Tender, lyrical, resonant
A review of Weena Pun's debut novel, Kanchhi
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening from Kathmandu. This is Issue 164 of KALAM Weekly, the only newsletter you need to keep updated with everything happening in Nepal.
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In this newsletter:
Survey is closing but we have an exciting announcement!
Rabi Lamichhane still in custody
Nepal at COP29
Film South Asia to kick off Thursday
The Deep Dive: Tender, lyrical, resonant
Survey is closing but we have an exciting announcement!
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Rabi Lamichhane still in custody
Rabi Lamichhane, the embattled chief of the Rastriya Swatantra Party, remains in police custody for investigation into his alleged links to the use of illegally obtained funds while he was managing director of Galaxy 4K Television. Lamichhane was taken into custody on October 18 and has had his detention extended four times — first by six days, then seven, then ten, and on Sunday, another thirteen. By the time you read this, he will have spent nearly a month in jail while being investigated with no charges filed.
This is standard practice in Nepal, but I’ve written before about how unfair it is to be held in custody without charges filed. Usually, the courts only extend custody in cases where the alleged perpetrator is a flight risk, or there is a danger of them destroying evidence. That doesn’t seem to be the case here, as Lamichhane is not in any position of power. It seems more and more like the KP Sharma Oli administration is out to punish Lamichhane and, by extension, his party for allying with the previous Pushpa Kamal Dahal government. Perhaps it is also a bid to cow the young party into falling in line behind the traditional mainstream parties.
Lamichhane’s party members are not taking the arrest of their chief lying down. They’ve been holding meetings and rallies, accusing the Oli government of “misusing state power” to jail an innocent. Whether Lamichhane is guilty or not is up to the courts to decide. So far, only a parliamentary investigation committee has accused Lamichhane of using illegally obtained funds while managing director of Gorkha Media. The committee found no evidence that he had directly embezzled or misappropriated funds. However, the committee is not a judicial body and cannot decide on Lamichhane’s guilt. The police arrested Lamichhane based on the committee’s report, but it is on the police and district attorney to now file a charge sheet with evidence of his wrongdoings. We’ll have to wait and see when or if that happens.
Nepal at COP29
Monday, November 11, the 29th Conference of Parties (COP) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change kicked off in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. From Nepal, at least 30 government officials attended the meeting alongside dozens of climate change activists and youth. President Ram Chandra Paudel was there too and made a speech highlighting Nepal’s goal to reach net-zero emissions by 2045 and called on developed countries to live up to their promises.
Call me cynical, but every COP is starting to resemble a junket for government officials and climate change activists rather than a serious meeting where deals are made and things get done. I’m sure it's great for activists to connect and form networks that span the globe since climate change is a global issue, but other than that, what really is it? This year, it is being held in Azerbaijan, whose fortune comes primarily from its oil and gas industry. In his keynote speech, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev lashed out at the West for decrying the fossil fuel industry and painted his country as a victim of a “smear.” Last year’s host was the United Arab Emirates, which used COP28 to try and strike oil deals. Let’s also not forget that tens of thousands of attendees fly into COP but no one seems to care about that carbon footprint.
For Nepal, climate change is the next big ticket issue. Nepal can access billions of dollars earmarked for preparation, adaptation, loss and damages. Development organizations in Nepal are pivoting to climate change as that’s where all the money is. However, despite all the organizations, individuals, and donor states working on climate change, the most affected don’t seem to receive any money or any adaptation. In September, flooding across Nepal claimed more than 240 lives, and thousands were displaced from their homes. These people have not received any of the funding for climate change, and it doesn’t seem like the billions poured into adaptation and resilience made any difference for them. Aid is supposed to trickle down, but it rarely gets to those who need it most.
For a less cynical and more informative take on COP, read this Nepali Times report.
Koshi Province lawmaker arrested for alleged human trafficking
Lila Ballav Adhikari, former minister of law and internal affairs for Koshi Province, was taken into custody on Sunday for alleged links to human trafficking. Adhikari, a member of the ruling UML party, was denied entry into Japan on October 30 for traveling with three others who had fake passports. Adhikari and the others had reportedly planned to attend an event organized by the Tokyo Arts Council. It is suspected that the three others had paid Adhikari to become part of his team and travel to Japan where they would remain illegally while Adhikari returned home.
It seems this is the new pattern of trafficking Nepalis to foreign lands. Just months ago, Deputy House Speaker Indira Rana Magar was implicated in a similar scheme to take unaffiliated people with her on a trip to the United States. In that case, the hopeful illegal migrants were denied visas, but a letter written by Rana Magar asking the US embassy to expedite their visa dates was leaked to the public, bringing the whole scheme to light. Then, there’s also the massive Bhutanese refugee racket where high-ranking politicians were implicated — and arrested — in a plot to cast Nepalis as Bhutanese refugees and transplant them in the US under a refugee resettlement scheme. Politicians from the Nepali Congress and the UML were arrested and remain in jail. This pattern shows, on the one hand, how desperate Nepalis are to leave the country and, on the other, how quickly politicians exploit this desperation for some easy cash.
