This is discernible from Buddhi Sagar Chapain’s maiden novel, “Karnali Blues.” Reading this landmark work in Nepali literature compels this reviewer to improvise on WB Yeats’ poem, “Sailing to Byzantium” and its opener: That is no country for old men.[break] However, the thread must be snapped right here, for “Karnali Blues” has its own skeins that have no semblance to Byzantium’s eternal art and fulsome culture. [break]Yes, the poem’s context is applicable to “Karnali Blues,” but its ideality is a mere dream in the novel while the stanzas’ dregs dig deep into the pages of the narrative. The art of Karnali is to seemingly create and cultivate its artful dodgers, and its culture is the dreaded “chhaupadi” to causing chronic uterine prolapses while singing and dancing to diatonic Deura.
West of the Rapti, the Karnali Region is still forsaken and forgotten, and it is left as Nepal’s Wild West where latterly the state’s Clint Eastwoods and Maoist Jack Palances started their own messes, one as the sustainers of Hindu Nepal, and the other as its liberators and new secular architects. These are not views of fussy intruders looking in from the outside; one must read the novel’s last pages, as suggestively exposed by the region’s own native son.
The novel is a series of back-and-forth tales of an irredeemable loss of time and place in Nepal. It has the juvenile observations of a schoolboy named Brisha Bahadur who reaches to be twenty-two when his family saga ends on the serene banks of the quietly flowing Bheri, with the death of his medical doctor father in the nowhere vehicle transporting him to his daughter’s home in Surkhet. Surkhet is the last post for Brisha, the peripatetic protagonist tossed by fate and circumstances – from Matera to Katase, then to Kalikot, and then to Kathmandu, summoned then to the Kohalpur Teaching Hospital, thence heading to his long-lost sister with his ill father, and now his newly widowed mother. His father’s death at sixty-nine is an afterthought to the demise of monarchy in an erstwhile kingdom, and the festering birth of a confused Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal. Brisha is a child in the once-upon-a-timeline of Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev who was then king of Nepal. Symbolically, for Nepal at present, the novel’s last lines merge with the fadeout of Brisha’s blues with the sleepy downstream of the Bheri.
An end is the beginning of another canto; this, however, eludes both this young Nepali everyman and a New Nepal. So it is only natural that the novel is meted out an inconclusively trailing end.
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“Karnali Blues” is juvenile literature at its best; the novelist’s juvenile prose renders poetic justice to a kid’s own growing up and experiencing and seeing things in and about him. There is nothing jejune in this challenging literary landmark; every paragraph will bore the reader, in that the narrative drills into the thick head and hard heart of the unwary reader, grills his dormant intellect and stirs the slumbering soul, and shakes one’s limp conscience. That is the meaning of “bore” here, not the stereotype yawn-inducing word we are accustomed to. This boring/drilling jolts the reader up, makes him laugh and weep, forces him to think, and recall hard.
Practically, nothing is the same after turning the last page of the novel. That is the truth about this particular work; henceforth, Nepali novel writing can no longer afford to be dull after “Karnali Blues”; Nepali fiction writers must be as boring – incisive and drilling – as Buddhi Sagar.
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Brisha is the Huck Finn of the novel, and he has his Tom Sawyers, Oliver Twists, David Copperfields, and Jane Eyres as friends and fellow spoilers. They, unlike Huckleberry Finn, for instance, live in homes with families and belong to society and are aware of things traditional and customary, yet they must hone their own moral improvisations to have them navigate through their individual unsure lives. This is because they are not Yeats’ “The young/In one another’s arms.” Along with Brisha, the spoiled rotten brat and failing student, his known friends and familiars must deal with their own agonized existentialist exigencies. Most are ill-treated, deprived, neglected, and hence left to their own devices. This is where their personal moral improvisation must come upfront; but some are not fortunate to exercise this personally willed alternative.
