On a blustery June afternoon in 1977, Hari Sharan “Kazi” Nepali stood on the Nepali side of the Tibetan plateau with three dead birds in his satchel. The only food he had was tsampa. “Every time I tried to put a fistful into my mouth, the wind blew it all away,” he recalled.

Flowing through the atmosphere
the breaths that my ancestors have taken
are perhaps drifting somewhere
though the interstices of this flower

La.Lit magazine is continuing its partnership with writer Samrat Upadhyay and Indiana University, Bloomington, USA to organize the fifth edition of Writing Nepal: A Short Story Contest. The deadline for submissions to this year’s contest is October 15, 2021.

As the hydra of the pandemic reared its head and cast its loathsome gaze across the world, a national lockdown was put into effect in Nepal, precisely a day before my mother’s 82nd birthday.

My endogamous family chart    

is composed of trees and                  

occasionally, almost rarely, shrubs.

To dig for quahogs, to feel their edges like smiles

 in sea mud and pull them up into a bucket.

My country cries over 

burnt flags,

borders,

the birth lore of gods,

not the bodies of desecrated dead girls;

My country says I am a Goddess. 

What are you hoping to get out of your appointment?

‘To provide service, help the community.’

How is that going so far?

‘We are doing our best.’ (Scrolling through his phone.)

This past year was an exercise in equanimity. Forced indoors under lockdown, quarantine or ‘shelter-in-place’ orders as governments scrambled to contain Covid-19, many of us eventually found ourselves on edge, listless and irascible. By the end of the year, we were spent. In such trying times, we turned to indulgences and sought comfort in that most maligned of disciplines – the arts.