On my part, I would like to dedicate this piece of reminiscences to Yatri’s decades as a self-instigated literary editor and critic through his own homegrown Nepali literary magazine called “Bideha” wherein many creative writers, especially like me, in our nascent thirties, found their berths and platforms every month. I myself submitted to Bideha some short stories and other literary write-ups, even including translation of some prose poems of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s, before the beloved magazine folded up for good. Bideha, in its slim and pocket-sized format, spawned new creative writers of Nepal in those days.
A compact, polite and a soft-spoken man in both colloquial and canonical Nepali, even-tempered Yatri belonged to a refined circle of Rimals at Kumari Pati of Patan.
Of course, not a single paisa was paid to us because editors of this kind were as poor as church rodents; besides, it was a mutual labor of love and commitment to literature on the part of both the contributors and the editors of such magazines in those Panchayat decades. We were together as kindred spirits, and continued to write and publish as regularly as possible. About this some more words later on.
Basu Rimal and I met at the Pulchowk Central Campus of the Institute of Engineering. He taught Nepali and I English. Both subjects were rather pooh-poohed by the technocratic dispensation of the sprawling campus that was first seeded by the ICM (Indian Cooperation Mission) during the 1960s on what the Ranas had started as their workshop pool of bricklayers, carpenters, technicians and plumbers in their days to maintain the palaces they had built on the expanses of Kathmandu. The main edifice of the campus was housed in the Gothic and Doric durbar called Anand Bhawan. Later, the campus was expanded by ILO with many faculties added to in the 1970s. Then the Institute was embraced by the World Bank, turning it in its present gargantuan sprawl on both sides of the road to Patan Gate.
Though my subject had many essential possibilities in its teaching-learning components called Scientific English, English for Engineers (civil, electric, electronic, architecture and so on) and Technical English (passive voice and indirect speech, etc), Nepali fared the worst because it was addled as “Nepal Parichaya”, and the generalized hodgepodge served no other purposes than being an amateurish promoter of Panchayat Propaganda.
Both Rimal and I left our teaching profession at the Institute at about the same time, around 1975, and the reasons were obvious: we, as lecturers in Arts & Humanities, had no satisfaction in the techno-mechano world of Nepali engineers and deans, World Bank consultants from Scotland, and bricklaying instructors from America, Australian landscapers, electronic experts from Poland, Swiss architectural visionaries, and master carpenters from Canada.
Rimal most fittingly left for the RSS, and I for Narayangarh and Bharatpur to build a section of the Hetauda-Narayangarh Highway. We lost contact from that time and we never met in the last thirty years.
But the four years we spent together at the Pulchowk Campus were reciprocally productive. It was only after having the magnum opus of my novel called “Pratyek Thaun: Pratyek Manchhe” published by Sajha Prakashan – now reprinted by FinePrint after thirty-two years! – and winning the Sajha Puraskar later for the same, I had delved into writing short stories, poems and such much in the interregnum. It was a reverse process, in fact; but these experimentations found ready space in Yatri’s Bideha while I also wrote for Uttam Kunwar’s and Bal Mukund Dev Pandey’s “Roop Rekha” and Nagendra Raj Sharma’s “Abhibyakti” and Amatya’s “Deepika.”
A compact, polite and a soft-spoken man in both colloquial and canonical Nepali, even-tempered Yatri belonged to a refined circle of Rimals at Kumari Pati of Patan. I visited him one autumn afternoon, and found him recovering from his son’s death at a football melee where a police baton had damaged his skull. He had just finished his son’s thirteenth-day rituals. This loss had disturbed him for sometime. He had left home one day and walked to Dakshin Kali, climbed over the Chandra Giri and hurtled down to Kulekhani, Bhainse and Bhim Phedi. Like a Bairagi, he said he wanted to leave himself, an abstract thought from any angle. Obviously, this led to nowhere on the plains of Hetauda, and he came back home to family and the mundane matters of livelihood and living life as one ought to. He was back to “normal”, and we talked about Bideha, among other things.