Even then, life goes on; and there is much fun for the youngsters, including the schoolgirls. The boys’ days are full of dark humor, schoolyard fights, sadistic teachers, swimming in the river, visiting the teashops in the Paal Bazaar, listening to the oldsters’ gossips and speculations, observing the goings on in the Chauraha, stealing ducks and roasting them and landing in the slammer for the misdemeanor. “My ducks were my family,” laments the Muslim owner to the police officer in charge. Brisha has the only bicycle in Katase, and he also walks the distance to the inauguration of the post-modern bridge on the Karnali by the prime minister who in Kathmandu “eats with a golden spoon.”
But ill omens are regular visitors in the fated impermanence of the place, plagued as it is by ghosts, evil spirits of the masan, ravens, bats, downpours, high winds and other shocks. Man-made vices continue to invade the habitats while old virtues and wisdom fade with “Those dying generations.”
In such an indefinite scenario, the first shocking victim of the society’s evils is the next-door neighbor Mamata Didi, bosom friend of Brisha’s older sister, Parbati Didi. Much maligned by her own mother, Mamata falls sick. Though love is lost between the two families, Brisha’s father, Dr Harsha Bahadur, visits Mamata’s house for possible treatment. But her mother rebuffs him.
“I leave my daughter to God’s will. What can you do, anyway?” she challenges him. “Don’t I know of your evil intentions?”
Spurned, the doctor can only thrash his bicycle in frustration. Mamata’s parents have a drum-beating jhankri in loud trance throughout the night to cure her, who the doctor suspects of suffering from meningitis. Mamata dies and is buried.
But Magar Mama, one of the gravediggers, sobs. “Didi, you know what,” he confesses to Brisha’s mother: “She was still breathing, albeit faintly. She was buried anyway.”
Mamata was buried alive! Had she been placed on a funeral pyre, she perhaps would wake up, shriek and jump out. Well, that did not happen, and that is a gravest tragedy in the novel.
It does not end there. The doctor shrieks in the night: “This is a sinners’ place, this Matera. Its people are dead for me henceforth. They’ll bury alive even my son and daughter.” He refuses dinner that night.
A couple of days later, Parbati cajoles reluctant Brisha to accompany her to the cemetery where Mamata is buried. Parbati bids farewell to her dearest friend: “Thou shall never ever forget me, okay? Please, Mamata!” she pleads and weeps. Both brother and sister tearfully mourn at the mound before they run home in the dusk.
Shortly, the doctor declares that the family should leave Matera for Katase. “The soil of this place is drenched in sin,” he says. Katase becomes the third destination in his internal migration in the western region.
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The young ones of Matera and Katase suffer in other ways. Avoiding belittling family abuse and untimely washout in life, they desperately seek to preserve themselves by running away from the constrained provinciality of their suburban settlements and its limitedness. Conservation lies with oneself, and one way is to leave; for most, it is the only way out. Choice and compulsion are muddled up in the process, further confusing their narrow world.
So, exercising her own moral improvisation, Parbati decides to elope, telling Brisha to obey the parents and look after the family and home. That is her parting plea. Young Brisha does not understand what is happening. But the bird has flown away to the freer worlds of Mahendra Nagar and Surkhet. This is how even young women liberate themselves from asphyxiating places like Matera and Katase where the state is still absent, save for its policemen, where no I/NGOs and citizens’ advocacy groups have arrived.
Polio-stricken and much-abused Chandre – “Had my father had me inoculated, I wouldn’t have had this limp leg!” – fails his school exams and slips away to escape his father’s beating. He is supposed to have gone to Bombay, to be with his brother. “How far is Bombay?” he had once asked Brisha. “It’s much further and farther away from Nepalgunj.” Such is the small world of Katase.
