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.
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.
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.
A name doesn’t mean anything. Nevertheless, many people grab hold of their name and use it as a fertiliser to grow things like identity. What is interesting, though, is the soil the fertiliser is applied to, the soul – what makes you a human being.
Aahva had run away from home at 17, packing nothing but some clothes, some food from the kitchen, her dead mother’s diary and three thousand Indian rupees that she had found while rummaging through her father’s drawers.
‘Line of Thought: Dialogues on Pedagogy and Personal Practices’, running at the Nepal Art Council in Babarmahal until Saturday, 18th January, 2020, intends to start conversations, some beyond pedagogy and practice.
After a fall of reading and re-reading your submissions to the fourth edition of La.Lit’s Writing Nepal: A Short Story Contest, Judge Samrat Upadhayay has revealed his picks!
So what do we love, in the end? An amalgam of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and phosphorus? Or a projection, a shadow, a signal that blinks off when its physical progenitor ceases to draw breath?
