moment on the mountain. It is only in Birgunj, watching rag picking children attempt to kill marsh hens, that I understand the young toll-collector’s combat fatigues: those are the only warm clothes he possesses, and trying to eke out a living on his own, he wears them to work through the winter.

Immediately, I chide myself for pretending to see through a man whose history and motives I have no access to. A two-year-old girl squirts a thin, insistent trickle of diarrhea outside her house, behind Sri Ram Cinema in Birgunj, while her mother pumps water a few feet away to wash vegetables. There is graffiti asking the bold but statistically mundane question: ‘Do you have a vagina?’ A business proposition and a phone number follow. Somewhere close by, a group of women from Maiti Nepal keep vigil over the border, pulling aside young women to brief them on the dangers of being sold into brothels. There is unrest around Ghantaghar Chowk, where the body of a man killed by a blow delivered to the head, allegedly by Maoist cadres, is the focus of a spontaneous protest. The driver of the tanga taking me away from there looks at me with pity.

‘You look like a righteous man,’ he startles me with an accusation I do not face fondly. ‘But this is the Terai,’ he says. ‘If you see a dead man, if you see a dying man, walk away. Don’t get involved. Or, before you know anything, they’ll accuse you of murder.’

The toll-collector’s fatigues returns to my mind. What has happened of his revolution? If I am right about that being his only warm apparel, how has the newly imagined nation rewarded him for his toil? If he wears it as signal of affiliation to a force with the will to power, how have his toils rewarded us? How is the pink ticket ever really uncoupled from his combat fatigues?

How is the sick child’s stomach uncoupled from her mother’s ignorance about waterborne diseases? How is the fate of our women uncoupled from the graffiti on Birgunj walls? I am ashamed of the man who sees righteousness in me, but also suggests in the same breath that I abandon all pretenses to it. Perhaps he did not see me as an equal or coupled to him by a mutual bondage of fear and worthlessness, and was eager to cut me to his size.

I wanted to give up all pretenses to ignorance, for a change, and let the toll-collector know what I thought of the pink ticket and its subtext about his combat fatigues. I wanted to shake the tanga-wallah by his neck and rub his face into the ground where an unjustly slain man slept. I wanted to catch the man who wrote the mundane question, and show him the scars on women who have returned from sexual slavery in Indian brothels.

I wanted to see meaning into the moment on the mountain, looking forward and back, conscious of the road that links an old, fatigued city and new scars on old mountains. I want to see a gesture complete and prophetic through the window-frame just finished by a carpenter in worn combat fatigues. I want to call the phone number to tell the person that, no, I am sorry, but I do not have a vagina, and thus trivialize his malice. But I am also tired of what I don’t understand and what I can’t know.

—

Prawin Adhikari is a writer, translator and editor. He is the author of Budhani (2025), Folk Gods (2019) and The Vanishing Act (2014). He has also translated Nobel laureate Han Kang’s The Vegetarian into Nepali. He recently translated Bhekh Bahadur Thapa’s A Life in Public Service into English.

We believe there’s a dearth of narratives for and about young people in the country. This has repercussions some of us might have felt, or not. We at LangLyang feel it in our bones. (We really do.) And we want to take a crack at fixing it.

A lot of young writers in Nepal have been penning incredible personal essays and journalistic pieces. More have journals where they pour their hearts out. We want the next thing to be sustained narratives. We want to witness—but also contribute in small ways to—a much-needed shift in Nepali writing. Ambitious, we know. How do we plan to go about it? By publishing short fiction about Nepali people in Nepal. We are specifically looking for literary stories with genre undercurrents: surrealism, magic realism, science fiction, fantasy. Stories in the vein of:

• “Marzipan” and “The Rememberer” by Aimee Bender

• “Birds in the Mouth” by Samanta Schweblin

• “The Transparency Project” by Alissa Nutting

• “The Prospectors” by Karen Russell

Contributions for LangLyang have so far been voluntary, despite some of the writers having practiced their craft for decades and/or having been published widely. This space has sustained thus far purely due to the contributors’ love of writing and a worry for the future of the written word in Nepal. Most of us do realize the dire need for young writers to get their work read, polished, critiqued and appreciated. And it is in this spirit that we want you to write for us and get paid doing it.

What we are NOT looking for: monologues that begin and end at the window, diary entries, stream of consciousness.

What we are looking for: characters, experience filtered through layers of genre distance, truth as you know it, ghosts, disappearances and reappearances, non-human logic, mirrors, doppelgangers, things you feel a strong pull towards at midnight or dawn. Even monologues at windows, diaries, et al, if you can actually pull it off. But most of all, we want something only you could have written. Not Claude. Not GPT. Only you. (Even among the non-AIs, very few others should be able to write the same thing word-for-word.)

Before submitting, read the stories and writers listed above to make sure you get a sense of what we want. We’ll read everything sent our way, but submissions that are clearly low-effort will not get very far. Submissions written by or “with” AI will get you on a filter. No, you cannot use it even “just for grammar” (yes, we will know).

With that said,

• We are looking for pieces between 1500 to 2000 words. We do not encourage submissions over 3000 words.

• Submissions should not have previously appeared elsewhere, not even in personal blogs.

• There is no submission fee. Accepted stories will be paid Rs. 1 per word, with payment capped at Rs. 2000 per submission. We realize the rate won’t make anyone envious, but we are putting in the money out of our own pockets for now*.

• Accepted works will go through a general feedback round followed by a copyedit.

• Send your story as a Word document (.docx) to submitlanglyang@gmail.com

• We’ll try to get back to submissions within three weeks. We are doing this voluntarily; we’ll appreciate letting three weeks pass before a follow up.

• The editors’ decision may well be incorrect but it is final, as The Stinging Fly succinctly puts it.

