| ranjit |
Posted
on 23-Aug-01 10:23 PM
In Nepal, Too, Desire Defies Modern Times
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
Houghton Mifflin
ARRESTING GOD IN KATHMANDU
By Samrat Upadhyay
191 pages. Mariner Books. $12.
The Katmandu of Samrat Upadhyay, a Nepalese writer who lives in the United States, is very different from the locale of foreigners' imaginations, an exotically primitive place steeped in custom, dust and religiosity (and most recently in the murders of most of the royal family by a discontented prince). In "Arresting God in Kathmandu," Mr. Upadhyay's first collection of stories, this 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.
At least that is my interpretation of the meaning of Mr. Upadhyay's title, "Arresting God in Kathmandu." There is no story of that title in this collection, although the last one, "A Great Man's House," would seem to be the best candidate. In it 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.
Rumors begin to circulate — rumors being a big part of Mr. Upadh yay's Katmandu — that she is bringing lovers to the house while Kailash lies in bed sick. Mohan Ram, the cook, sees her with older men, and he waxes nostalgic for the old days when Kailash, whom he calls "my master," was surrounded by adoring relatives conducting his spiritual sessions. At the same time the cook senses in himself a perverse arousal for the vixenish, calculating Nani.
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 son, Moti, marries the candidate, Rukmini, but he rejects her as soon as he discovers her limp. Yet while outwardly a picture of demure, melancholy passivity, Rukmini is 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.
There is a deceptive simplicity to all of these stories, just as there is a deceptive simplicity to Katmandu, whose appearance of traditional piety is, like Rukmini's, a mask behind which all manner of complications flourish.
The tradition exists most notably 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.
There is, for example, the case of the modest teacher named Aditya in "The Man With Long Hair," whose homoerotic infatuation with an itinerant actor leads him to rekindle his faded passion for his wife. Or there is American-educated Kanti in the story "The World" who rejects a perfectly suitable arranged marriage with a Katmandu doctor because of an unhealthy attraction to an aristocratic, womanizing rake named Jaya, who is himself a sign of the disappearance of old ways and old values.
"Kanti slid down and sat on the floor," after her final meeting with the rejected doctor, who has himself returned to Katmandu from England, where he loved a woman just as unsuitable for him as Jaya is for Kanti. "She wondered where Jaya was right now — probably in bed with some awful woman in a hotel. But, then, Kanti herself had been such a woman for a while."
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.
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| reviewer |
Posted
on 26-Aug-01 09:10 PM
This review in Far Eastern Economic Review is a more apt review of Samrat's book.
BOOKS: HOLIDAY SPECIAL
Another Place
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By Kavitha Rao
Issue cover-dated August 09, 2001
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SAMRAT UPADHYAY bills himself as the first Nepalese writer in English to be published in the West. Unfortunately, his collection of short stories has very little to distinguish it from other writers from South Asia, except that it's set in Kathmandu.
Upadhyay clings to the themes of arranged marriages and domineering families so beloved of South Asian writers. His insecure and lonely characters--some trapped in loveless marriages, others with children who disappoint them--find solace in the company of strangers. But this peculiar South Asian malaise has been done to death, and done better, by such Indian writers as Jhumpa Lahiri, Shashi Deshpande and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.
Upadhyay's prose does have a certain simple charm. Unlike so many writers of the region he does not overdose on puns and wordplay. In his most successful story, A Good Shopkeeper, he describes the anguish of an accountant sacked from his job. "He missed the ritual of going to the office and settling down for the day's work, even though he had been doing the same job for years. He loved the midday lull, when everyone in the office ordered snacks and tea, and a feeling of camaraderie came over the workplace: people laughing and eating, talking about mundane things . . ." Most of the stories begin well, but peter out to unsatisfying conclusions. Those familiar with the work of other South Asian authors are likely to wish that writers from the region didn't feel compelled to be melancholy in order to be taken seriously.
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