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Soon Katase itself sees dreamlike bulldozers rolling by it, to carve a state highway connecting with the far west. The bypassed bazaar loses its commercial viability, and people leave it for nearby towns for sustenance and furtherance. The place is only for old men like Bista Buda. Even Brisha’s school crush, his “adaraniya” Sharmila, starts living in town. Their final encounter, while Brisha is on his weeklong trek up to Kalikot for resettlement, is numbing because they are not destined to resume and consummate their affection.
The people who arrived in Katase for opportunities leave for greener pastures, or simply disappear in madness and drugged desperation. Saddam is found drowned and dead; the doctor’s cough syrup-addicted medico has left, so is the radioman from whom Brisha had planned to purchase a Walkman. One of the few who still remains knows how many gallons of mouwa moonshine were consumed last night in town and which bazaar sahu has contracted gonorrhea. The town barber knows of the daughter of a certain businessman disappearing into the bushes every night for her sexual trysts. Meanwhile, the nearby Gouri Khola claims its annual sacrifices: Its monsoon torrents deposit drowned people and dead pythons. The once-leafy town’s chaparral is now covered by plastic sheets and dotted with tetrapacks and broken bottles. The townspeople’s urination at the base of their trunks has killed two stout trees, and the town’s polluted water has started sickening downstream users.
Katase – itself a past wasteland and its bazaar allegedly “built upon dead bodies” of native Tharus buried underneath it – is dying anyway, and Doctor Harsha Bahadur once again moves his family, this time to Khanda Chakra near Manma in Kalikot where the specters of state-Maoist menace pervade the latter pages of “Karnali Blues.” This is where new kinds of disappearances take place. The doctor had become a loafer and an absentee and taken to bhajan singing in Katase; in Khanda Chakra, his avatar is that of a kirana shopkeeper and a Krishna Pranami convert.
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Thus, the tolls are heavy on the novel’s characters, young and old alike. Dismay and desperation smother men and women. Development displaces and creates diasporas all over again. When the center no longer holds in Kathmandu itself, West Nepal totters and disintegrates. This is no country for anyone.
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Saving the rest of the novel’s many other gems for avid readers, a few outstanding features of “Karnali Blues” must be mentioned in conclusion.
Buddhi Sagar employs declarative sentences in his novel, making him the Ha Jin of Nepali literature. This technique suits the characters who, except the brief Raja Saheb – such a feudal character is the principal player in Sheeba Shah’s “Facing My Phantoms” – are young and mostly lowbrow men and women.
The novelist avoids maudlin and emotional descriptions and opts for terse, direct and rough dialogues and colloquial style which speak volumes in the reader’s mind.
“Karnali Blues” is a rare Nepali novel that has almost totally displaced Sanskrit in its narratives. There are no speechifying politicians and pseudo-intellectuals in the book, nor development gurus and social workers and other dollar farmers waxing their lingo and lacing their reports with mind-blowing idiotic idioms. The settlements’ carpetbaggers don’t fuss with Sanskrit. Rather, the pages have local Tharu dialects of Bhagi Ram, west Nepal’s guttural expressions delivered by Brisha’s mother, and the Kumaon-Garhwal-Khasan-Sinjali vernacular of Nepali spoken by Jarilal in Kalikot. These variations are Nepal’s very own, and readers will enjoy deciphering their nuances.
Professionally copyedited and produced by FinePrint, this novel is the first Nepali work to use expletives, but not as often and rampantly, as claimed by the wimpy speakers at the novel’s inauguration. Calling a spade a spade is the new norm in Nepali fiction, and “Karnali Blues” has shown the way – at long last!
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West Nepal has invaded Kathmandu’s literary firmament now. Both Buddhi Sagar Chapain and Sheeba Shivangini Singh Shah are novelists from the west, particularly Kailali. Nepali fiction, both in Nepali and English, has entered a new and definitive metamorphosis because of these two fertile minds. Their latest works add to the list of iconic titles in the literary pantheon of Nepal. The rest must eat their hearts out while future Nepali fiction must be able to stand against these two authors.
pjkarthak@gmail.com
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