Basu Rimal “Yatri”’s appointment at RSS was more secure and permanent, a godsend opportunity to do what he liked doing. But he would not be allowed to remain the official editor of Bideha. That was the law of the land of the day, one precondition to having his job at the RSS. So he appointed his wife as editor of the self-financed publication, with advertisements being scant in those days save for the Department of Information’s favors, which Yatri could not seek for obvious reasons. Needless to say, such an indefinite and unsafe undertaking of sustaining a literary magazine with guaranteed loss every month was risky and unwise. After some issues, expectedly, Bideha disappeared in the inclement political climate which thwarted self-expression despite having lyricist and painter kings in Mahendra and Birendra.
Even then, many editors with self-ardor published literary magazines on their own in those desperate decades. Yatri, as an early pioneer in the fraternity, had many fellow editors, publishers, critics and advocates. Among them:
- Uttam Kunwar and Bal Mukund Dev Pandey managed their joint Rupayan Press at Dhoka Tole for their livelihood. Kunwar did the PR works while Pandey minded the office and the press, and they edited and published the “Roop Rekha” monthly. The rest is literary history. Both Kunwar and Pandey passed away some years ago, and the magazine also faded away from the Kathmandu landscapes. Though it was considered a high-echelon magazine, Roop Rekha accepted my humble efforts at creative and expressive writing.
- Basu Dev Luintel, while attached to the Madan Puraskar Guthi and Kamal Mani Dixit for decades, moonlighted with his own “Kauwa” (crow) Prakashan and published his periodicals as well as self-sketches penned by writers and artists at his insistently dictatorial behest. He also passed on a couple of years ago.
- Nagendra Raj Sharma still continues, I believe, with his beloved “Abhibyakti” to which I submitted many short stories in the 1970s. He worked at CEDA and waited for his monthly salary to pay the printer for the already-delayed issue of his slim magazine.
- Achyut Raman Adhikari continues his romance with “Unnayan”, however irregular his literary magazine may be at times, which is quite often. He sustains himself as a professor of Nepali while he forages around for write-ups and financial aid for Unnayan.
- It is also worthwhile to remember one Amatya friend who published his dearly beloved “Deepika” in the 1970s. Uttam Nepali and I contributed a long joint epic poem to the magazine, much to the delight of, among other admirers, the prolific novelist Daulat Bikram Bista.
- Whatever happened to Bhawani Ghimire’s milestone “Bhanu”? There is nothing left now but to wonder about this once-outstanding magazine.
- Fond mention also must be made of Shiva Adhikari’s “Suruchi” for which I wrote some expressive pieces in the 1980s. Sadly, the publication was converted to something else, and Shiva died young a couple of years back.
- It was as early as the 1960s which saw the publication of Basu Shashi’s much-looked-forward-to “Sanchaya” monthly; and the 1970s had Hari Bhakta Katuwal’s “Gojika” concept that fitted in one’s jacket pocket. Both publications ceased before the editors-publishers themselves departed.
- Last but not the least, Kamal Mani Dixit still continues with his pet “Nepali” quarterly, ostensibly the soft mouthpiece of the Madan and Jagadamba Puraskar Guthis. Though the Guthis are believably well-endowed financially, it is rumored that Kamal Mani spends much of his own honorariums, received from attending the many corporate meetings he is obliged to as board member, into the magazine itself.
So it went, and so it goes, with these self-addicted editors and publishers of Nepali literary magazines.
In the 1980s, I developed a yen for longish short stories and pieces, the average length being fifty foolscap pages, which could not be contained in the said “skinny” magazines with barely forty pages to go in each edition. So I was forced to submit some seven “fatty” stories to “Garima” in one lot, and its editors – Bishnu Bibhu Ghimire, Gopal Parajuli and Thapalia – had a free play in serializing them in their successive issues.
But it was the domestic and family-run magazines, beginning with Bideha, which accepted my submissions in those decades and discovered in me a creative and an expressive writer in Nepali. That I have stopped writing in Nepali is an altogether different matter now, my only task at hand being paying my heartfelt homage to Basu Rimal “Yatri” and thanking him for the place he gave me in his beloved Bideha.
Godspeed on your “yatra”, dear “Yatri”! And may you as well rest in peace!
pjkarthak@gmail.com
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