There are more than three million Nepalis employed abroad, both documented and undocumented, sustaining over 21 percent of Nepal’s economy. In the first nine months of the 2066/2067 Nepali fiscal year, over 200,000 workers left for foreign employment. DV lottery winners are only a minor quotient of this, with around 2,000 candidates selected in the 2010 screening. Ideally, each migrant assimilates into the changed scenario with the ease of a chameleon, and promptly begins to gain wealth. But reality isn’t as quick as the statistics it produces. In each digit is an elongated story of migration, assimilation and rejection, which Manjushree so carefully conceives in Prema’s tale. With one slight wavering in front of the “ATOMATIC GARANTEE GREEN CARD banner,” Prema is dislocated from her familiar hill bazaar and sent adrift into the landless seas in search of a landing.
Prema attempts many false landings, the first being when her airplane touches down at Los Angeles International Airport. From here, she is escorted to Little Nepal, an enclave of compatriots who speak in the Nepali language among themselves, “their talk invariably turned homeward.” Her didi Neeru is even afforded the error of calling Americans ‘foreigners.’ Little Nepal follows the trend of satellite Chinatowns across the globe burgeoning like fast food chains of the China experience – wherever you may be, you get the ‘same great taste.’ Such insulating strategies – often in response to unwelcoming hosts – keep some migrants from ever arriving. Other examples of this are found in second- and third-generation migrants who still have difficulty speaking the host language; a booming market for international calls, and violent prejudice towards the ‘other.’
Prema’s arrival is not only delayed by the elaborate reconstruction of home but also by the puzzling similarities between home and an unfurling America. She compares miles of low-income blocks in Los Angeles to a town near where she worked in Nepal. And when her boyfriend Luis confides his frustration to her, “Don’t you find all this empty? Like all we Americans ever do is work and shop and pay taxes and die?”, she responds, “It is the same everywhere, no?” The physical location of countries may be mutually exclusive, but their social, cultural, political and economic identities may not be. As the solidity of geographic distance is unraveled by vacillating nearness and farness of other forms of distance, Prema begins to find alliances between the most remote of places. For example, she is introduced to the story of Luis’s deceased father, Carl Reyes, who had come to America from Guatemala in 1968. As she becomes more invested in understanding who he was, she compares the four-decade Guatemalan civil war beginning in the 1960s to the decade long civil war in Nepal of the 1990s/2000s. “Guatemala’s war is like the original war. What we have is a photocopy war.” More encouragingly, the cross-cultural bridges allow for a blossoming in the relationship between Luis and Prema. Luis says to her one day, “It’s like there’s no Nepal, no America. Just us, you know?” The parsing of what is and is not America becomes difficult when Prema finds elementary resemblances between her host and home country – poverty, disquiet, love.
And to prick the migrant’s dream once more, Prema does not initially find her condition improve in America, either financially or holistically. Her savings come at the cost of a drudging, devoid lifestyle. “For those who felt they were from a shabby third-world country, it was hard not to believe that life in a richer land was more proper, solid.” On the contrary, Prema sees too many sooty polishers of America’s shining symbols of wealth and freedom to believe this. “Wondering – this is America? It was neither proper nor solid. How could anyone from the ramshackle streets move up to the streets of glass and granite?”
Untold tales
Confronted by these misconceptions of migration, Prema rejects both Nepal and America to find her place “in the wilderness at the heart of human habitation.” She does not need a treasure map to locate her buried fortune; the final ‘x’ marks no empirical ‘spot’. Her fortune lies in the discovery of her own convictions. “In the wetlands, the shiny atom of her mind drifted apart, exposing, at her core, a yearning – a need – for conviction, which persisted...Even she needed to lead a complete life.” The author asks whether Prema believes in conservation early on in the novel, when she is still working as a forester in Nepal, and receives a vague response. But when the same question is raised at the end of the novel, it is clear that “Botany, Biology, Biogeography” are what stir Prema’s convictions. Her travel to America was a means to this end, but she did not have to migrate to find it.
Unlike Prema, there are characters whose convictions are anchored in location – like her sister Bijaya after joining the Maoists, says, “‘Everything I’ve done – I do – is for my country, for the liberation of my country, my people.’” There are characters for whom the change in background made all the difference – Neeru didi now drives a car and owns the restaurant she used to work at. Her children date and go to college – “you wouldn’t know they weren’t American!” Then there is Esther, the old woman Prema takes care of, who never embarks on the irreversible migrant’s journey, nor ever considered it.
Indeed, Prema’s experience is relevant only to the specific type of migration she undertakes – she is offered a permit to legally work and live in America, and to her condition in Nepal – “there was nothing wrong with what she had.” For some, migration is an act of survival – the physical shift making all the difference. Almost 40 percent of Nepali migrants go to India, many of whom are from rural, poor, food-insecure areas where migration has developed as a seasonal coping strategy. For others, migration is seen as transitory suffering for future gains, as evidenced in the hundreds of thousands of Nepali laborers currently working in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Not to mention the groups of countless migrants incarcerated by their undocumented status. Prema takes up a negligible and relatively luxurious position in the millions of migrant stories.
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