Gorkhas Imagined: Indra Bahadur Rai in translation

translated by Anmole Prasad, Dorjee Tshering Lepcha & Michael Hutt
Mukti Prakashan, 2010

Indra Bahadur Rai, the Darjeeling-based Nepali-language writer, has long written about Nepali speakers in and around the Himalayan region. His writings are a seminal part of contemporary Nepali literature, playing an instrumental role in shaping our understanding of the Nepali consciousness. Writing in Nepali, however, has meant that his writing – as that of his contemporaries – has only been accessible to Nepali readers. Gorkhas Imagined, consisting of translations of eight short stories and two essays by Rai, goes a long way towards addressing the dearth of Nepali literature in translations.

Born in Darjeeling before Indian independence, Rai is well versed in the teachings of Western philosophers such as Derrida, Lacan and Baudrillard. Indeed it was perhaps this interest in language and linguistics that drove him to establish the All India Nepali Language Recognition Committee, through which he successfully fought for the recognition of the Nepali language as a national language in India. Also stemming from these philosophical leanings is the Tesro Aayam (Third Dimension) movement, one of the most prominent developments in modern Nepali literature. This was launched in the early 1960s by Rai, Ishwar Ballav and Bairagi Kaila, in an attempt to capture the three-dimensional nature of subjects. Rai’s last publication, Lekhanru Ra Jhya, continues to incorporate elements of this movement. A sample may be found in one of the short stories translated here, ‘Maina’s Mother Is Just like Us’.

 The Third Dimension movement stemmed from disillusionment with the ‘realist’ writing styles that had until then been a fixture of Nepali literature. In ‘Maina’s Mother’, Rai explores the internal conflict of the diaspora that combines tremendous hope with the sorrow of displacement. The story is interspersed with thoughts about migration, including attempted justifications, doubts, and the persistent question, “Why then did you come here?” Utilizing narrative fragmentation, which is a feature of third dimensional writing, Rai attempts to delve into Maina’s inner being:

“A rock swished down from overhead (man goes to the moon). Maina’s mother dodged it; it just missed her. Then came a stave (live as men). It caught her in the chest; she doubled up and fell. All her sorrows stand before her; they come continually to her home. Joys for her are unknown and haughty. She wanted to sink underground in case great ews came rolling down and crushed her. Her load of weighty hopes buried her deep, but she struggled to rise up and become a mountain.”

The impact of the narrative breaks within the broader storyline is questionable. They seem imposed from the top rather than revelatory of a depth, but they do succeed in delineating the dimensional prerogative of cubistic presentation. Rai referred to this approach as leela lekhan, a phrase that stems from the Hindu understanding of leela as ‘all of reality’. Leela Lekhan is based on the view that subjectivity dominates the human landscape, from rationality to morality. Rai sees the subjective as something similar to a Kafka-type trap of semi-personal structures, which can only be effectively negated through the deconstruction of the subjective. He takes a leap of faith in seeing this deconstruction as a means to a higher plane of dispassionate existence, taking its cue from ideas of satori and sunayata.

The success of the Third Dimension movement and Leela Lekhan is debatable: few Nepali authors since then have embraced this form of fragmented writing. In retrospect the style appears, at best, a novel experiment. In compromising with the narrative and juxtaposing past and present, the stories lack a sense of flow, relying too heavily on a sympathetic deconstructionist analysis. However, the translations do a marvellous job of capturing the complex nature of the writing style. Even in translation, Rai’s gift for storytelling and his command over language comes through. The end result is a jittery read that is nonetheless frequently compelling and thought provoking.

Beyond hills and streams

Gorkhas Imagined presents the full range of Rai’s works, and in doing so demonstrates why he is such an influential figure in contemporary Nepali literature. His short stories capture the daily nuances of the lives of midhill Nepalis from the second half of the 20^th century onwards, as they grapple with the universal human problems of existence, meaning and truth within their particular social contexts. The three stories ‘Ghosh Babu,’ ‘The Ordinariness of a Day,’ and ‘The Storm Raged All Night Long’ excel at this. The plots are trivial, the characters predictable but they capture the ordinariness of life in the Himalayan midhills, and glimpses of a greater truth can occasionally be gleaned. The narrator in ‘The Ordinariness of a Day’, for instance, poignantly summarises many a life in the hills when he says, “He stays alive now only because of life’s compulsions.”

Rai’s Nepal extends well beyond the frontiers of Nepal (he never lived within them) to capture something of a pan-Nepali identity, in which dislocation and a constant tussle with nature are evident. The experiences of Nepali migrants and their descendants, as they try to establish themselves in foreign settings, provide a context for the history of the Nepali peoples over the last two hundred years. More than anything else, the semi-nomadic and transitory nature of Nepali midhill life shines through in these stories. Whether the narratives follow Nepalis moving to follow a family member’s military posting (‘Jaar’), a traveller’s experience at a rest spot (‘Kheer’), or the Nepali exodus from Burma (‘Jaimaya Alone Arrived at Likhapani’) – Rai’s people are always moving, looking for a home, and trying to survive.

