Out of Kathmandu

by Subarna Prasad Acharya

Here are the characters that you may not have ever met a poverty-stricken village drunkard who is being walked home as muddy as a wallowing water buffalo; a fisto who loses and regains its life more than once during its sleep; a helpless husband who begs by the street to pay for his wife’s operation at a hospital; a home-sick outsider of the city who remembers his remote home-village in the distant mountains; an insane man who disappears into the mist of the busy capital; a legendary ghost who chases villagers out of their wits after dark; an innocent and uneducated village girl who tells the enumerator that she was born in a hay-stack behind her house while she tries to register her name for a voter’s ID… Characters as weird as a three-horned buffalo and Black Nightshade come vividly alive in this collection to portray the true-to-life tales of love, of loss, of human suffering, of humour, of human-ness, and, after all, of fate and fatelessness of the poor and helpless people living in the remote mountains of Nepal. These are the stories that may not have ever appeared in the west. Be it the crow which turned into a raven because of a curse or a blob of black that transformed into a black mole on a nurse’s chin, the ladle-wielding wife of a menially-paid office worker or the tormenting chain of thoughts afflicting the heart of a young man after his fiancée becomes abducted all of a sudden during the heart of the insurgency, the stories truly mirror the realities they try to paint and the boundaries between fact and fiction unperceptively merge in a collage.

172 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Born and raised in a nation where political influences and other connections count at each step, I do not really feel I belong there...

I struggle on the edge of the universe as I love reading, writing, travelling, photography, making friends, and talking my heart out... as the situation permits. I listen to deep, meditating, binaural beats and other peaceful, quiet music for sleep that is so hard to come by.

I occasionally work with graphics, for my own ever-hungry satisfaction, and do odd things that people rarely think about doing...

So far I have written short stories, full-length novels, and poetry...

My progress can be traced in my blogs that have been reclaimed and updated, at http://fallencorner.blogspot.com and http://lonewanderings.blogspot.com

Reviews

[Narayan Sharma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Out of Kathmandu is a collection of 11 short stories that revolve around the incidences of change and bitterness that has affected and greatly afflicted the lives of the Nepali people. From the intricate webs of real events that shaped the outlines for the title story, to numerous characters that one can encounter in the outskirts and villages of the capital centre, the stories more than reflect the society that has encountered stagnation despite struggling to keep pace with the rest of the world. The selection of stories from as far back as a decade to bringing various characters from different scenes from in and out of the borders of Nepal and interconnecting them in the intricate social fabric of life each story so vividly portrays is truly remarkable in every detail. Most of the stories even unbelievably capture the historical events and mark the changes that very few now remember to be true.

Unlike most contemporaries writing in English, Mr Acharya, although poorly represented in the mainstream, deserves a far greater applause for bringing out a book so remarkable that not even a single piece of story seems out of place or unrealistic in any way. A great work from a remarkably gifted and talented author struggling to get a foothold in a wider circle. A greatly deserving and easily recommended piece of work to anyone interested in capturing unique glimpses deep into the lives of a poorly represented lot of people.

[Alison]

kindle (stories)