Off the Record 103: A tree of one's own
Issue 103 • 28 July 2023
It’s July 28, 2023, and you’re reading Off the Record.
I’m Pranaya Rana and in this newsletter, we’ll stop, take a deep breath, and dive into one singular issue that defined the past week.
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Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening from Kathmandu. There is a lot that’s happened this past week but not much that warrants a deep dive in itself. So in the vein of what I did last week, there’s a review waiting for you in the deep dive. But as always, before we get there, a quick recap of the week and all that’s been making the news.
Let’s begin, as we so often do in this newsletter, with tragedy. A 13-year-old was swept away by flash floods in the middle of Kathmandu and almost a week later, his body has yet to be found. The Samakhusi river, which is little more than a sewer, flooded its banks and the ensuing floodwaters swept away Sajan Ale Magar, a sixth-grader. This happens almost every few years as streams constrained by roads and buildings overflow during the monsoon flooding the environs. The danger posed by the flooding is compounded by the fact that there are numerous open drains, drainage canals, and sewers that also flood, obscuring their depth and even their location. In 2017, a frightening video of a schoolgirl disappearing into an open sewer emerged. Miraculously, the girl reappeared at another end of the sewer where passersby rescued her. In 2021, a 10-year-old boy again fell into an open drain in Kapan in Kathmandu. His dead body was discovered five days later in Lalitpur.
This happens when the natural course of rivers and streams is circumscribed by roads and houses. Every year, places like Samakhusi and Kapan flood during the monsoon with water from the nearby rivers entering into houses and residences. Residents complain but what really can the authorities do? Besides building embankments on the river banks, the authorities cannot really constrain the flow of the river waters and when residents build homes by encroaching on the river banks, they must prepare to face nature’s wrath. Mayor Balen Shah had attempted to clear the banks during his demolition spree but was stopped by the courts. He had the right idea but the wrong approach. Bulldozing homes without negotiating or taking the residents into confidence was never going to work. And so, the same problem is bound to recur every year until an amicable solution is found and the rivers are left free to be rivers.
Even as children fall into drains and die, there are also monsoon diseases to deal with, namely dengue. Over 4,200 people have been infected with dengue, a mosquito-borne disease that results in high fever, headache, body aches, and rashes. Most get better in a week or two but some end up with severe symptoms and must be hospitalized. Ten districts — Sunsari, Dhading, Kaski, Darchula, Kathmandu, Sankhuwasabha, Myagdi, Kanchanpur, Rupandehi, and Morang — have been severely affected, but the dengue virus has been detected in 70 of Nepal’s 77 districts. Health officials say that the worst might be yet to come as numbers are doubling every week. Dengue too is emerging as a significant annual concern for Nepal. Last year, 88 people died from dengue while more than 58,000 were infected. This year, at least seven people have already died in Sunsari alone.
And it’s not just humans who are suffering. The ‘lumpy skin’ disease has been ravaging the country’s livestock. More than a million cattle have been infected and more than 48,000 have already died. Lumpy skin disease is named after the blisters that appear beneath the skin of infected cattle, leading to the profusion of lumps. The cattle stop eating, develop fevers, and eventually die if untreated. But many farmers lack medication for their cattle and even the ones that receive medication are dying due to delays in treatment and overwork as this is the monsoon, planting season for many crops. Currently, the most affected cattle are in Sudurpaschim and Karnali Provinces but the disease could easily spread to other areas since its vectors are mosquitos, ticks, and mites.
Let’s move from tragedy to farce now, as Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal returned on Friday from a week-long Europe tour. He was first in Rome for the Food System Summit +2 organized by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization where he gave at least two speeches stressing the importance of investments in agriculture. He also met with Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Accompanying him on the trip, which is his second foreign visit, were Agriculture Minister Beduram Bhusal, Foreign Secretary Bharat Paudyal, National Planning Commission member Jay Kant Raut, and of course, the daughter that he is grooming to take her place in politics, Ganga Dahal.
It was at around this time that former prime minister and CPN-UML chair KP Sharma Oli was in Cambodia for a less-than-savory reason. He left on July 18 and returned on Tuesday, 25 July, after a week-long visit. He was there as an observer of the general election, which reelected Cambodian strongman Hun Sen to another term as prime minister, a position he has held for more than forty years. While other observers and western countries denounced the election as neither free nor fair, Oli gave his stamp of approval.
And speaking of foreign visits, yet another Chinese delegation was recently in Nepal. The delegation, led by Yuan Jiajun, a politburo member of the Communist Party of China, arrived on Sunday for a three-day visit. The Chinese met with top government officials including Defense Minister Purna Bahadur Khadka, along with Nepali Congress President Sher Bahadur Deuba and UML chair Oli. Yuan announced Rs 145 million aid for agriculture-related projects in all seven provinces. These visits have become rote as of late, as any announcement of a visiting US official is either followed or preempted by a Chinese delegation that promises more aid and more cooperation.
