Āja Ramitā Cha, by Indra Bahadur Rai, Sajha Prakashan, 2011 (1964)

There’s a moment in Indra Bahadur Rai’s Darjeeling saga Āja Ramitā Cha (1964) when a teacher remarks, “We say Nepal-Nepal, as for Nepal…” There’s truth in the charge that the Nepali diaspora, and its cultural influence, has been neglected by those ensconced in the Kathmandu Valley. But Rai has been a notable exception. His contributions to the cubist perspectives of the Tesro Āyām and Lilā Lekhan movements have established him as a pioneer of modern Nepali language literature.

Indeed, his credentials as an uncompromising radical are enough to frighten readers away. Yet while Āja Ramitā Cha is unorthodox, this tale of a Darjeeling tenement house is as psychologically perceptive as anything by BP Koirala and as life affirming as Buddhisagar, and far from academic. There’s Janak, the disillusioned patriarch who dabbles unsuccessfully in business and politics. There’s Rabi, who struggles to reconcile an unrealized infatuation with his social conscience. M.K. is an unemployed alcoholic whose existential issues compel his unhappy wife Babuni to occupy herself with their family’s material concerns. A host of colourful characters fill out Rai’s palette, such as the coquettish Yamuna, visiting from Sikkim, and the fiery, wily Bhudev, who provides an early glimpse of the fraught Gorkhaland movement. There are no heroes or villains, and the scattershot mosaic can be distracting for those used to linear narratives. Rai himself explains in the preface to the latest edition that his narrative is as disjointed as he perceives real life to be. The result is a convincing tapestry of Nepali life in Darjeeling in the first few decades following Indian independence.

Āja Ramitā Cha is rich in humour, metaphor and colloquialisms unique to Darjeeling, and the author’s facility with language is impressive. The Darjeeling of the 1960s is already cosmopolitan in a way that Rai’s contemporaries in Nepal would not have been. In that sense, this novel offers a prescient glimpse into urban Nepali society as it has developed of late in Nepal. On both sides of the border, dreams of greener pastures abound: at one point Janak, returning from a trip to Nepal, chases a peacock he’s glimpsed off the trail to the border. “We humans may have left our own country,” he quips, “but if even the beasts and birds leave, how many days will Nepal remain?” Rai’s Darjeeling is inescapably Nepali, down to the small-town mentalities and the frustrated fatalism. Yet it is subtly different. It’s slightly disconcerting to be looked at from across the border. Maybe it’s time those in the motherland had a look too.