Today’s ‘Nepal’ stretches beyond the Darjeeling hills to the hot deserts of the Middle East and the urbanscapes of New York, London and Tokyo. But Rai goes a step further: his Nepaliness does not relate to a country, but is rather an identity that distinguishes him as part of a scattered Indian minority. In one particularly well-crafted essay, ‘Indian Nepali Nationalism and Nepali Poetry’, the author displays a remarkable understanding of identity and language in the role of nation building. In this, he shows an inherent Indian patriotism combined with a keen sense of his Nepali heritage. This level of understanding carries forward into the next essay, ‘Hills and Streams’, in which he attempts to express his feelings towards his heritage through a more poetic narrative that relies upon Leela Lekhan. Tackling the homecoming of one Nepali migrant who chooses to stay in a hotel rather than his own home, Rai writes:

“He lives in a hotel, he does not have his own home. Now he finds it insipid and hollow compared with the house of his own race, which stands wide and tall before him.

‘It won’t fall down, this house!’ he says.”

Ultimately, though, Rai’s Nepal is a specific one – that of Nepali speakers with identities forged in the hills of Darjeeling, distinct from that of the plains. The stories in this collection are specific to certain ethnic and social groups, and rarely touch upon the more excluded groups, who comprise the silent voices of a vast majority of forgotten people in the central Himalayan midhills and the adjacent plains. This is not a criticism of his writing, however, but rather an acknowledgement of the inherent problems in writing about Nepali speakers, whether within Nepal or in the diaspora. As a Nepali writer from Darjeeling, Rai remains true to his ‘expatriate’ Nepali identity but concurrently holds no obligation to be true to Nepal’s own Nepali identity.

The book’s introduction, it should be noted, goes into depth about the work of translation and Rai’s own philosophical inclinations, but does a poor job of introducing Rai to a global audience within the context of Nepali literature. Fortunately, this is a lacuna more than made up for by the quality of the stories themselves.

On the first Sunday afternoon of February he announced to his friends that he would not be seeing any of them over the week beginning the next Sunday. ‘Also, please try to limit your phone calls,’ he said. Nobody really cared much for his announcement.

On the Wednesday of the same week he shopped for dry food and plenty of canned drinks and a few periodicals and street-literature, as he euphemistically called his supply of pornographic materials. On Thursday he left a posting at a website he frequented and was well known at under a ridiculous alias. ‘I will be gone for a week,’ the posting read.
Nobody replied to that thread.

He smiled at all the friends, acquaintances and strangers he encountered through Friday. He taped a message by the doorbell that said — ‘out of order’.

In the evening he took an ordinary thin book into his apartment and closed the door behind him with a ceremonious caution. Nobody saw him do that.

He also wrote to a girl very far away — someone he had known once and refused to let go of. He told her — ‘what a writer really wants for himself is a habit and a style. I can’t just sit around and wait for it to come to me.’

As he cleared his writing desk of the oddities that cluttered the desktop, he wondered if she even checked her email anymore. He wondered if she instinctively delayed a reply to him, so as to discourage further correspondence. The thought saddened his heart and he sat on the floor, into a corner, and stared into the corner diagonally opposite to him.

That was the farthest he could look in the room. He knew that from geometry. So he looked at the corner that was the farthest from the corner he cowered into, because the sadness that burdened his heart made him look far off into the distance.

‘A habit and a style,’ he wrote on a piece of paper and taped it to the desk. That was what he sought. He was a serious man now, for a habit and a style.

But soon the weight of such a lofty proclamation wearied him. His spirit was like green bamboo, he thought — it swayed, gave considerably without breaking, and without fail kept righting itself up.

So he disappeared into his apartment on Friday evening. He was not seen in any of the regular places one would normally expect to find him at. Very few people actually interacted with him, and he was very easily wiped out of the short-term memory of the world. No one inquired about him Friday evening through Sunday, so he didn’t even exist in that interim.

Someone from somewhere knocked on his door and broke the silence on Monday morning. The two days of quiet had made him very uneasy already. There was anxiety simmering in his chest. He had even been having the recurring dream those past nights.

He had once wanted to put the dream in words, but was afraid to write it down on paper because the permanence of the images that the written words implied was unnerving. He would be more comfortable talking about it to somebody. A friend, preferably. It would be a sad day if he had to pay someone to listen to him.