We strongly believe in growth through practice and feedback. Our goal is to set in place a system for exactly that. This is your chance to participate and contribute.

(*You will also soon be able to support LangLyang — we are setting up the infrastructure! — if you feel it has provided value to you. This will directly feed into the resources to create more value.)

A Promising Debut
Prawin Adhikari

Tribeny Rai’s debut feature Shape of Momo was the festival opener for KIMFF ’26, and is in theaters beginning 29 May. In the Q&A following the screening, a lady in the audience tried to formulate her discomfort into a question, but managed only to recall two scenes which had bothered her, and ended by asking Gaumaya Gurung, who portrays the protagonist Vishnu, ‘How did you feel?’

These scenes involved direct but wordless confrontations between Vishnu and Sainli Aunty’s Son, played by Wangden Sherpa – between a woman trying to overcome accusations of behaving inadequately like a daughter and a young boy trying to playact at being the man of the house in the absence of his laborer father. One has to adopt the mantle of gentle femininity, going so far as to hallucinate herself into the role of an expectant mother, while the other has to present as brash and brittle, also going too far when he deliberately bleeds to make his point in the marda ko chhoro style.

Shape of Momo is essentially confrontational, although the charm of the Sikkimese genteelness and the gendering of spaces make it appear less so. There are signposted anxieties around generational differences; divergence in familial, filial and gender expectations; class and ethnic resentment, etc., but none of these come as a revelation. So many situations seem as if picked from a grab-bag of commercial filmmaking – the meet-cute, the displaced protagonist, or the doll to signify girlhood. But a different reading is available if the viewer choses to see past these surface distractions.

The screen flattens motifs, tropes, and metaphors to push a visual cue through the mill of received interpretations. So we fall back to transfixing what momo may mean to each us, or how taking the uphill run of rigor contrasts with reaching the quiet haven of a flat rock in a stream to curl up in self-pity. This mode of viewing does disservice to Shape of Momo as a work of cinema. This reduces actors to their roles alone, their intentions to the intoned dialogue alone, the landscape to background alone. It also does disservice to the viewer, as if a movie is a vehicle for conveying the precise quantum of meaning designated to each scene, each gesture, each crafted mise-en-scene and nothing further, as if there isn’t another world in the cone of light that extends beyond the screen. It makes the cultural experience one of collective pedagogy – and therefore a stage for messaging, of subscription into a particular theory about living. To read a work only through available intellectual competence is to deny the work’s creative ability. This is not a useful way of experiencing work.

Shape of Momo is a Sikkimese document, filled with Sikkimese worries around ethnic fractures and fear of the outsider. It is the documentation of constant attrition – of the days of youth, of the sunset hours of life, of the home, of physical and emotional security. It is a record of the anxiety created by relative prosperity which shoves a people up against the under-class which carries them aloft. It presents as the story of a few women, but it is really the story of a subdued people kept in a gilded cage by hands and voices that act from afar. It is about the smallest psychological relief afforded to the Sikkimese – whether as refuge in nature, or as the pride felt at being asked for help with obtaining an Adhar Card for the man who helps with the outdoor aspects of domesticity. The community here presents as cohesive and collective, but manifests as a latent threat against disturbing social decorum. The Sikkim here knows to keep outsiders out, even as it reluctantly accepts that kinsfolk who leave will return only reluctantly, and will forever pine to leave again. Shape of Momo is not about homecoming. It is a prescient dirge for the home that is being slowly lost by the snapping of communal threads, by the intrusion of the market, and because education cracks open the world to let in all kinds of light that point to elsewhere.

The director, Tribeny Rai, and the three actors present at the screening – Gaumaya Gurung, Pashupati Rai and Janaki Kadayat – all spoke about the absence of stories that center women’s voices and experiences. Audience reaction seemed to solidly support this position. I have a slightly aslant a perspective on this. I think new work must be created that addresses the why of this, before we can get to talking about the what of it. Systemic critique of the structure that makes it impossible for women’s stories to become market viable must be created – in cinema – before we produce enough work in cinema to begin countering or dismantling the structure itself. Unless the viewer is repeatedly reminded of the causes of an injustice a story depicting the injustice itself risks being reduced to learned responses and received interpretations, making it easily forgettable. Shape of Momo doesn’t risk going into the why of structures that shape Vishnu’s experience.

Having said all of this, I am glad to recommend the movie, but especially also the work of the small but highly engaging cast. There is a lightness with which actors seem to approach their characters, even if the story matter is heavy, as if there was joy pervading on set. Actors like Janaki Kadayat, Deepak Sharma and Wangden Sherpa, who play the migrant Nepali family trying to eke out a meager living in Sikkim, are very effective. Rahul Nawach Mukhia is unobtrusive – as demanded by his character – providing just the counterweight against which Gaumaya Gurung soars as the protagonist Vishnu. It is a pleasant inversion in the context of the movie’s gender critique. Pashupati Rai’s portrayal of the mother called to my mind a quintessential hill woman, the kind whom I’ve met in IB Rai’s stories before, struggling to hold together a family, taking on the burdens of the world without bending in her dignity, celebrating small moments of victory. The late Bhanu Maya Rai quietly endures, is endearing.

Perhaps because so much of the movie rests on her shoulders, Gaumaya Gurung is deserving of special praise and celebration. Vishnu carries a hesitation that is rarely allowed to a protagonist in our part of the world – toward family responsibilities, toward carrying social and gender expectations, toward her own creative abilities and aspirations. Our protagonists are forced to be doers, rather than seek moments of quiet in which they may grow toward contemplation and complexity. Gaumaya Gurung steals such moments for us, conveying burden and impatience, recognition and resolve. It speaks to the strength of her craft that she says the most when she is seen in extreme close-up and remains silent, letting time tick onward as the cogs of thought whirr in a suggested somewhere else.

