He directs the creative writing program at Indiana University, Bloomington, and will be visiting Nepal with two of his students in June/July.[break]
Upadhyay is best known for short stories told in minimalist language. His new book is a tome of over 500 pages that follows a diverse set of characters through the last half-century of Nepali history. Upadhyay’s German translator and publisher, Philipp P. Thapa of Lahure Kitab, asked him how he arrived at this new stage in his writing.
In Buddha’s Orphans, the narrative keeps returning to Kathmandu in the early 1960s. What makes that place and time so interesting?
I was born in 1963 in Kathmandu, so I don’t have much memory of that entire decade. What I do have are some mental pictures – whether they are products of my mind or they really happened are hard to tell. These images flickering in my mind were the first impulse to write Buddha’s Orphans. After all, childhood memories, whether real or fake, can make strong material for a storyteller. The 60s was also a very heavy decade since it was when king Mahendra devised and executed the Panchayat system. The immensity of that political move, combined with my personal interest in the cultural and social atmosphere during the decade of my birth, provided much of the fodder for the novel.
How would you describe that 60s atmosphere, and how has it influenced the development of Nepal’s society?
That decade was the time when Nepal began fully ‘opening up’ to the outside world. I remember as a child walking with my mother in New Road – I couldn’t have been more than five or six then – and watching two dreadlocked hippies French-kissing as they crossed the road at a snail’s pace. The government was everywhere, on the billboards in Kathmandu, on Radio Nepal, which paid homage to the king and the Panchayat system, it seemed, every hour. I also remember walking with my parents and my sister, and people commenting on how our nuclear family matched the family planning slogan of those years, ‘we two, our two.’
Most of the influences of that time are fairly obvious, but what’s striking (and I hope it’s something that comes across in the novel) is that the ‘innocence’ that many people nostalgically attribute to that decade, and the subsequent decades of the Panchayat system, was hardly innocent at all. The peace and propriety that many Nepalis experienced then hid much turbulence beneath, as it’s become evident now.
Is that a major impetus for your writing – to chip away at the image of Nepali propriety? After all, extramarital affairs and other sexual taboos are your trademark topics. In Buddha’s Orphans, both main characters grow up in outwardly respectable families that are actually broken.
The major impetus for my writing is to try to tell a good story, to keep my readers engaged with my characters and the story’s happenings, and to make them feel, by the end, that they have caught glimpses into human nature. But yes, calling into question the image of Nepali propriety is one of the byproducts of my storytelling. It is not something that I consciously set out to do, but it’s one of my natural inclinations, so it becomes very much a part of my narrative thrust. There’s a tendency in our society to sweep under the rug all those things that we don’t want to admit exist. Even among Nepalis living in the West, this attitude is prevalent. We blame the West for its corrupting influences on ‘our culture,’ as though there’s one solid Nepali culture, pure and pristine, that we need to cling to.
What about the Western image of Nepal? What does your primary American audience think they know about the country, and how do you react to it in your writing?
The Western image of Nepal can also be equally one-dimensional and static. I remember one reviewer of Arresting God in Kathmandu complaining that my work didn’t showcase enough dust and dirt, or something to that effect. Another reviewer expressed wonder at the fact that my work suggested Nepalis aspire to and struggled with some of the same things Americans do. The knowledge of my American audience about Nepal runs the gamut. There are readers who associate the country primarily with the mountains, and during reading tours I have received comments about how cold it must be where I grew up. I have also encountered very savvy readers of my work, people who know Nepal well and can speak of our cultural and political nuances.
I don’t feel like I need to do anything deliberate in my writing to counteract the Western image of Nepal. I reveal the truth, with all its subtleties, as I see it, and that itself is an argument against what’s out there.
You left Nepal at 21. Raja, the male main character in Buddha’s Orphans, is born almost the same year as you, he loves books, makes a living from writing, and like yourself, he starts growing long hair in his fifties. Unlike yourself, he stays in Nepal and gets into trouble writing critical political columns. Is that you trying to imagine how your life might have turned out if you had stayed?
Well, I did go back to Nepal in the early nineties, got married, and worked as a journalist and a teacher for a couple of years before returning to the States, which probably disabused me of any nostalgia about how my life would’ve turned out had I never left. I’m usually also not given to self-introspection that way. Despite the similarities, I don’t think Raja is my alter ego (but I’m ready to be convinced). Even the columns I wrote for newspapers during those two years were more satirical, hardly aggressive or challenging, and sometimes goofy enough to be utterly nonsensical. In other words, I’m a lot less serious than Raja.
But I do suspect that this long hair business is my (desperate?) attempt to recapture my youth, those teenage days I spent hanging out at the GAA (Godavari Alumni Association) with my Xavier buddies, ambling over to Thamel to while the afternoon away in the tourist restaurants there, loitering outside the palace in Durbar Marg sitting on a wall that we’d appropriately named The Wall after the Pink Floyd album that was all the rage then, meandering through the gullies of Asan and Indra Chowk to reach Freak Street and check out the latest bootlegged cassettes of The Grateful Dead or Neil Young. The world was mine then, and my long hair definitely had something to do
with it.
Buddha’s Orphans is your most complex work so far. It’s nearly twice as long as The Guru of Love, it has multiple storylines spanning more than four decades of Nepali history, and there’s a departure from strict realism in the appearance of a dead child’s ghost. Is this the kind of book that you’ve wanted to write all along, and it took all those years of practicing with the simpler forms to get there?
It certainly felt that way when I finished writing Buddha’s Orphans. This novel is the most challenging work that I’ve done, both in terms of subject matter and narrative structure. The first draft was close to 800 pages! And I was completely exhausted by the end of it, so much so that I thought I’d not write for another year or two (it turned out I couldn’t stay away for more than a couple of months).
Yet I’m hesitant to say that it’s the book that I was gearing up towards all along. I think many writers feel that their latest work is the most important work they’ve done, and I did feel that about Buddha’s Orphans when I finished writing it. But I’ve experienced this at the conclusion of every book I’ve written, which can only mean one thing: the book I’ve wanted to write all along is yet to be written.
(Samrat Upadhyay will be talking about writing today (July 2) at the Kathmandu Contemporary Art Centre, Jhamsikhel at 5 pm. The title of the program is ‘The Write Stuff’.
His book will be launched at the Nepal Bharat Library on Friday, July 3 at 4 pm. The event is part of the monthly literary event held at Nepal Bharat Library to promote inter-cultural dialogue. The event is open to the public.)
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