Finally, one more thing I should mention. This past week, a very public spat has emerged between Kantipur Publications, the largest media conglomerate in the country, and various workers’ unions. Newspaper delivery persons affiliated with unions inserted a pamphlet outlining their demands and dissatisfaction with the conglomerate with copies of Kantipur and The Kathmandu Post, leading the publication to threaten legal action. The unions responded by dumping all newspaper copies outside the publication’s office in Tinkune and halting all distribution. The publication again responded by saying that the unions were hampering citizens’ ‘right to information’ and again threatening legal action.
The latest update is that Kantipur has agreed to sit for talks with the unions, who represent lower-rung industry workers. Journalists too are reportedly dissatisfied with the publication’s recent practices, including delayed salaries and the dismissal of journalists without following due process, according to mediakurakani.com. It’s an open secret that Kantipur does not abide by the Working Journalists Act, which mandates a minimum monthly salary of Rs 24,600. While salaries at Kantipur Publications are competitive, the basic salary is often very low, lower than the Act mandates. The salary is augmented by various allowances that add up to a decent salary so most journalists don’t complain but this allows the publication to pay out low amounts in pensions, bonuses, and other obligations that are based on the basic salary. It also takes a minimum of 10 years of work at the publication in order to be considered a ‘permanent’ employee, which entitles journalists to additional benefits. Otherwise, most employees work on a contract basis and receive no such benefits.
This has long been in practice not just for Kantipur but for most publications in Kathmandu. While Kantipur at least had a reputation for paying salaries on time, unlike others (I’m looking at you Nagarik, Republica, and The Himalayan Times), even that seems to be eroding with time as salaries have apparently been delayed for the past three months. Disputes like these will occur but it is really up to institutions like Kantipur, which have built their reputations on championing the right cause, to negotiate in good faith and provide their workers and journalists with what is mandated by law. Otherwise, it is hypocritical to write editorials exhorting politicians and government officials, and everyone else to follow the law while not doing so themselves.
And now, without further ado, the deep dive — after last week’s theater review, this week, a book review.
The deep dive: A tree of one’s own
Smriti Ravindra’s debut novel, The Woman Who Climbed Trees, begins and ends with a fable. In the prologue, a widower finds a woman who agrees to marry him and take care of his children. She is dutiful and loving as a wife and mother but one day, the husband discovers that she often leaves her bed and disappears into the night. He decides to follow her and finds her atop a tree, just sitting there. He does not understand why she does this and after consulting with the villagers, decides that she is up to no good. When no evidence of adultery emerges, they conclude she is a witch because, after all, she is a woman confidently by herself out in the middle of the night. What other conclusion is there? They beat her and then they drown her.
It’s a harrowing way to start a novel, establishing early on that this is not a story where choice and freedom are going to be rewarded or even understood. The novel’s primary protagonist, Meena, is 14 years old when she is married to the 21-year-old Manmohan. Meena lives in Darbangha in India’s Bihar while Manmohan is from Sabaila, in Nepal’s Janakpur. The cross-border marriage is a practice that is still in effect now, the roti-beti relationship as it is so often called in political parlance.
Meena’s life is not pleasant. In her new home, she is berated endlessly by her mother-in-law and is induced to become a shell of herself, even though there are moments when her natural defiance bubbles up to the surface and explodes into a wave. She finds herself distant from her new husband, who has almost immediately moved to Kathmandu, while simultaneously finding herself attracted to her sister-in-law, Kumud. What begins as sisterly warmth turns into burning desire for Meena, but her feelings are not reciprocated.
Manmohan eventually takes Meena to Kathmandu. Meena suffers through miscarriages before giving birth to Adi and Preeti. She finds herself dislocated and lonely in Kathmandu and takes to gardening and farming on their small plot of land as a way to cope with city life. Manmohan, meanwhile, has quickly climbed up the socio-economic ladder, going from an employee at the government’s family planning unit to an accountant with his own firm and a partnership with a wealthy benefactor. He has managed to purchase a home and land in Ganesh Basti, a small neighborhood in Maharajgunj, Chakrapath, just inside the Ring Road. It’s actually a stone’s throw from where I grew up.
At this point in the novel, the voice changes and goes into the first person, narrated by Preeti, the daughter, who is now middle-aged and reflecting back on her and her mother’s life. The portion of the plot is familiar, treading the same ground as other similar narratives of growing up in Kathmandu as new immigrants. Preeti and Adi go to school, play, and watch their parents drift apart. There are moments of shock but this section is the weakest part of the narrative. This is where the pacing slows to a crawl and it is difficult to find any impetus that is driving the plot forward. Portions verge on the tedious.
It is when we go back to the third-person omniscient narrative following Meena that things pick up again. The trajectory of her life is not punctuated by large events but small obstacles that add up in their frequency. Meena and Manmohan are barely able to tolerate each other’s presence and Meena’s mental health begins to slide. Adi and Preeti do what they can to keep their family together while still existing as their own beings. The men in this story get the short shrift as they feel like appendages to the real story of the women. That’s not a fault per se but it does leave me wondering at times what Adi and Manmohan were doing while Preeti and Meena were leading lives of quiet desperation.