We’re getting to celebrate Abinash Shah’s Elephants in the Fog only in the news, but Shape of Momo is here, steaming fresh and fragrantly inviting. I recommend viewing it in the theater, with a notepad and pen in hand, as tribute to so finely crafted a work, filled with gems of performances.

—

Prawin Adhikari is a writer, translator and editor. He is the author of Budhani (2025), Folk Gods (2019) and The Vanishing Act (2014). He has also translated Nobel laureate Han Kang’s The Vegetarian into Nepali. He recently translated Bhekh Bahadur Thapa’s A Life in Public Service into English.

Sourly Tasty
Ishan Mainali

The cat named Freedom — Azadi — runs away towards the end of Tribeny Rai’s Shape of Momo (2025), never to be found, but what disappears is not exactly freedom but the protagonist Vishnu’s resolve for freedom, a position she ardently fights for throughout the film.

The search for her cat leads Vishnu, played by Gaumaya Gurung, to the house of her family’s orchardkeeper built on the prior’s land, only for her to realize that the bulk sum of money she had extracted from them in exchange for oranges sold as well as her desire to build a new homestay by demolishing the keepers’ old wooden house, forces them to give up their lives in Sikkim and return back to Nepal. This, they do without providing a notice to the ‘patron’ family. What they do with their new lives in Nepal is left unknown.

Neither do we know what happens to the migrant laborers living in a makeshift tent at the edge of their property, towards whom Vishnu’s sister and mother are stereotypically suspicious since the start of the film, after the police take them away accused, without evidence, of stealing Junu’s – Vishnu’s sister’s – undergarments under a false pretense of stealing gold. Migration is wrought with uneasy feelings, for those used to the same kinds of people as well as those new to the place. It invites tenuous navigation with and against each other with particularities in behavior emitting from the migrant’s class-caste-gender status as well as the perceptions of the locals. Tribeny Rai is acutely aware of Sikkim’s history, its many people who have migrated from elsewhere, as well as the perception of the Rai family towards the newcomers.

At the inception of the film, with the context of her father – the only remaining male member of the family – passing away, Vishnu herself comes back to Sikkim from Delhi, becoming a migrant to one’s own hometown while simultaneously imbued in thought and action the eliteness of a qualified Delhi professional. Her family, particularly her woolen-cap-wearing mother, sees her not of the place but of Delhi. The mother’s accusation towards Vishnu is geared towards the daughter’s lack of understanding of the Sikkime context. Vishnu’s attitude is that of a trailblazer, wanting women of her family to transcend what the local norms and perception allows. The mother-daughter relationship and its changing tenor is the crux of the movie; however, it does not overshadow the many other layers of commentary that takes place through visual, sonic, and linguistic metaphors. Her mother’s woolen hat comes off after she has to become the head of the household. As the hat is removed, not only does her face look different and her suffocated grey hair revealed in its elegance, but similarly does her attitude towards Vishnu soften. Her character has changed, albeit subtly, and it was Vishnu who was able to push her towards it.

Vishnu, however, moves in the opposite direction. Her Delhiwaali attitude of making others work for her in exchange for freedom for herself does not work out in Sikkim where relationships between families are rooted beyond pure capitalist modes of exchange. Not only does she have to carry a heavy gas cylinder as a consequence, but her mother has to bear the bickering of the community for having broken norms-of-exchange, among other things. The community remains mostly invisible in the film but their presence in the characters’ consciousness and their everyday actions reveals the social dynamics of Sikkim.

Depicted well is also the relationship between Vishnu and her love interest Gyan. The Delhi-to-Sikkim returnee architect, who is also the son of the mayor, seems to be soft, caring and understanding. They plan to work together to realize Vishnu’s dream of establishing a homestay. But Vishnu decides to reject him for his inability to see the gendered labor in the domestic. He does what Junu’s mostly-absent husband does at the dinner table – leave behind an achaar laden dish with the last ‘imperfect’ momo beside it without even caring to carry it to the sink.

A very special mention is due to the grandmother, played by Bhanu Maya Rai, who, sadly, passed away a few months before the film’s release. Bhanu Maya Rai makes you laugh and she makes you cry, and she does it with the kind of innocence one cannot learn but only live. She breathes her character through and through, and allows everyone else to be themselves under her warm matriarchy.

Shape of Momo is shaped beautifully through stellar writing, excellent cinematography, intentional sound design and layered characters. For a feature debut by Tribeny Rai, it transcends the mediocrity of most debut work. And for a Nepali language film, it does ‘social realism’ better than all its infinite predecessors. A scene or two may feel as if inserted without adequate foreshadowing, but none of it takes away from the flow of the film.

This momo of a film has stuffing of many ingredients, its shape might be slightly off, but what matters is what is inside, isn’t it? The momo is indeed tasty with the sourness of the achaar resolved as a necessary element both of the dish and of life-at-large.

‘Tapain chinta nagarnus – tyesko mukh ta ma hamesha ko lagi banda garidinchhu!’

Writer-director Aakash Adhikari’s Kohinoor is perhaps better known as the final cinematic vehicle for the much loved actor Shree Krishna Shrestha. Watching it so close to the unfortunate demise of its lead actor makes for a mixture of a sensation of prescience and frustration at the director. As the narrative moves closer to conclusion, the many melodramatic farewells and talk of death hit home with unexpected force. But, Adhikari’s direction is so packed with the unoriginal and the blatant that many occasions will be found for #facepalm.

Aakash Adhikari’s forte seems not to be in telling a story, but in yelling it to the face of the viewer, and with such goldfish-like attention span that he’ll repeat the exact same line, with the exact same platitude of emotion or curiosity, at the beginning of a scene, at the middle of it, and once more, at the end of it. Such repetitions are a waste of theater air-conditioning, not to mention the time and attention of the viewer. And it does the great disservice of making the performer look inept. Most often, performers work to avoid having an auteur like Adhikari look inept by actually breathing intelligence and purpose into the insipid, hackneyed, derivative lines or scenes given to them. Therefore, when a writer-director betrays the trust of a performer by making them look worse than made possible by the drivel given to them, in my opinion, the writer-director has committed the worst possible crime against his craft.

