Perhaps due to this experience, he was cautioning his tenth grade son Nisamshu, who was carrying three volumes of Lord of the Rings, not quite like Indian detective novels but for his father, still the same. “You should spend more time with course books,” he tells his son.
“I think we’re going to have an opposite story now,” the teenager says. “Dad flunked in English because he read one too many Indian detective novels. I might flunk in Nepali, because of the English novels I read.”
Pokharel just smiles.
If you ask Pokharel to say one most interesting part of his teen years, his answer would be “dowdy clothes.”
“I grew up in a strict family. So, I had to wait for my family’s consent to wear the clothes that I wanted to wear,” says Pokharel who claims he wore fashionable clothes but just too late, when it was outdated.
“Usually, by the time I would have convinced my family to opt for the kind of fashion I was vouching for, it would be so outdated. But I would still be fascinated by them and so would still wear them.”
Pokharel lost his mother when he was still a toddler. Since he didn’t have any sisters, he felt very difficult communicating with girls, especially during his teens. “I was so shy; I was always running away from them. I had a great difficulty approaching them,” he says.
He did not say if his son has the same problems like he had with his family’s restriction to wear the latest clothes and his shyness with girls. Neither did his son.
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