Upadhyay, Samrat;
Arresting God in Kathmandu
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001, 191 pages [gbook]
ISBN 0618043713, 9780618043712
topics: | fiction | south-asia | nepal
reading these stories during a trip to nepal i was struck by the ordinariness of these lives. the opening story is a subtly told story of a secret love between an out-of-job accountant and a peasant girl whom he meets sitting at a bench in the park. the woman helps him forget the mounting social stigma of his joblessness, and he eventually reconciles with opening a shop. Deepak Misra's secretary contrasts the exotic foreign wife of Deepak, and his ugly but efficient secretary. while the locales move across the homes and temples and offices of nepal, what makes these stories work is that the experiences are universal; the everyday ordinariness of the lives.
1. The good shopkeeper 2. The cooking poet 3. Deepak Misra's secretary 4. The limping bride 5. During the festival 6. The room next door 7. The man with long hair 8. This world 9. A great man's house
http://www.villagevoice.com/2001-08-21/books/getting-bourgie-in-kathmandu/ was the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award as well as a pick for the 2001 Barnes & Noble Discover Great Writers Program. has been translated into French and Greek. Upadhyay's collection opens with "The Good Shopkeeper," to my mind the best story included here. Pramod, an accountant in Kathmandu, loses his well-paying job in a finance company. Reluctantly, he goes to Shambu-da, a distant relative of his wife, for help in finding a similar job. Shambu-da makes promises, but as the weeks pass no help is forthcoming. Pramod's wife entreats Pramod to open a shop, but he finds the suggestion demeaning. He grows listless and disinterested until he falls into an affair with a servant woman who has left her husband in her village. Through the affair Pramod learns to put his sundered life back together, not by escaping his material constraints but by giving them a new shape. He decides in fact to become a shopkeeper after all. Upadhyay draws an evocative map of a city ringed by mountains and centered on the famous Pashupatinath temple. The marketplace of Asan, the tourist sector of Thamel, the Royal Palace, the park at Gokarna — as Upadhyay's characters move through and around them an intriguing physical description of the city accumulates in increments.
The Katmandu of Samrat Upadhyay is very different from the locale of foreigners' imaginations, an exotically primitive place steeped in custom, dust and religiosity... [In this collection] of stories, the city is an awkwardly modern place where temples, painted with the eyes of the gods, are on the periphery of ordinary life, peering into consciences but imposing no obedience. Katmandu seems almost local in Mr. Upadhyay's stories, full of middle-class people worried about what their neighbors will think, dreaming about sex, getting tired of their wives or husbands, struggling against illicit desire. This book reminds us that there is truly no place to hide from the temptations of cosmopolitanism, from globalized culture or from the universal human condition, not even in faraway Nepal. [In] the last story, A Great Man's House, [...] a wealthy hotel owner and admired Hindu guru named Kailash -- who preaches about the renunciation of desire to a circle of friends -- takes on a much younger wife, Nani, whereupon his faith, his health and his authority crumble. Told in the voice of Kailash's cook, who nurtures his own secret desires for Nani, this story could be read as metaphor: Kailash as God, whose commands regarding renunciation and a higher level of spiritual awareness are rudely challenged by his young wife. ''It's very easy for you to sit up there on that cushion and preach on the illusions that our desires create,'' Nani tells him during one of his sessions with his followers. ''But the truth is this, that most ordinary people like me want to learn how to live and fulfill our desires, not treat them as if they were stepchildren.'' At the heart of this story, subtle and spiritually complex like Mr. Upadhyay's others, is the ambivalence the reader feels toward Nani. We tend to want to share the conviction of Kailash's friends that she is brazen and coarse, a bearer of trouble, like all uncontrolled women. In Mr. Upadhyay's stories interior events occur like tumblers falling in a lock, so quietly and inconspicuously that we almost don't notice them. In The Cooking Poet, a young political rebel with a great poetic talent becomes a student of Katmandu's poet laureate, Acharya, putting Acharya into confrontation with the loss of his own powers. In ''Deepak Misra's Secretary'' a homely, devoted woman draws her boss, a successful financier, away from his obsession with his estranged American wife, only to be rejected by him in turn because he is embarrassed by her bony hips and a birthmark on her cheek. In The Limping Bride a widowed father, Hiralal, strives to reform his son's rebellious heavy drinking by finding him a wife, concealing from him that the candidate he finds is imperfect, that she walks with a limp, a humiliating loss of face for the son. [The wife turns out to be] possessed of a sly worldliness that puts her in command of father and husband, each of whom, in his own way, is seeking a kind of reincarnation of Hiralal's dead wife. [Traditional piety is seen in] the ceremonies of arranged marriages and the perfunctory visits some of Mr. Upadhyay's characters pay to the city's temples. Mostly, in Mr. Upadhyay's version of it, the city is filled with ordinary people who, in the words of Rani, are seeking ways to fulfill their desires, even furtive ones. [Bernstein seems surprised by this, and repeatedly refers to how Upadhyay's Kathmandu differs from the tourist image.] Subtle, tinged with the melancholy of modest, materially constricted lives, Mr. Upadhyay's stories bring us into contact with a world that is somehow both very far away and very familiar.