Kohinoor purports to be about human trafficking – but it really just the idea of what a Nepali movie ought to look like, from the inside, as imagined by a person who has no relationship with reality, but sees everything through the lens of all that has come before in the melodrama-steeped world of Nepali and Hindi movies. Consider this: the villain – whose blood the populace screams for at the end of the movie – portrays a politician, and is referred to as ‘Netaji’ throughout the story. We rarely ever get to hear his name, except when he confesses his crimes. Adhikari resolutely refuses to give any roundness to any of his characters – forget the fact that oftentimes they appear positively amnesiac, incapable of carrying the ecstasy or hurt from one scene to the subsequent one. This refusal to create characters instead of mere types belittles the audience.

In my opinion, Adhikari’s generation of filmmakers in mainstream Nepali cinema has thrust upon the Nepali moviegoers this unfair generalization that the viewer is incapable of understanding or appreciating subtext or complexity. I think that is a lazy attitude, and one designed to hide the incompetence on the director’s part. In what real world would a woman ask the man she hates the second-most to now kill her ex-lover whom she hates the most, and then bring a glass of milk to the lover’s mother in a subsequent scene? In what kind of a world would a son, slashed into ribbons by goons with swords, cry in his mother’s arm and say he is afraid of dying, and then organize a meeting to plan his nemesis’ downfall with nary but a kerchief dandifying his thick bicep in the next scene?

As applied on a film set hereabouts, the word ‘damage’ means the trickle or torrent of blood and the patchwork of bruises and tears and rends on garments, etc. Damage accumulates over a scene as punches are exchanged or a man is riddled with bullets or a woman is tossed about like a ragdoll. Think of Slyvester Stallone and any of the Rocky movies – the boxing bouts that always make up the climax are all about damage accumulating over a scene. But, damage also accumulates over the arc of a movie – and this damage may not be visible as blood or broken bones, but it is of the more important kind, because seeing emotional or internal damage accumulate draws us closer to the point of view of a protagonist or character. It is the accumulated internal damage that makes Oedipus Rex an unforgettable tragedy. It is the internal damage that makes us angry at the perfect man of Hindu myths, Ram, for treating his wife with the cowardice he shows in defending her.

This very idea – that internal damage accumulates or transposes itself across scenes over the arc of the movie is an utterly alien concept to the writer-director of Kohinoor. Because of this, the performers fail to perhaps give their best performances, and the blame for it should be Aakash Adhikari’s. Don’t be fooled by the commercial success Kohinoor is enjoying – it isn’t a deserved success.

But there is heartrending poignancy in watching Shree Krishna Shrestha romance Shweta Khadka onscreen. Khadka is awkward on her own; there is something ever so slightly off about her as a performer. But with Shrestha she seems to become illuminated from within: the chemistry between them is believable because they seem to move as one, connected across time and space. Just before intermission, when Khadka’s character Kohinoor waves goodbye to Shrestha’s character Abhishek, the mind can’t but race out of the theater into the real world and imbue the gesture with added meaning. The manner in which Kohinoor and Abhishek’s characters seem obsessed with death also begins to gain new meaning. When Abhishek comes home injured and cries to his mother, and when Mithila Sharma, playing Abhishek’s mother, reminds him that Mother is still there, and that all would be alright, it is impossible not to ask if Shrestha didn’t know of his approaching death, if he doesn’t mean to wave goodbye when he waves in the very ultimate frames of the movie. Thusly informed by reality, the viewer is mesmerized by Shree Krishna Shrestha, seeking clues in the signs and symbols of his gestures and words. Everywhere, in the odd bulge of his neck and arms, or in the strain sometimes seen when he forces an emotion or a line a bit too far, the viewer finds clues pointing to the imminent unraveling.

Kohinoor is a typical Nepali film – indeed, it is one of a dying breed, attacked on one side by mindless drivel the likes of Miss Nepal, and on the other side by more urbane movies that are either original and inspired or carefully copied from foreign sources. Although all of its ideas about women are flawed – a virgin whore is as entirely a patriarchal construct as a virgin mother is – it seems to attract women to the theater in large numbers. It will perhaps continue to be loved out of affection for the performer we have lost, but it should also be criticized for its bad directing.

—

Prawin Adhikari is a writer, translator and editor. He is the author of Budhani (2025), Folk Gods (2019) and The Vanishing Act (2014). He has also translated Nobel laureate Han Kang’s The Vegetarian into Nepali. He recently translated Bhekh Bahadur Thapa’s A Life in Public Service into English.

Thamel grew out of Thabahi, one of the thirty-two symbolic tole occupied by the Maharjans, under the guardianship of Bikramashila Mahavihara which is next to the now (il)legally muddled Chhaya Center. It has witnessed the imprints of the Shahs and the Ranas, the Shakyas and the Manageys, and everyone else who dares to either spare or make a rupee for themselves. The ‘locals’ keep on changing and to whom Thamel really belongs to is a question that can only extract a muddied response.

Thamel is clearly an erudite work collapsing ethnography with flâneur writing. It is well-researched, albeit at instances under-explained perhaps to leave the reader to carry out their own exploration of the place and its history. Ones unfamiliar with Thamel get to understand the many layers that make up its physical and spiritual stratigraphy, while those who boast familiarity get to excavate a few extra layers.