He would have talked despite his resolution to himself to the contrary. Not a drawn-out conversation, but just a few words — perhaps just the bare essential words involved in a social ritual of greeting. Just to let a few words bounce off the walls and the furniture and scare the grumpy ghost of a silence that was brooding in the apartment. But that someone from somewhere realized the error, and walked off before he could reach the door. There was nothing familiar about the footfalls, and he never heard a voice. He couldn’t tell who it had been.

The rest of Monday was quiet. The television hummed like a naturally present drone.

He did not count listening to the television as breaking the silence, just as he did not count the act of listening to the cicadas as one. But he dropped this notion around mid-afternoon on Monday, and started to consciously ignore the sound from the television. He still hadn’t written a single coherent paragraph, although he had filled more than half of the first notepad on his desk with abandoned sentences and phrases, names and addresses of fictitious people, the eating habits of horses and ants and a ridiculous, badly strung together ballad to be sung by a frog in a children’s story. There was also a page reserved exclusively for figures. Numerous human heads in hurried strokes.

Around two am on Tuesday morning he sought out a small bud of ganja that he had ‘thrown away’ a couple of weeks before, and smoked it. Only then did he find the patience to sit at his desk or in a corner for hours. But that didn’t help his writing much either.

He was sitting at his desk late into Tuesday morning when she knocked on the door.

He had heard her footfalls and known of her arrival. First, he was afraid that he had materialized this visit by thinking too often of her.

Then he was angry at himself that he couldn’t admit that she might have enough affection for him to be concerned. But he made her wait by the door and knock a couple of times more, all the same.

She knocked softly first. He deduced that she imagined he was sleeping and took caution to not startle him awake. Then she knocked louder — not violently, but just loud enough to qualify as loud. He deduced that it had now dawned upon her that he was actually awake and ignoring the knocks. He expected her to knock louder — even violently, perhaps. She did knock louder eventually, but not violently. He was disappointed. He did not respond.

She called his name. He closed his eyes and listened to his name being spoken by her lips. He strained to remember her voice — the pitch, the lull in it, the pain, the way it rose and fell with the syllables. He then tried to imagine in his mind her next call to him, anticipating his name on her lips — a little different every time. A novel pleasure it was to him — his name on her lips.

But he still did not respond.

Then she beat on the door with the flat of her palm. The knuckles knock a civil rap, but the palm slaps much too urgently. It has too many connotations. He had to respond. He went by the door and said in a raspy voice, ‘Hey!’

It was as if the room had spoken unexpectedly. He wondered if it sounded to her too as if the room had spoken. He deduced that it wouldn’t sound to her as if the room had spoken. But he remembered nothing of the train of arguments and evidences that had led him to this deduction.

He asked her if she was well. She said, ‘Yes. And you?’ It was a terse reply, but it was not entirely impersonal or unfeeling. Perhaps his three days of silence also weighed on her mind — somewhere in the subconscious, if there is anything of that sort.

She asked him if there was any reason why he was doing this. He thought about telling her of the habit and a style jargon, but immediately decided against it. The only reason he had told the girl who was very far off was that she was very far off and probably wouldn’t even check her email to pose awkward questions before him.

He asked her to repeat what she had been saying as he hadn’t been paying any attention. He meant that in earnest — a train of thought had kidnapped him to a distant expanse, and suddenly returning to the door, he had forgotten what the conversation had been about.

There was a silence that could be aptly called an uneasy one. He was very sure, later as he reflected upon the day, that it had been an uneasy silence; and he noted it in his yellow notepad. Outside the door, she turned sharply around and walked away in long deliberate strides. This he could tell from her footfalls. Then he imagined her hair and the curve of her neck and her buttocks and her legs as they fell hard on the floor with each stride, and a picture was complete in his mind.

He thought about that picture for a good half hour, he was filled alternately with amusement and an aching that he placed a couple of inches to the right of his heart. When he thought of how a dull sadness ached in him, he sighed and touched that spot. The physical act of touching a spot and the sound of his sigh gave his ache a tangible quality, and that was very convenient.

He still hadn’t written much, but that had become a secondary concern now.

He paced about the room for the rest of Tuesday. He even coughed loudly enough to be heard outside his door. He even considered humming a strain but couldn’t decide upon one. Some were too frivolous and that would have been lying to himself, others were too sombre and that would have been lying to whoever happened to listen to it. In any case, he was a bad singer.

On Tuesday evening he also tired of the food he had with him. He craved for something hot and full of flavour. He sat and tried to recount all the fine meals he had eaten since the earliest that he could recall. But that didn’t work too well. So he decided to think of all the meals he recalled for whatever reasons. He tired of that after a couple of hours.

That night he tossed on his bed. He suspected that he might have even spoken in his dream. But there was no one who could verify his suspicion. If ever he did speak in his dream, there was no way he could hear of it from anyone. His thoughts depressed him for an hour, before he found the two amusing designs on the rug by the writing desk.

