Word: nepal
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...goes and ends Lil Bahadur Chettri's brief but unflinching 1957 Nepali fable Mountains Painted with Turmeric. Where did the family migrate to? Were they ever avenged? Chettri's novella - one of Nepal's most popular stories, reprinted 30 times in the country and now widely available for the first time in English - doesn't say, but likely they went to India, perhaps West Bengal, Sikkim or Assam, where Chettri, despite being such a prominent figure of Nepali letters, was born, raised and still lives...
...plot that propels the novella, but rather the intimate, unfolding portrait of village life in eastern Nepal that Chettri sketches in masterfully stark but occasionally lyrical prose - like a brisk, cold brook dappled with sun. Chettri vividly conjures the social and natural landscapes in which Dhané's miserable story takes place, from trade councils lorded by ruthless landowners, to placid livestock pastures and swollen rice paddies pleating the hills. The book "might not entertain its readers, because that is not its aim," Chettri has written. "I have simply tried to give a picture of the villages in the hills...
...That encounter, to Sandhya's relief, never came to pass. In 1996, as a 14-year-old student from a town north of the capital Kathmandu, she joined Nepal's Maoist cadres at the moment when their armed insurgency had just begun to take hold of this rugged Himalayan nation, long a magnet for foreign backpackers and adventurers. Her father's military income meant Sandhya did not grow up among the country's many poor, but she chafed under the rigid caste laws and gender norms that blunted her parents' ambitions and stripped her of the same opportunities...
...guide Tenzing Norgay had stood on the top of the world, looking down on a white ocean in which peaks like Kanchenjunga and Lhotse appeared like frozen waves. He pulled out his camera and snapped Tenzing holding aloft his ice ax, strung with the flags of Britain, India, Nepal and the United Nations. Tenzing dug a hollow in the snow and filled it with Buddhist offerings: a few sweets, a chocolate bar and some cookies. Hillary dug a second hole and buried a crucifix. The two nibbled on some mint cake and, aware that their oxygen supplies were limited, began...
...Once, Hillary and his friend Michael Dillon, a filmmaker, were on a short trek in Nepal when an American walker stopped and showed Hillary how to hold an ice ax. "Hillary listened and thanked him, but said nothing else," recalled Dillon. "The American went away without any idea whom he had spoken to." The conqueror of Everest didn't see himself as a hero. Others always will...