Most chapters are detailed as the author traverses the theoretical as well as the physical spaces that makes up Thamel. A few chapters in the middle are dedicated for first-person narratives of a few of his interlocuters — an ex-black-metal-artist, a ninety-year old jack of all trades, a dancer from a dance bar, a hairdresser, a recovering druggie. The structuring of the chapters is a symbolic nod to Thamel itself: one can make the most out of their own mental version of the neighborhood but the diversity of lives that people live in Thamel are innumerable, uncountable, everchanging through the ebbs and flow of history and politics, and somewhat irreducible through a third-person synthesis.

Thapa’s own personal history with Thamel comes alive within the book. Growing up near Thamel and subsequently with and in it, Thapa brings his own relationship to this place on paper. Some of his subjects are his old friends and a few of his hangouts are interlinked with the time of the hippies. An anthropologist new to the place would never be able to bring forth the kind of intimacy that Thapa himself has accumulated with the people and their junctions. Thapa is able to tame the beast that Thamel is, given that it hosts perhaps the largest volume of businesses in the city per square meter as well as visitors flocking in from everywhere — from within the country and many miles beyond it.

While Kathmandu is ever-growing with new neighborhoods being formed and named (and renamed) on, what once can assume to be, a daily basis, a hyperlocal exploration like Thamel adds to the richness of the city’s historiography. The lovers of Kathmandu, and I am sure there are many, deserve more literature on locales understudied as well as unstudied. With time, literature like Thamel, which I picked up from the hard-earned next-to-the-reception section of Thamel’s Pilgrims Book House, is bound to be appreciated by the present-and-future dwellers of the space.

Thamel swoops one in, makes it difficult for them to get out, but makes them curious about what the many sounds, the many lights, and the many people bustling in and out of old-and-new buildings alike. And if you, like me, are one of those people, go pick up Thamel.

Prawin Adhikari has become Prawin dai now. When I revealed to him during our first encounter in the winter of 2024 that I had read his book about a decade prior, he had guffawed at the realization that young readers who had read the book in its early days had already become a working adult drinking a glass of crisp beer in front of him. I had been unsure whether to confess having read his work or not — I only remembered vignettes of Tanahun’s hilly landscape and a few stories being set in the United States, because I had devoured the stories as quickly as I could without truly appreciating its artistic merits. Thankfully, he didn’t ask me what my favorite story was.

But like Prawin dai’s excellently cooked khasi ko masu lathered with melted fat that requires a slow preparation over two hours at a precise temperature of seventy degrees in Celsius, The Vanishing Act too demands a well-paced, acute reading to release its many layers of flavors. This realization arrived during my second read only a few weeks ago.

The merit of the book lies in its breath of exploration. Out of the nine stories, the first two stories are written from a child’s perspective; three are based in Tanahun, four in Kathmandu, and two in California; and a couple of them break away from realism to slip us into the surreal. The geographic distribution of the setting as well as the chronological ordering of the stories, save for perhaps one or two, maps on to the author’s own migratory history quite tidily. The descriptions of the exteriority, therefore, feels intimately familiar but also tied neatly to the characters’ interior world.

The opening story Boy from Banauti is reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird in its theme of a child learning about his own place in a world of layered privileges. The child is of the place, knows his way away from the school around the fields and the rivers of Daraundi and Marsyangdi, and understands who stands beneath his family socially. But a child is also a child, in desire of a friend as much as in desire to rule. To not know the name of the other child throughout and beyond moments of play as well as fight, and its social implications are explored.

Mayapuri, the second story, I found quite beautiful. It not only explores the relationship of an older mother-like woman and a boy-child hailing from two different caste-class-regional background, but expounds on the nature of desires of many kinds. The woman’s life is shown through the child’s vantage point as their own age-based desires unfold. The backdrop of mass migration of workers into Aanbukhaireni for the construction of the Marsyangdi Hydropower Station brings with its overflowing currents conversations around the role of the working-class man digging his life away to put food on the table, keeping his own desires at bay till its time to finally clock out, from work but also from life itself.

In Fortune, Abukhaireni comes alive from the perspective of an old man who has seen his small village transform into a town of ambition. The transformation brings with it elements foreign — greed, breaking of close ties, and a nostalgia of what once was. Not everything is lost, however. Navigating in a rapidly shifting economic ecology requires trust and hope till the very end.

The Messiah takes politics seriously and moves us through the later moments leading to the revolution of 2006. The story is one of anger towards promises both unfulfilled as well as aspired. Our dear little country never seems to transcend from the deluge of politics. The bloodline of a nation are the people and never a messiah. Someone make Balendra read this story.

The Game features a wife that has run away from her husband. The search is on, but all he gets are hints. He ambles around town but no progress is made. Urban loneliness of a sarkari jaagire is as real as it is for his stay-at-home wife. Left uncured, it invites tumult. To fix what has been broken is a choice one has to ultimately make.

And then enters the two powerful symbols of Stamp and Signature — those who have access and those without. The story dwells on the relationship between two men, both strangers to each other, as they have their eyes on the same tiny plot of land to carve out their home in Kathmandu. Both are troubled by their personal finances, but only one gets to have his way with cheap tricks that are expensive to the soul. Only one house can be made, with a bougainvillea plant creeping on its walls. The roots of the tulsi reaches out to hell.

We are then transported to Santa Rosa in The Face of Carolyn Flint. The story breaks away from the kind of realism in the stories prior. It weirdly reminded me of The Vegetarian, a book that the author has translated into Nepali, although the transformation in The Face of Carolyn Flint has more to do with the male protagonist and his perception. Maybe life does have many faces, doesn’t it? I am excited to find another face of the story reveal itself to me in the third read, perhaps a year or two from now.

The title story The Vanishing Act introduces us to two Mexican circus-clowns with some tricks up their sack. It is not just a Mexican clown that vanishes, it is a Nepali father too. But it is not entirely magic for the latter. The environment and life circumstances brings one to make choices. But it does require a teeny hint of magic as well.

