However, what made the ritual of going to New Road in the evening meaningful was a rush to buy the Statesman and the Dinmaan as soon as it arrived from the airport in a Russian Jeep loaded with newspapers and magazines from New Delhi. The day’s supplies in hand, some would then head towards the Bangalore Coffee House in Khichha Pokhari. A few climbed up the stairs of Nepal Coffee House down the street or Indira just across the road. Then there would be the regulars sneaking into back alleys of Ranjana Galli for their daily fix of buff momos accompanied with fiery local spirits.
It was more by default than design that Sandesh Griha had become a lifeline for the insulated intelligentsia of the Kathmandu Valley. Professors of Tribhuvan University bought English publications, but most Hindi magazines were the staple of Nepali littérateurs. By the mid-Eighties, venerable literary periodicals in Hindi such as Dharmayug and Hindustan had closed down. Navaneet and Kadambini had degenerated and begun to flounder. This was when Maskey Sir and Ganga Dai suggested their regular customers that the Hansa, a Hindi magazine where BP Koirala had published his first short story, had been revived.
Under Rajendra Yadav, a storywriter of repute but an ace essayist, Hansa would become the favorite of Hindi-reading leftwing intelligentsia in South Asia. Had Sandesh Griha been around, the passing away of Rajendra Yadav (August 28, 1929–October 28, 2013) would probably have been discussed on the footpaths of New Road and in momo joints of its back alleys. But the landmark news-store had downed its shutters for good a few months earlier. Few took notice, but a part of cultural furniture of intellectual life in Kathmandu had disappeared unsung along with the closure of Sandesh Griha.
KESHAB THOKER
Wasting land
The wasteland of Publius Tacitus is the land of prosperity and peace. Distaste for ideas and obsession with action help create an equally effective intellectual desert where giant ants feed on carcasses even as predators wait patiently to devour them in turn. The Kathmandu intelligentsia now surfs the Internet and takes more interest in Justin Beiber (“parties with 30 girls following brothel visit in Brazil,” says the Daily Mail headline) than even Jagdish Ghimire (April 10, 1946–October 31, 2013) who had somehow been better known for his emoluments at a multinational philanthropic corporation and frightfully expensive treatment of a fatal disease than the quality of his writing. Even fewer would recognize Albert Camus (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960), the expositor of Absurdism, who would have hit hundred this week had a car crash not claimed his life just when the writer had begun to recover from intellectual onslaughts from left and right for his beliefs that could perhaps be called the fundamentalism of freedom.
Rajendra Yadav wore his leftwing beliefs as a badge of honor throughout his life. Born much later, Jagdish Ghimire didn’t stay with Communist ideology for long. In fact, the pendulum of faith in his case swung rightwards with full force, and conservatism is pronounced in his latter writings. However, both shared a passion for what Camus calls a basic human instinct of rejecting normative justice. Yadav translated one of the simplest, and hence also one of his most complex works—The Stranger/L’Étranger —into Hindi as ‘Ajnabi.’
Ghimire had been one of the devoted acolytes of Prof. Dhireshwar Jha Dhirendra in Janakapur and it is quite likely that he soaked up the ideas of Camus from the literary milieu of Mithila where the French philosopher was more talked about than read in the Seventies.
Any attempt to simplify and define Absurdism would end up being absurd. The dictionary meaning, however, points out the direction towards which explorations of the idea should begin: “Absurdism is a philosophy based on the belief that the universe is irrational and meaningless and that the search for order brings the individual into conflict with the universe.”
But how does one resolve the inevitable conflict in order to live a meaningful life? Camus was probably in search of an answer in the book that he was said to have been working on before his death. Even if he had found one, in all probability, it would have formed yet another prescription causing some more to rebel against the idea. As an equally gifted writer of a different persuasion and fellow Nobel laureate would state firmly many moons after Camus in an eponymous book: The world is what it is.
Attempts to change the universe intensify conflicts that every individual endeavors to cope in her own way. A few struggle to understand and live in agony. Some rebel and fight to change the world. Most accept the reality, surrender themselves to the forces over which they have little control, and live in contentment in whatever circumstances they find themselves. Festivals are the mechanisms of coping with the complexities of life for the lot that is resigned to its lot.
Fertile fields
While it is true that discontent has propelled humanity with greater force in search of certainties, it is possible to argue that the ability to surrender and accept ambiguities after a certain point has been equally responsible for saving mankind from extinction. When the wasteland is left to rot and recover, it turns into a fertile field. In microbiology, culture is the propagation of microorganism in a growth medium. Sociologist Max Weber puts culture into “a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance.”
The transcendental meaning of Dashain, Tihar or any other festival, lies in their very being. Their temporal significance is an invention that changes with the passage of time. As a devotee prays to the saddening yellow of the setting sun in the evening of Chhath, the water of the river flows downwards, steams rise up from the surface of a pond, and birds head home regardless. In the morning, the bright red sun rises again—in a Hindu mythology, Hanuman once mistook it for a ripe fruit and ate it, putting the world in complete darkness, and had to be persuaded to free the Supreme Energy to let life survive in the universe—to accept the prayers of the faithful. It is not always visible, but every celebration comes with enthusiasm and exhaustion, brings happiness tinged with sadness, and then leaves everyone perplexed: Did it really mean anything more than a mere marker of the passage of time?
Once winter begins, trees will stand naked and dry fields will catch the tears of sky every morning. For warmth, devotees will continue to wait for the tepid sun to come out of the haze and fog. Humanity will continue to crave for freedom even as meanings are conferred upon the conditions of the living to cope with the externalities beyond the control of ordinary beings. Some would still rebel, and the world will either celebrate or denounce the revolutionary.
Life will go on.
Lal contributes to The Week with his biweekly column Reflection. He is one of the widely read poliitical
analysts in Nepal.
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