He woke up late on Wednesday afternoon. He had had a rather sleepless night when he hadn’t been sleeping a troubled sleep. He had had to get out of his bed numerous times in the night to drink water. Twice, he also masturbated when he went to the bathroom to urinate. Perhaps that was the reason why he slept till late. He also woke up a very tired man with bloodshot eyes and very bad breath that disgusted him.

He stayed in bed and wished Wednesday was over already. Of course, he had to wait till midnight to actually and totally get rid of Wednesday. But his efforts amounted to nothing in reality — since he walked wide awake into Thursday and since he closed his eyes only when the windowpanes assumed a life of their own, he had failed to escape that which plagued him.

He was not fond of sleeping through a day — especially if it was very bright outside, and the room couldn’t be made dark no matter how hard he tried. But he wasn’t used to staying awake through a night, and it took its toll on him. Through the day, he kept waking up to the sounds of life outside his apartment and he kept slipping back into sleep.

She came back on Thursday afternoon. She stood outside his door. He crept to the door quietly and listened to her with his entire body, straining to picture her outside his door.

She stood there motionless for quite a long time. He crept away from the door and cleared his throat when he was at a sufficient distance. She promptly knocked, softly, in measured raps. He dragged his feet to the door, so that his footfalls made the distinctive sound of his walk. Or so he thought. She knocked again, which told him that she’d heard his footfalls.

And that was all the response he was looking for.

But he shouldn’t have spoken those words to his mind, for the moment the words dawned upon his mind, he shrank away from the door, which he would have instinctively opened otherwise. If her response was all that mattered he shouldn’t do anything more.

Anything that she would do would be life unfolding its mysterious petals before him. And that was a question in a different realm altogether. So he did not answer, even when demons tugged at his heart from various sides and vied for his favour. He soon cheated on himself and shuffled around, which prompted her to knock on the door. He felt guilty about having cheated on himself, but it took him only a while before he rationalized that to himself (he was very good at that), and sat by the desk.

She went away. He imagined that he heard her sigh. He wasn’t sure, though. He thought it could have easily been himself, because he remembered that he felt something ache in that very convenient spot on the chest as her footfalls faded away, and he might have very easily sighed as he unconsciously touched that very convenient spot on the chest.

Late on Thursday afternoon, someone brought him his mail. It was from the bank, and therefore of no significance. He knew his account by heart, and he knew of his spending by heart too, for there wasn’t much of either. He pondered about whether he should read the mail, as the person who brought it had made no attempt to establish communication. He decided against it eventually. But he couldn’t simply leave the envelope at the door either.

Picking it up and putting it away would be in violation of his silence, he had concluded. That was out of question, then. He decided to firmly tape it to the floor, as it sat under the door.
He realized that he had been neglecting his hygiene. He also realized that he was unkempt and could use a shave. But that, he decided, was not strictly necessary.

He waited for Friday. More people are remembered on Fridays. The phone rang five times on Friday. It actually rang more than five times, but he had deduced something from the times of the day the phone rang, and proclaimed that he had received calls from five individuals.

The phone rang late in the night — so late that he was sure the caller was intoxicated, as he knew all of his friends and acquaintances were generally very intoxicated at that time in the week. He wondered if it could have been her. He would have liked it to have been her. But he could offer himself no concrete evidence regarding the identity of the late caller. He would have really liked it to be her, though. The phone rang once, around three in the afternoon, and someone tugged at the envelope but gave up immediately. That was Saturday.

On Sunday morning he opened the letter and tossed it aside. He brushed his teeth with extra vigour, as if to cleanse his mouth of the silence that he had been indulging in for a week, as if to wake the spirits in his tongue into making beautiful words. He shaved and admired himself in the mirror.

He stepped out cautiously and closed the door behind him. Nobody saw him do that.

Three individuals stopped to talk to him in the morning. He had forgotten the names of two of them, and at least one, he suspected, had mistaken him for somebody else, but politely played along the civil game when it was too late to admit to the error.

He was watching a few children from the neighbourhood play with a broken bicycle wheel when she sneaked up to him and stood with her shoulders touching his. He wanted to take her hand, but she had her hands buried in her pockets. He smiled at her, but did not say anything. He did not want to break the silence between them with mundane, dry words, and he had nothing worthwhile to say.

She pinched his arm, and she pinched it really hard. He looked at her face and saw that she was more pained than he was. He even suspected that her eyes had grown moist. But when he tried to search her eyes, she turned her head away. He thought she sighed, but he had been too busy trying to search her eyes for him to be absolutely certain.

He was still searching for words, watching the games the children played, and trying to find something innocent and pleasant about them to say to her when he realized that she had sneaked off just as she had come.

The new silence that he did not ask for sat heavy on his heart, and he touched that conveniently placed spot on his chest.