The final story touched my heart deeply. The Condolence Picture is multiple journeys within a journey. The journey to childhood, the journey into memories and images, the journey to the heavenly abode, the journey back to the remaining piece although unfamiliar. Grief is an utterly complex emotion but The Condolence Picture captures it in its bits and pieces, but it does so tremendously well.

Twelve years since its release, The Vanishing Act has aged well. This book works for those who want interesting stories out of Nepali characters. In a deluge of mediocre works bobbing for attention in the bookshelves of our bookshops, The Vanishing Act stands out not only as an excellent collection of short stories but a lesson on craft itself. It makes you want to not only consume good stories but write a few of your own.

Do yourself a favor and get a copy here, delivered to your doorstep.

Prima Facie depicts two selves in a person; a self that understands and follows the system and the other that is betrayed by it. In the play, Prisa’s view of the legal system becomes diametrically opposite after she herself is sexually abused and has to stand as a plaintiff.

The play is compact and captivating, thanks to Pashupati Rai’s stellar solo performance. For two full hours, we see Rai slip into multiple roles and characters to invite the audience into her story. She becomes her ageing mother, the lawyer, the judge, the friend, her brother, and everyone in-between.

Rai’s transitions between characters are effortful but seamless. The play is gripping and the audience is unable to look away for a split second, even when the subject of the play starts becoming heavy. The first half is joyful, the second its opposite, as the story arc changes from highlighting her professional success to her demand for justice for herself. Even at her lowest, she is portrayed as being terrific, resilient, and calculative. Throughout the runtime, Rai is successful in making the audience feel a range of emotions — from utmost happiness to complete dejection.

It is not just Pashupati Rai who transforms her ‘self’ to become the many other characters in the story; the stage does the same. Through precise use of spatial lighting, the black box shapeshifts into her house, court room, back of the taxi, long train ride, and the apartment bed where she is sexually assaulted by Julian.

Prima Facie’s crowning achievement also lies in the direction of Akanchha Karki who is able to tap into the breadth and depth of Rai’s character. Though Prima Facie is undoubtedly an all round showcase of technical mastery of stagecraft, its core strength lies in the work of the translator Durga Karki. It is particularly impressive, especially given its expansive scope and multifaceted re-imagination into a Nepali socio-cultural context. Notably, the portrayal of the Nepali mother-daughter relationship with a specific middle class upbringing and a constantly lingering imposter syndrome during the daughter’s academic training at Cambridge successfully localizes Prima Facie.

Through the play, we not only see how flawed the justice system is, we witness how the system is designed by men and hence, by default, is unprotective of women. 1 in 3 women globally experience violence and the stories are buried, hidden, and are concealed mainly because we hear stories like Prisa’s where the system doesn’t trust her words. The original play itself burgeoned after the wider recognition of the #MeToo movement. As both the writer and translator are trained lawyers as well as artists, their dual-expertise allows space for the audience to understand the character and setting of the play with ease. The audience is made familiar with the character’s life as a lawyer, the legal system, the training they receive, advice from the mentors, and the legal jargon used to shelter the system that benefit only those who play the game well. We live through a lawyer becoming the very person she fought against — a survivor — and this pushes us to question and interrogate the fragility of the legal system as well as the roles professionals play within it.

Also interesting to note is the trend of one-person play sweeping the Kathmandu Theatre scene with past shows like The List played by Alisha Bade Shrestha, Peeda Geet played by Nirbhik Bhattarai and now Prima Facie by Pashupati Rai. This points to a growth of Nepali theatre by being open to experiment with craft and genre. Prima Facie did not fail in its experiment. It will be remembered as a powerhouse-women-production where the crew have worked effortfully to reveal the lights and shadows of the legal life.

—

Ishika Thapa works at Kalam Weekly. She also manages and contributes to The Nepali Cinematheque and occasionally writes personal essays on her substack Jeevanshaili.

This government is off to a rather clumsy start: the populist moves to arrest Oli, Lekhak, Sharma and Khadka have all back-fired, as the Supreme Court has ordered the release of each of these individuals. The government has referred to the East-West Highway as the Mahendra Highway, perhaps betraying the fact that people in this government have never emerged from the fog of nostalgia for a pre-1990/2006 Nepal under the monarchy. They’ve referred to Nepal as a ‘buffer state’, echoing foreign phrasing rather than being mindful of language necessary to reflect national sovereignty. And they’ve been caught issuing orders to other levels of governments in a manner that exposes a fundamental deficiency – people in this government either have no regard for the constitution, or equally bad, they haven’t read the document.

It should also worry the citizen that a prime minister who has declared social media as his primary source of income should come into power following violent riots orchestrated in the wake of a social media ban by the Oli government. Lest we forget, Balen had been making inciting and violent remarks against the state leading up to the Gen Z movement, and following it, did assure Sudhan Gurung, now the home minister, on X, that ‘the country will not forget your contributions.’ Now, this government has decided to attack traditional journalism by taking away nearly 3 billion rupees in advertisement revenue issuing from the state.

This money is essential to sustaining timely salary, photo journalism, art criticism, sectoral beats. Gorkhapatra doesn’t break investigative stories against sitting prime ministers and ministers: it is the government’s propaganda mouthpiece. The stories you’ve come to base your notion of widespread corruption among the business, security, political and cultural elites have come from independent media houses who need the state’s purse of advertising money in order to sustain their work. Now ask yourselves this – why would a new government, which came into power claiming to fight corruption, render toothless and ineffective the very aspects of civil society that sniffs out and exposes systemic corruption?

