I have had this biased preconception, like many others, that to read a literary work written by a Nepali writer in English is to stoop down qualitatively; this thinking, I presume, makes most of the Nepali readers to pick foreign authors compared to our very own. But a foreigner will have difficulty in grasping the exact realities of a Nepali society or properly understand our sufferings and toils. So someone should write about it. That’s exactly what I found at The End of the World by Sushma Joshi. The book is a collection of eight short stories, which was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and is published by Sansar Books.
The book opens up with the story called Cheese—a long-life desire of Gopi who had the mission to have a bite of it anyhow. The story not just deals with the temptation of consuming something that one has never tasted and wouldn’t foresee the consequences after tasting it but conjures up with the problems that Nepali society face like child labor, untouchability, and patriarchy. It talks about two characters—one who’s a returnee of foreign land having brought full of goods, and there’s this household worker who being denied to have cheese determines to eat it once in a life. He does eat it in the end only to puke and realizes that his whole life he’s something that he didn’t know its taste. The writer makes clear in the last sentence: ‘’a warning against temptations for things whose tastes one could not foretell.’’
In the second story, Match-making, a Nepali girl in India travels from Calcutta to Allahabad with her mother to see two women for marriage prospect but struggles to impress them as she fights against menstruation, the colour of her skin, being not fairly educated, and the nonsensical debate about being paired up according to horoscopes/astrology while she’s about to be courted. In the end, after all the drama the arranged marriage is approved without the presence or thorough checkup of the bridegroom and the girl finds her existence and future meaningless: pre-defined and destined by someone else. All these events point at the still lingering social ills in our society where a woman/girl is more likely to be harassed before/after arranged marriage whilst men enjoy the privilege of the unfair patriarchal society.
The third story, Betrayal, is an obverse to the second one as it deals with two men where one gets cheated by his wife and is left alone and disillusioned. It’s about migrant workers in Mumbai who return only to find themselves amidst People’s War and siding with them. The story portrays these two characteristics in the form of the ever-debated issue of deception and betrayal. What happens to both of them in the closing chapter touches most of the male readers as it puts them into retrospection whether one can trust in another human being. Trust gets broken by one man when he’s turned and helps in his friend get caught by the police for being a former Maoist combatant.
Next three stories—Waiting for Rain, Law and Order, The End of the World—is a personal sage of characters who are waiting for the world to end by spending everything they have for last grand meal; a young police lusts for a girl next door but ending up with his desires only, and a man lamenting over his property. All these humane desires and tragedies sum up Joshi’s book to be existentialist and maybe a bit of women-centric.
Lastly, the last two chapters, After the Floods and The Blockade, is a precursor to Nepali tragedies. My favorite being the After the Floods is a tragic story about death by floods—which happens repeatedly in our country. Even though death is cruel and natural sometimes natural disasters take one’s lives easier. I find pauses in this story where life is celebrated and mourned at the same time. Life for the protagonist in the story is linked with a pair of fireflies-like golden earrings. For her, it becomes an epitome to die: precious and everlasting. And in the final chapter, I find a man deserted by his wife who becomes stone-hearted after finding his son has died. He then decides to stay in his village—a rural place far from the madding crowd.
Tragedies come to its best and Joshi has mastered it in the context of Nepali societies where she exposes the still lingering social ills and struggles by embodying with the common desires of Nepalis. Though the stories were written in the last decades the themes of it are still relevant and once reading this book one will find themselves sitting under a tree and questioning whether life is just about desire and tragedy. The End of the World is a must-read for every Nepali.
