Word: upadhyay
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...young and frightening Maoist guerrillas. Until a few weeks ago, its cities were brimming with baton-swinging riot police in blue fatigues and protesting students with torches in their hands. Average people doing average things seem about as common as yetis?except in the work of Nepali author Samrat Upadhyay. The Royal Ghosts, his new collection of short stories, is full of characters who care for sick parents, fall in love with the wrong people, cheat on their spouses or get drunk in the afternoon when they should really be more responsible. In short: normal folk living normal lives...
...Upadhyay, who teaches at Indiana University in the U.S. and writes in English, doesn't ignore the violence and political strife of his native country?he just keeps it in the background with controlled plots and measured prose. The title story takes place immediately after the 2001 massacre of the royal family by Crown Prince Dipendra. While the country is thrown into confusion and grief, cab driver Ganga is confronted with a more personal upheaval?learning that his brother is gay. In Supreme Pronouncements, another story, when the student organizer Suresh is thrown in jail for writing a provocative editorial...
...first short-story collection, Arresting God in Kathmandu, religious themes are everywhere in The Royal Ghosts. Through them Upadhyay reveals the universal in the apparently exotic. In The Weight of a Gun, a mother of a mentally ill son consults a clairvoyant believed to be possessed by a goddess. But in Upadhyay's telling, this hardly seems odd. He pares down the extraneous bits to reveal the characters' underlying humanity, rendering clear the woman's reasoning?she is simply trying everything she can to save...
...Upadhyay's hands, characters whose lives seem impossibly foreign become intimately familiar. Even when facing the saddest of circumstances, they often find hope in the end. One wishes as much for their troubled country...
...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...