It is a caricature to portray the media landscape as being controlled by a handful of individuals. This is conspiracy thinking at best, and utterly ignorant of the role of the press in a healthy democracy at worst. It is true that people who own media organizations have behaved purely like capitalists and aligned themselves with centers of power in order to enrich themselves. But their organizations have employed individual journalists who have gathered hundreds if not thousands of years of collective experience in doing the kind of journalism that informs us, the citizenry, on corruption, crime, society, parliamentary affairs, politics, the economy, education, sports, the arts and literature, the criticism of these arts and literature, cinema and theater, international relations, security issues, geopolitics, fashion, etc. These journalists inform us about every aspect of our polity. Our cultural production as a society and a nation is shaped by the media. AI slop doesn’t a coherent nation make. This government’s attack on independent media organizations gravely undermines democracy.

Your ability to learn freely as a citizen is under threat. Manners of corruption will follow modes of production. Traditional media and social media are both made possible by advertising. But the crucial difference here is about ownership – YouTube, X, LinkedIn, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, etc., aren’t owned by Nepalis.

End of rant.

A Shift in Focus

Deshbikas requires the labor of women to be celebrated and elevated into monetary exchange, and education to be reformed to promote vocational skills from the middle-school years. It is important to shift education away from the Confucian-Brahminical ideals of rote-learning for exams, in a preferred hegemonic language, aimed at ‘prestigious’ jobs as technical specialists or civil servants, and toward skills rooted in crafting goods and producing service that can be exchanged in society at the smallest levels of organization: between families, neighborhoods, communities, municipalities, states. Prioritizing tourism as a major source of national income drains away large amounts of investment into a service-based economy which is ever subject to the whims of international politics and economics. Vocational trades create hyper-local economies with greater degrees of autonomy from such external shocks. Every home must become a site of production, preferably with each adult pursuing a distinct vocation. A redrawing of cuisine must be aimed at liberating the nation from reliance on import, and on moving toward climate-suitable grains, legumes and meats. It must be a national priority to produce as much energy as possible. But the exporting of energy must be a final resort of economic activities, not the focus of the federal government. With enough energy, a handful of grass can be made into plastics, petrochemicals, medicines, fertilizers, clothing, building material. With enough energy. Therefore, selling energy in exchange of Indian Rupees or Bangladeshi Taka should be the very last thing we do as a nation.

And perhaps the time has come for every province to buy a tunnel-boring machine each. Imagine how much Karnali can accomplish if it has a few TMBs at its disposal – to bring water from one valley into the next, to create a network of reservoirs to store monsoon runoffs, to connect communities separated by large mountains but not by distances as the crow flies.

—

Prawin Adhikari is a writer, translator and editor. He is the author of Budhani (2025), Folk Gods (2019) and The Vanishing Act (2014). He has also translated Han Kang’s The Vegetarian into Nepali. He recently translated Narayan Wagle’s Koreana - Coffee Guff into English.

The structure of the novel is set with each chapter alternating between the perspective of the mother-daughter duo. While Medha’s point-of-view is written in the first person, Shah has rendered Priya’s perspective in the third person, seemingly to create a symbolic psychological distance. Medha’s inner life is given a relatively closer inspection while her mother’s is not.

The book’s narrative arc is quite linear. The book begins with a hopeful Medha arriving at Dabolim Airport at Goa. Her goal is to convince her mother to return back to Kathmandu from her life in Goa. However, the story quickly transforms into the duo having a continuously tumultuous relationship with each other, neither being able to convince the other of their desires in which the other is severely implicated. Medha’s want of her mother taking on a more ‘motherly’ responsibility is refuted by Priya’s insistence to stay settled in her Goan life.

The novel offers a refreshing setting and a plot uncommon in Nepali literature. Most of the story is based in Goa with a few chapters dedicated to Priya’s failed stint at Mumbai’s film industry. Kathmandu, too, is featured in a few instances. Whether this literature is ‘diasporic’ in nature is difficult to claim. The countries and people of India and Nepal have always had a close relationship to each other, and the lax rules on work and migration for citizens of both countries in each other’s territory allow it to be imagined as a singular geographical entity. However, current ultranationalist fervor in both countries tends to segregate instead of unite. Shah is clearly not interested in this political division and treats the migration from Nepal to India as a normal part of life.

Mother Mine also provides a vantage point to imagine the psychological degeneration of South Asian women of the elite class. Not all Nepali mothers can imagine having a go at the Bollywood career like Priya, and not all twenty-eight year old women have four people working under them to cater to their entrepreneurial aspirations. The desires of modern women are explored and so are the anxieties that they invite: of curating a particular self-image, of being desired, of wanting a calm and peaceful life devoid of any sort of ups and downs.

The language of the book is simple and its pacing quick. One can definitely wonder whether the sudden jumps in time at multiple instances is a choice of style or an editing oversight. Either way, it does induce moments of confusion that break the reader’s flow. The inconsistencies in the linguistic style (sentence length, punctuation use, etc.) across chapters and a couple of plot loopholes point to a limited editorial input. How much does a writer fight for one’s own work to appease the publisher, only the writer can speak on it, but elements of cliche — like Medha’s constant attempt to ungay a gay man — point towards such appeasement.

Nevertheless, Shah’s six-month-long effort at crunching out Mother Mine is inspiring for Nepali writers, both young or otherwise. Her sadhana has led her to begin working on her fifth novel already. One can only wish her future work will be bolder and based on a firmer collaboration with the editor and the publisher. We need more Nepali literature in English and Shah stands as a powerhouse in this domain.

The Nepal launch of Sheeba Shah’s fourth novel Mother Mine will take place on the 11th of April, Saturday, at Manny’s Eatery and Tapas Bar, Jawalakhel. The author will be in conversation with Alfa M. Shakya and Arun Gupto to discuss her novel.

