Comrade Aakrosh’s reputation preceded him in the party. He was as known for his ruthlessness as he was for his loyalty to the party and therefore, the cause. His loyalty and uprightness were as fearsome as his ruthlessness.

The government is rolling out vaccines and he knows that he isn’t supposed to get one. At least, not yet. The vaccines are for the older folks, the doctors and nurses at the hospitals, the bankers, and the sarkari babus. Everyone but him.

Once she overheard two aunties talk about the growing numbers of vehicles on the roads of Kathmandu. ‛The street looks like a colony of ants. The cars are the big ants and the motorbikes are smaller ants and they run a never-ending marathon,’ one of them had said.

From the outside, the five-story house looked rickety but whole. On the inside, every storey under the corrugated tin roof was divided into two neat parts. One part belonged to Fakir Das Shrestha – an angry old widower – and his only son, Panna.

The feeling started at her knees and radiated upward, traveling through the capillaries and veins that usually carried blood. Today, there was something else mixed in it whose exact chemical composition Sheela could not tell.

When Kathmandu was a lake, there lived a creature here so grotesque even its own mother could not bear to look at it. Its name was Chhepu. Look above the entrance of any temple in Kathmandu and you will see it posing mid-meal.

The Writing Nepal contests have been a treat for the readers in Nepal. Since its first edition, it has attracted emerging writers to submit stories to the competition, and some such writers are emerging writers no more, but established on the firmament of Nepali writing in English.

We are happy to reveal our shortlist for the 2021 edition of Writing Nepal: A Short Story Contest.

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.