The Vanishing Act, by Prawin Adhikari (226 pages, Rupa Publications 2014)
The early stories in Prawin Adhikari’s debut collection examine the mixture of guilt and innocence with which a young boy growing up in the village of Abu Khaireni receives his first lessons in nature, dealing with other boys or spying on the afternoon lovemaking of newlyweds. The boy lives in Panchayat Bhawan. His grandfather surrounds himself with astrological charts. On the first page we hear that he feels alienated from his family traditions, because he studies in an English medium school and doesn’t learn Sanskrit.
It is natural to wonder how much in these stories is autobiographical, since Adhikari comes from a similar background, and like some of his characters he studied at a Kathmandu boarding school and at a college in America. He belongs to a generation that was born in one world and migrated to another, so it no longer belongs where it began. Among his subjects is the astonishing pace of social change, one of modern Nepal’s chief characteristics, and which must in some form be a subject for any writer as serious-minded as Adhikari. His stories describe some of the various fates that might befall a young man of such a background, and often their feelings of humiliation, powerlessness and bewilderment.
In “The Messiah”, a village boy has become a student in Kathmandu and a participant in the 1990 People’s Movement. The story records his ideological confusion and commitment to the revolution, his personal despair and alienation. He interprets the Movement through the traditions of his village, through family and caste ties, the camaraderie and pecking order of the students, the memorialisation of martyrs, and so on – but unless I missed it the word “democracy” does not appear anywhere in the story, and scarcely in the book. This is appropriate. Since Adhikari is describing what happens he doesn’t need the word by which what happens is concealed. (Another lying word that seems to be missing is “development”.)
Two stories describe junior bureaucrats. In one the protagonist is a spectator to his wife’s affair. This, the fifth story, happens to be the first in which no one dies. Up to this point drownings and industrial accidents have taken a regular toll, and the new highway through Khaireni imposes a tithe on the village’s children. The second bureaucrat, a lowly “stamp and signature man”, is himself at the mercy of other, capricious, bureaucrats, who have the power to decide whether he can leverage a piece of land in his village into his own tiny plot of the Kathmandu Valley. At least he has the edge over the retired schoolteacher, whose hopes rest on source-force he turns out not to have.
Whereas the seven stories set in Nepal provide, among other things, a convincing and artfully drawn description of social reality, the two that follow a young Nepali student to America are more fantastical. In “The Face of Carolynn Flint”, an American woman who has had too much cosmetic surgery ends up with no settled face of her own.
Adhikari’s characters have a philosophical or altruistic bent. Whether they are adults or children they are mostly innocents upon whom some reality is brought to bear. Indeed (as in “The Messiah” or “The Condolence Picture”) they are tortured souls, wracked with poetic angst over situations in which many people would more readily forgive themselves. Adhikari’s skilful writing produces many beautiful descriptions, acute and satisfying phrases. For my taste, he’s often at his best when he shows things plainly, in describing the plot of land “littered with jackal turds”, or the young woman’s “shapely but widowed legs”, than where I read that “the floor between reality and the quicksand hell of nightmares began to dissolve”.
The Vanishing Act is the work of a talented writer and a deeply serious and sensitive interrogator of modern Nepal. It deserves to be read, and future works are keenly anticipated.