I’ve come to see essays as what follows after a realization and fiction as the dramatization of reaching such realizations. One ends and the other begins. But it is not necessary that the two say the same things. In fact, if you try diligently to get an “epiphany” down on paper, it can look misshapen and incorrect. It might turn out to be little more than romantic spontaneity. But that does not mean the epiphany itself was false. Some things just get translated into logic space less agreeingly. This defiance of the instinctual against being reduced is perhaps what gives it its power: imagine unbridled subconscious versus its shadow on the brain wall.

Among the two, the dramatization of getting there interests me far more than the making sense of it afterward. I believe the former to be much more expansive and interpretative than the latter, which, to be effective, has to tame itself into neat claims and conclusions, which isn’t always possible. Realistically, essays are equally—if not more—important, but mining for truthful images from a narrative mess drafted feverishly over days or weeks is perhaps—just—a slightly higher calling. Or, again, that is what I like to believe.

Reaching in the dark

The strongest appeal to writing fiction is probably the promise to perpetuity. We remember stories and might just remember the writers. But the biggest reason to write fiction should be that it allows you unchecked access to yourself. Of course this is as cliched as it gets. Writing has for ever been associated with thinking and untangling thoughts. But nowhere is this self-revelatory apparatus as sharp, I’d argue, as when writing fiction.

Could there be a better way to get closer to the self than trying to pull out a narrative from a mental image that accretes in your brain over leisurely pockets of thought? What else in your average day do you do to look into the blinding core of yourself? Pulling the narrative out of whatever dells and corners in the brain they have scuttled to and then going through the draft accumulating atomic changes until it all sounds and flows right to the same brain—could anything else really get you closer to the ghost in the machine? Not for nothing do you see links and glaringly obvious threads and connections in a story after months of having written it. Fiction is often so subconsciously produced that you notice having stolen things from everything that made an impression on you: another writer’s work, exact phrases unknowingly lifted, months-old versions of you that saw certain things, sounds, colors, people you know, people you don’t, all the things that made a mark on you due to their rarity in your day and their unpredictability.

In addition, fiction, unlike other kinds of writing like essays, criticism, non-fiction narrative, even to some extent poetry, has few constraints. Perhaps the practicalities of publication slap on some of those, but fiction does not necessitate a heavily consistent framework. This is unlike criticism writing, where an inconsistent slip would be a serious gaffe, or investigative writing, where the piece’s credibility strains and buckles under a single compromised claim. What this loosening of constraints allows is the subconscious to hugely extend its reach. And the more the subconscious, frankly, the more the self.

We need more fiction

All of this reaching just to make enough room to say Nepali people do not write enough fiction. Or in any case do not publish enough. There used to be a time when the scene here was livelier: Saturday fiction and poetry issues in the newspapers, literary magazines more active, overall a better environment for non-professional writers. Now it has dried up and it feels like a desert. Or is this just nostalgia speaking?

We need more fiction because the fiction output of a period of time is, simply, how that time leaves its mark in history and culture. We read the Russians and can imagine the late 19th century. We read the great Indian novelists describe the Emergency and get a glimpse into that time. We read about the Song Tra Bong and Salem cigarettes preferred by Viet Cong soldiers and are in on the stupidity of the whole enterprise. Nothing else from a time is a handier yardstick than the literature it produces. Perhaps films too now, but the technological advancement aspect dates films rather quickly, and they are also constantly unhelpfully remade. Less handy are, of course, wars, like the Civil War in our own recent history. But we don’t want more of those.

I consider myself not well read enough in Nepali literature to make up my mind on the quality and general direction of it, but we have never really been known as a literature-producing country. And this is not going to change unless we actually start writing. And the thing about writing fiction is that you need to do it to see how to do it. No amount of reading is going to get you there. You have to write and suck at it and learn to put it away and write some more having learned a number of important things from the experience. And repeat this for many times before you can get to one good story. (Trying to get there myself.)

Circle one or more

Write fiction not necessarily to be a Chekhov or an Alice Munro or whoever your favorite writer is. You’ll get there if you are disciplined enough and it could turn out to be a long long journey. But what you write today does not need to be excellent. You pit your work against the best there is and that hurts your output, which hurts your chances of getting there. Also, pace your reading and writing carefully or that’s another paralysis. This is more serious than people usually make it.

Write fiction to arrive at understandings of yourself. Much less daunting. If you feel that your actions on the day to day are too automatic and simple, lacking in motive, see if you cannot make your characters act differently and perhaps you will understand something about yourself. Who cares if the result isn’t smart and ironic and illustrative of a way of life? Let’s just get the story done. Listen to your brain transmitting a mute image and try giving it language. If it fails, there’s surely another equally beautiful image you haven’t given enough attention to. Surely two thousand words a month isn’t too much to ask of yourself. Start with an image, then find ways to get the characters around the image, write out their thoughts, separately, the causality in the narrative has to be casual, then put it all together, and then put it away. Come back and see if it had anything. If not, discard. The next one will.

Write fiction not to “exercise empathy” or whatever virtuous else people recommend doing it for. Do not fool yourself. You’re only ever writing about yourself even when you think you’re writing about others. And anyway, you cannot know anyone past a reasonable threshold except yourself. Anything that tries to make writing fiction look like an altruistic act should be put in the trash.

Write fiction because it is a very human thing to do, for which literally everything else in your life is a preparation. Inexhaustible simple intelligence is on tap now at $20 per month. Shallow thinking might not make it past the year. It’ll still be some time before machines start writing gasp-inducing masterpieces but they will get close. Even then we should keep in mind that they are only approximating, that they haven’t felt it. But you have. That should be enough reason for you.

Write fiction not to meet expectations or to represent anything. Just sit down and create characters and make them do things and see where it takes you. It will always—on the condition that you earnestly dedicate a non-trivial chunk of your time, which is without exaggeration the only thing you own—lead you someplace you will be ecstatic to have reached. It will also always be someplace you never quite imagined. Yes: every single time.

—

Sharad Duwal is a short-story writer from Bhaktapur, Nepal.