Quotes of the Day
When the English language was planted in South Asia, who knew it would bloom with such fecundity? From the riots of Salman Rushdie to the florid sagas of Vikram Seth and the humid prose of Arundhati Roy, much of the best subcontinental writing has embraced a hothouse style, the kind of Victorian grandness long forgotten by the English themselves. When the empire wrote back, it was never at a loss for words.
Enter Samrat Upadhyay, Kathmandu-born but U.S.-educated, here to trim the verbal overgrowth. Upadhyay, whose first book was a well-regarded collection of short stories called Arresting God in Kathmandu, is that rarity among authors of a subcontinental drift: he is an under-writer, both in style and substance, the anti-Arundhati. Upadhyay employs the kind of simple, sanded-down prose built in American creative-writing workshops, but with a touch of Buddhist detachment. He is equally austere with his typically middle-class characters—though they suffer fine shades of psychological distress, they lack the will to do anything really dramatic.
Ramchandra hates his job, hates his in-laws, hates Kathmandu and has lost his passion for the dutiful Goma. He is struck by Malati's erotic promise and within the space of a few pages the once somnambulant Ramchandra is shadowing his student to her squalid home. Upadhyay paints Ramchandra's fevered befuddlement perfectly as he tries to think through the unthinkable: "He had an urge to walk toward Tangal, knock on Malati's door and tell her not to come to his house anymore, that he could no longer tutor her. Or perhaps crawl into bed next to her." With little resistance from either party, Ramchandra and Malati are soon crawling, stumbling and falling into bed together. I'm not sure what the term is in Nepal, but in the U.S. it's called a midlife crisis.
His financial worries and guilty infidelities group Ramchandra with literature's familiar middle-class husbands. Upadhyay's detached descriptions of Kathmandu are rinsed of the exotic, adding to the sense that he is treading on familiar ground. Still, we never forget that Ramchandra and Malati are in Nepal, not New Bedford. Their first fumbling attempt at a tryst, in a city park, is interrupted by a horde of rampaging monkeys. Not the kind of thing that happens to adulterers in John Cheever's work.
Nor is the reaction of Ramchandra's wife when he confesses his infidelity. Inexplicably, Goma decides that Malati will move in with the family and into Ramchandra's bed; Goma will sleep with the children. Why? I have no idea. Upadhyay struggles with his characterization of Goma, sometimes a doormat, sometimes Machiavellian, never quite convincing. Also problematic are Upadhyay's efforts to weave Kathmandu's political turmoil (the novel takes place during the pro-democracy riots of 1990) into a personal story. The complex sleeping arrangements are distracting enough, and the collapse of the state pales next to the disintegration of this jigsaw family.
Unlike many of its neighbors, Nepal was never colonized by the English or their language, but Upadhyay is hardly operating in a cultural vacuum. One of the first Nepali writers to publish fiction in the West, he has been called the "Buddhist Chekhov." He's not Anton Chekhov, but he is Buddhist, and the influence of the religion—observant, detached, cyclical—is richly apparent. Cycles are everywhere. Ramchandra's passion waxes and wanes. Even as he descends into recrimination, he sees his maturing teenage daughter succumbing to the same dangerous passion that undid him, and he is powerless to stop her. Fate, fueled by misguided desire, carries the characters on its wheel, through good and ill and back again. Nothing, Upadhyay suggests with his crisp yet melancholy words, is ever really possessed, yet nothing—not even love—is ever truly lost.
- Bryan Walsh
- A Nepali math teacher suffers a twisted midlife crisis in Samrat Upadhyay's novel, The Guru of Love