Word: kathmandu
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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...
...tells his story well?even if we have heard it before. The book's title is a cosmic joke on its sad-sack protagonist. Middle-aged Ramchandra is far from a guru of love, or much of anything except for mathematics, which he teaches at a grubby Kathmandu school and to private students desperate to pass college-entrance exams. It's through these extra tutoring sessions that Ramchandra hopes to scrounge together enough rupees to move his family?his patient wife, Goma, and their two children?from their cramped apartment into a house of their own. This, Ramchandra repeats...
...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...
...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...