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Manjushree Thapa’s globetrotting vim and vigor is well-known in Kathmandu among her friends, fans and acquaintances about her recurrent trips all over from US and Europe and more frequently to India and many Himalayan trekking and research destinations. She appears and disappears, like a migratory bird. Nevertheless, those non-whimsical hibernations certainly do have consequential reasons: she returns home to hatch books. Her debut Tutor of History (2001) received a lukewarm response in Nepal, however, critically acclaimed elsewhere. Thapa’s potential as a promising novelist is apparent, and the facility and charms of her language (English) without losing a Nepali accent, is the hallmark of distinction. Sure – she is no shrinking violet. Writing is part social inquiry, part confessional, or can also be, at times, part crusade against (any forms of) tyranny. It is a noble means to reach out to the larger masses beyond all sorts of frontiers; it is a meeting with people without being met. Had her primary education in Nepal but mostly in the West, essentially in Canada and the US, Thapa, daughter of a career diplomat, unflinchingly believes that freedom of expression is not only a Western value, but ours, we Asians’ too. She portrays the poetry of a tangled social fabric of Nepali society through her works, with audacity and deftness. Forget Kathmandu: An Elegy for Democracy (2006), her controversial non-fiction hit the bookstores at a time, when the nation was swirling under the sinister charm of King Gynendra’s iron-fisted rule. This book is a rich literary mosaic of: political history, journalistic reportage and travelogue. Thapa had to flee the country for safety, as the jaw-barring monster’s (read the royal regime) whims were dangerously unpredictable. Very recently, we got in hand, a freshly rounded new title Tilled Earth, a jingling atypical collection of twenty-one long and micro-stories. In a space of less than a quarter of a page, a statistician in “The Hungry Statistician” reports of the most ubiquitously cultivated crops of the nation viz paddy, maize, wheat, barley and millet – only to eat and report the very same over and again in perpetuity. This piece nourishes a dashing satire on Nepal’s soul-shattering monotony and eternal reiterations – of history, monarchy, politics, political buffoons and so-called developments. It is a shinning metaphor of our time. In one story, Ramesh, a student leader harbors a jumble of career dreams other than political, when the ruling government is not in his favor. But he at once changes his mind when he heard the news that the government was toppled, only to join the politics again. This is a common phenomenon among the Nepali youths, as unemployment is eminent in Nepal; politics is the smart choice since it is the most lucrative career to leap from rags to riches in no time. An introspective retired bureaucrat
visits the Buddha’s birthplace, Lumbini, only to rediscover
the uglier side of his own self. Thapa fictionalizes the
facts of Lumbini telling us the greater truth of it, in
one of the stories. In the midst of hiking and exhaustion, Sarah suddenly recalls of her birthday, when the aiselu berries burst sweetly in her mouth; or even when she picks up a fallen leaf with its midrib gone mustard yellow. As she twirls the leaf in her hands, it assails her with a notion that at thirty, this is where she is. In future she may be able to communicate well in Nepali language with others, but her private wishes to share moments of intimate silences with Keshab – is unforgettable. The title story “Tilled Earth”
digs into the struggle of a Nepali woman, who is a student
and trying to make herself a room in the United States.
The 26-year old narrator is in love with a man, a lot older
than her age and from the wrong caste. Her family objected
this and she was confined at home to refrain from meeting
him. But they confined her so long she began to fall in
love with a larger dream of freedom. As her visa validity runs out, she plunges into a zero sum game: either quit US or dump her lover and be an illegal alien. She does the latter, but not without loosing something dearly – The warm vapors of tilled earth, her lover’s breath. A very moving and evocative item and ingrainedly funny. Albeit her themes, now and then, run in the vein of diasporic writers such as Jumpa Lahiri, Kiran Desai or Khaled Hosseini, Thapa is profusely attuned to the rhythm and idiom of her native soils. She picks up trivial things and paltry events to make us mull over inspiring a monologue, “these dramas are commonplace… but never thought of them seriously before.” “Tilled Earth” is absolutely a good harvest of a tilled mind. Thapa has attained a new apogee in contemporary Nepali literature. The Kathmandu Post ( June18th-2007)
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