The narrative progresses but never really crests. There is no real arc to the characters. Meena who was miserable at the beginning of the novel is still miserable at the end of the novel. Manmohan, who flits in and out of the story like a ghost, never really becomes a character of his own. His dalliance with politics is mentioned at the beginning and then comes back in a small way at the end but it too never turns into something that is important to him or to the story. His arc too ends with a whimper. There isn’t really a resolution of anything here but perhaps that is the point.
The story ends once again with a fable, but this one is hopeful while also a little sad. It is about women finding a place all for themselves up in the branches of a tree where they play and sing and dance and write, in short, do everything they are prevented from doing in their actual lives. The final lines are that of a song, a celebration of what life could be like, free from the shackles that constrain so much of their selves. It is a poetic end, one that feels deserved after the petty cruelties of everyday life as a woman in Nepal.
Ravindra’s prose is as always immaculate. I was a great admirer of her columns in The Kathmandu Post and was very disappointed when she stopped writing them. Her columns provide a glimpse into where much of the stuff in the novel came from — her own life. The book is somewhat biographical, of herself and her mother. Like Meena, Ravindra’s mother too greatly enjoyed Bollywood films. The analog for the author in the novel is Preeti.
Ravindra’s prose, however, reveals much more than it hides and at times in the book, it is the most powerful driver moving the narrative forward. While the plot might drag at times, the prose is never dull or tedious. Early on, when Meena and Manmohan have just been married, Meena reflects on what a barber’s wife had told her about women and marriage in a very prescient passage:
For a girl, her mother and motherland are temporary affairs, she had said. “A girl learns early on that her life is a tight bud waiting to burst into a flower.” Her life is in limbo until she marries and changes mother, motherland, home, name, affections. Nothing she is born to does she belong to, and she must dream and prepare for a life that is permanent only after she has left the womb that housed her and the house that protected her like a womb. Her wars are never to be fought for the mother, nor for the motherland she is born to. Her wars must always be for the mother-in-law, who is her true mother, and for the marital land that gives her her name and dignity. Had a woman written the long history of change and conflicts, history would be the confusing path that forces one to unlearn the familiar and learn the new. It would lead one way from all that one loves to all that one secretly dreads.
Passages like these litter the novel.
One particular characteristic of the novel I would especially like to point out is the vibrancy of desire that pulsates throughout the book. The book is really brimming with love, lust, and longing, sometimes for sisters, other times for sisters-in-law and best friends. There are relationships that straddle friendship and romance, sex and abuse, love and lust. It is a truly multifaceted exploration of desire and sexuality as an entire spectrum that is as refreshing to read as it is often uncomfortable — incest and attraction towards one’s close family members recur often.
As much as its literary merits, the book is also a story for our times. With so much debate recently over amendments to the Citizenship Act and the many veiled apprehensions that quite directly concern the Madhesi population, the novel explores just how fraught with casual bigotry and prejudices the Madhesi identity is. The scorn with which Pahadis have long treated Madhesis always lies lingering below the surface, bursting out easily whenever a conflict arises. Although the book does take quite a few liberties with the timeline and mere existence of certain historical events and the character of the Kathmandu of its day, the changes serve the larger purpose of exploring Kathmandu’s attitudes to Madhesis. This will probably not be evident to most non-Nepali readers but it is going to stand out to Nepalis familiar with very recent Kathmandu history. Ravindra also makes a decision to give pseudonyms to certain incidents and characters while keeping the names of others intact. For instance, Hrithik Roshan becomes Vivek Rahane, perhaps in an effort to change the timeline of when the Hrithik Roshan ‘kanda’ actually happened and when it takes place in the novel.
But for a book that came out in February, I have yet to see a single review in any Nepali publication, neither in Nepali nor in English, except for a very personal piece by Pratibha Tuladhar in the Nepali Times. I wonder why that is, given the dearth of novels about Nepal in the English language. The last major novel in English was Shradha Ghale’s The Wayward Daughter, published in 2018, another book that’s received much more attention from the reading public than from critics in the Nepali press. For a media landscape that hungers for Nepali stories in English, especially those published abroad, here is a story about the straddles the Nepal-India border, literally and figuratively, a story that speaks so urgently to the current zeitgeist and yet, no one has deigned to give it a review.
But I digress. To conclude, The Woman Who Climbed Trees is a refreshingly bold and lyrical debut novel from Smriti Ravindra. It is not a book without faults but it is a book that is decidedly worth reading. It is not a bombastic book and it is not ambitious in the tale it is telling. It is a book about small things, small families, small loves, small desires, small lives. And ultimately, that’s a good thing.
The Woman Who Climbed Trees by Smriti Ravindra, published by Harper Collins India, is available at all major bookshops in Kathmandu, across India, and online. Readers abroad can get their copies via Amazon.
That’s all for this week. I will be back next Friday, in your emails, for the next edition of Off the Record.
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