True Stories Made Up

8220;As they saw it,8221; she wrote, 8220;the massacre had taken place against a romantic medieval background. But for the Nepali people, it had taken place in a field charged with politics.8221; In the aftermath of those deaths and disturbing questions they left, and in the growing Maoist insurgency in the countryside, she sensed her country to be on the cusp of a momentous political transformation. And to explain that field charged with politics, she used her own experiences to filter the country8217;s history and understand its always fleeting democracy.

In Tilled Earth, a collection of short stories, some of them no longer than a paragraph long and others almost novella-length, Thapa explores how political and social change in Nepal has been internalised in the lived experience of ordinary people. These people are aspiring novelists, retired government officials, foreign NGO do-gooders, twenty-somethings dreaming of emigrating, non-resident Nepalis returning to find some connect with traditional roots, Maoists, woodworkers, students overseas yearning for home. Late in the collection in the title story, a student in Chicago finds temporary elation after a coffee with a classmate, 8220;having said something about her past that makes sense in her present8221;. That, in summary, is the unspoken quest all of Thapa8217;s characters are enrolled in. And for this, these are stories suffused with sadness, because the longing to pull the past and future into the present is just so elusive.

Even the imagination does not help in this. In 8216;Friends8217;, a shopkeeper, struggling to sell enough wares in Kathmandu8217;s tourist district Thamel and watching the world rush by, resorts to stories to work out accumulating personal concerns: 8220;I sit here all day long, and want Nepalis, like foreigners, to meet each other in Thamel 8212; to forge the heart connections we don8217;t in our own society. Why are we, among ourselves, jealous and resentful, mistrustful of everyone? Why can we not become friends the foreigners can 8212; full of goodness and grace? This is what I want.8221;

For 8220;foreigners8221; it doesn8217;t get any easier. As Nadia, a human rights activist, ruminates on the seminar subjects for the week ahead, the changing season quietly nudges her to research United Nations manuals of evacuation in case of emergency. Sarah, an American consultant, goes on an arduous trek, savouring the silences with her Nepali companion, knowing that their paths will begin to separate even in the course of the journey.

Then again, the sadness that finds expression through Thapa8217;s eye for the telling detail is not exactly hopelessness. As with the shopkeeper in 8216;Friends8217;, there is in each of these stories an acute desire for something better 8212; something better in a higher order of personal politics. It is a desire that remains often unachieved but just the articulation of it through lived lives is a perfect measure of Thapa8217;s empathy as a storyteller.

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