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Arresting God in Kathmandu 3>Samrat Upadhyay

Upadhyay, Samrat;

Arresting God in Kathmandu

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001, 191 pages  [gbook]

ISBN 0618043713, 9780618043712

topics: |  fiction | south-asia | nepal


reading these stories during a trip to nepal i was struck by the
ordinariness of these lives.

the opening story is a subtly told story of a secret love between an
out-of-job accountant and a peasant girl whom he meets sitting at a bench
in the park.  the woman helps him forget the mounting social stigma of his
joblessness, and he eventually reconciles with opening a shop.

Deepak Misra's secretary contrasts the exotic foreign wife of Deepak, and
his ugly but efficient secretary.

while the locales move across the homes and temples and offices of nepal,
what makes these stories work is that the experiences are universal; the
everyday ordinariness of the lives. 

Contents

1. The good shopkeeper
2. The cooking poet
3. Deepak Misra's secretary
4. The limping bride
5. During the festival
6. The room next  door
7. The man with long hair
8. This world
9. A great man's house

review by S. Sankar

http://www.villagevoice.com/2001-08-21/books/getting-bourgie-in-kathmandu/

was the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award as well as a pick for the 2001
Barnes & Noble Discover Great Writers Program.  has been translated into
French and Greek.

Upadhyay's collection opens with "The Good Shopkeeper," to my mind the best
story included here. Pramod, an accountant in Kathmandu, loses his
well-paying job in a finance company. Reluctantly, he goes to Shambu-da, a
distant relative of his wife, for help in finding a similar job. Shambu-da
makes promises, but as the weeks pass no help is forthcoming. Pramod's wife
entreats Pramod to open a shop, but he finds the suggestion demeaning. He
grows listless and disinterested until he falls into an affair with a servant
woman who has left her husband in her village. Through the affair Pramod
learns to put his sundered life back together, not by escaping his material
constraints but by giving them a new shape. He decides in fact to become a
shopkeeper after all.

Upadhyay draws an evocative map of a city ringed by mountains and centered
on the famous Pashupatinath temple. The marketplace of Asan, the tourist
sector of Thamel, the Royal Palace, the park at Gokarna — as Upadhyay's
characters move through and around them an intriguing physical description
of the city accumulates in increments.


NYT review: Richard Bernstein


The Katmandu of Samrat Upadhyay is very different from the locale of
foreigners' imaginations, an exotically primitive place steeped in custom,
dust and religiosity... [In this collection] of stories, the city is an
awkwardly modern place where temples, painted with the eyes of the gods,
are on the periphery of ordinary life, peering into consciences but
imposing no obedience.

Katmandu seems almost local in Mr. Upadhyay's stories, full of middle-class
people worried about what their neighbors will think, dreaming about sex,
getting tired of their wives or husbands, struggling against illicit
desire. This book reminds us that there is truly no place to hide from the
temptations of cosmopolitanism, from globalized culture or from the universal
human condition, not even in faraway Nepal.

[In] the last story, A Great Man's House, [...]  a wealthy hotel owner
and admired Hindu guru named Kailash -- who preaches about the renunciation
of desire to a circle of friends -- takes on a much younger wife, Nani,
whereupon his faith, his health and his authority crumble.

Told in the voice of Kailash's cook, who nurtures his own secret desires for
Nani, this story could be read as metaphor: Kailash as God, whose commands
regarding renunciation and a higher level of spiritual awareness are rudely
challenged by his young wife.

''It's very easy for you to sit up there on that cushion and preach on the
illusions that our desires create,'' Nani tells him during one of his
sessions with his followers. ''But the truth is this, that most ordinary
people like me want to learn how to live and fulfill our desires, not treat
them as if they were stepchildren.''

At the heart of this story, subtle and spiritually complex like
Mr. Upadhyay's others, is the ambivalence the reader feels toward Nani.  We
tend to want to share the conviction of Kailash's friends that she is
brazen and coarse, a bearer of trouble, like all uncontrolled women.

In Mr. Upadhyay's stories interior events occur like tumblers falling in a
lock, so quietly and inconspicuously that we almost don't notice them.

In The Cooking Poet, a young political rebel with a great poetic talent
becomes a student of Katmandu's poet laureate, Acharya, putting Acharya into
confrontation with the loss of his own powers. In ''Deepak Misra's
Secretary'' a homely, devoted woman draws her boss, a successful financier,
away from his obsession with his estranged American wife, only to be rejected
by him in turn because he is embarrassed by her bony hips and a birthmark on
her cheek.

In The Limping Bride a widowed father, Hiralal, strives to reform his
son's rebellious heavy drinking by finding him a wife, concealing from him
that the candidate he finds is imperfect, that she walks with a limp, a
humiliating loss of face for the son.  [The wife turns out to be] possessed
of a sly worldliness that puts her in command of father and husband, each of
whom, in his own way, is seeking a kind of reincarnation of Hiralal's dead
wife.

[Traditional piety is seen in] the ceremonies of arranged marriages and the
perfunctory visits some of
Mr. Upadhyay's characters pay to the city's temples.

Mostly, in Mr. Upadhyay's version of it, the city is filled with ordinary
people who, in the words of Rani, are seeking ways to fulfill their desires,
even furtive ones.
[Bernstein seems surprised by this, and repeatedly refers to how Upadhyay's
Kathmandu differs from the tourist image.]

Subtle, tinged with the melancholy of modest, materially constricted lives,
Mr. Upadhyay's stories bring us into contact with a world that is somehow
both very far away and very familiar.


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This review by Amit Mukerjee was last updated on : 2015 Aug 26