Cross-Country Race

An engaging novel about a young womans flight from Maoist Nepal to Los Angeles....

Winning a green card in the US governments diversity lottery,a young Nepali girl arrives in Los Angeles. Her journey follows a trajectory familiar to many immigrants: from finding a corner of home away from home in her case living with a Nepali family in Little Nepal to moving out and embracing the American way of life to realising that the past can be put on hold but cant really be shaken off and that reinventing oneself is not as final as it sounds. It was and it was not far,where she came from. Some days her birth village felt centuries away,and other days it was too close,she could not get far enough away from it.

In Manjushree Thapas novel Seasons of Flight,Prema leaves behind a country caught between Maoist insurgency and brutal counter-insurgency,and a sister who has joined the Maoists. Her flight takes her from her village up in the hills of Nepal to a beachside neighbourhood of LA. She leaves behind an ageing father to work as a homecare attendant of an elderly American woman.

In America,she has to constantly explain home: so,home is near India or where Mount Everest is,or where the sherpas come from. To some,of course,even these descriptions are not enough. More commonly,though,what Americans heard was Naples,as in: I just love pasta, or My husband and I went to Rome for our honeymoon,but we never made it to Naples.

But its in this strange land that she makes friends and even finds love with an American. In Thapas novel,the personal meets the political. And though home is far away,the shadow of a homeland caught in transition,moving from one era to another with all its accompanying confusion is never far. In a sense,it runs parallel to Premas search in a new land,complete with the initial headiness of discovery and freedom,followed by anxiety to gradually finding her place.

Prema who worked with a non-governmental organisation in Nepal,alongside a senior forester,to offset the carbon footprint of a British corporation,finally gets a sense of belonging as she finds friends in fellow conservationists. It was a complete stranger who showed Prema how to stop drifting and set down roots wherever life might land her. What brings a sense of purpose back in her life is a chance meeting with Fiona,a lepidopterist by passion and a lawyer by training on the lookout for El Segundo Blues,a tiny butterfly that stayed still for long stretches and then took flight in a flutter of blue. A creature that goes through cycles of transformation before it is finally ready for a season of flight.

Premas journey is much like that periods of stillness broken by a flutter of disquiet. Not every immigrant launches on a deliberate quest of identity. But living in a new land,the question of identity is like a tune one cant get out of ones head,a persistent anxiety that comes uncalled,followed by a gradual realisation that identity is not this or that but something that falls in between.

After turning her back on her country,she begins scanning the internet for news on Nepal and exchanging e-mail with friends in Nepali,the language she had discarded as the language of sorrow.

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As one womans personal story,as an immigrant narrative,Thapas novel is engaging. But its the background of Nepali politics and the countrys moment in history that lends it force. After all,it is a territory where Thapa,whose former work includes the critically acclaimed Forget Kathmandu,is on firm ground.