Film South Asia to kick off Thursday
If you’re in Kathmandu next week and looking for something to do, Nepal’s premier documentary festival will be showing from November 21 to 24 at the Yala Maya Kendra in Patan. There will be 47 films from across South Asia and beyond, along with panel discussions and talks.
Films to look out for include the Nepal premiere of Subina Shrestha’s Devi, which follows Devi Khadka’s journey from a victim of war-time rape and torture as a Maoist rebel to being elected as a parliamentarian and her continued advocacy for survivors of sexual violence. Devi will be showing at 6.30PM on Friday, November 22. There’s also the critically acclaimed While We Watched, a film by Vinay Shukla that profiles Ravish Kumar, the former executive editor of NDTV, amidst an increasingly hostile media landscape in India. While We Watched will be screened at 10.30AM on Friday, November 22. There’s also All That Breathes, another critically acclaimed, award-winning film. Directed by Shaunak Sen, the film follows two Muslim brothers who rescue and treat injured birds in India. The film has won a spate of awards, including the Golden Eye award for Best Documentary at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival and Grand Jury Prize in World Cinema Documentary at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. All That Breathes will be showing at 6.30PM on Saturday, November 23.
Also check out Tashi Lhazom’s No Monastery, No Village about the village of Halzi in Humla’s Limi Valley, which is perpetually threatened of a glacier lake outburst flood (GLOF). No Monastery, No Village will be showing at 2PM on Sunday, November 24. And in case you missed it while it was playing in theaters, Sunir Pandey and Rajan Kathet’s No Winter Holidays will also be showing at 3.15PM on Saturday, November 23. Read my review of the film here. Check out the entire Film South Asia 2024 schedule here.
That’s all for this week’s round-up. The Deep Dive continues after the break below.
The deep dive: Tender, lyrical, resonant
Manjushree Thapa said it best when she described Weena Pun’s debut novel Kanchhi as a “tender swirl” in her back cover blurb. The novel and its titular protagonist are achingly tender, while the plot is an eddy of events and emotion. But Kanchhi is not extraordinary; it is, in fact, very ordinary, a story that resonates precisely because it is familiar. A young girl grows up in a village nestled in Nepal’s mid-hills. She encounters all the obstacles women face in Nepal — judgment, opprobrium, restrictions — and perhaps because of them all, she grows perceptive, headstrong, empathetic. It is a well-known story but not often told in Nepali literature.
What makes Kanchhi such a compelling read is Kanchhi herself. She is a curious child prone to bouts of rebellion and naughtiness. Early in the story, she leads her friends on an excursion to India, where her father allegedly resides. The kids are caught, and Maiju, Kanchhi’s mother, ties her to a bamboo pole and whips her with stinging nettles dipped in water. Kanchhi splits a boy’s head open with a tossed rock, leading Maiju to sell a chicken to pay for his treatment, and hilariously, goes around calling “bakulla,” fava beans, as “bauko gulla,” father’s dick.
But Kanchhi learns early the many taboos for women in Nepali society. When she gets her first period, she subscribes to the superstition that has her mother in its grasp. She is carted off to a room in a neighbor’s home, where she’s forced to stay until her period ends. She is cautioned against touching men or deities lest something horrendous befall her. She realizes soon enough that the gods will never know that you’re on your period if you don’t tell them. For a year, she hides her period and goes about her days, touching anyone and everyone.
While Kanchhi is the protagonist, her mother, Maiju, is as important to the story. I wondered about Weena’s decision to call Kanchhi’s mother Maiju, as maiju in Nepali is an aunt, a mother’s brother’s wife. Weena had this to say in response to my query:
This was a personal/artistic choice. I call my mom ‘Mom’ and her mother ‘Ama.’ So, ‘Ama' has never meant ‘Mom' to me but a grandmother. Plus, the character Maiju is not the narrator’s mother. So, it felt very weird to call her Ama as a narrator. I could not write ‘Mom' obviously. A mother or Mother was also out of the question for me because they always sounded very distant, cold, clinical, formal—all that—to me. I did call her ‘Budhiyan’ in the early, early drafts, but I never liked the term. When I finally stumbled on Maiju (and it took a long time to get there), it just clicked and the character opened up for me. I think this was the case because a) the novel is set in my mamaghar; b) the majority of women there, women who are of my mom’s age, are my maijus; and c) since I know these women as maijus and I know their stories as such, it gave me the confidence I needed to write about them or one of them as Maiju.
Maiju is the long-suffering single mother archetype, and she remains so throughout the novel. The book switches alternatively between Kanchhi growing up and Maiju in the aftermath of Kanchhi’s disappearance. Maiju’s solo sections were the least exciting part of the novel. I don’t think much would’ve been lost if they’d been excised completely. Maiju is much more present in Kanchhi’s story and there, she’s quite a character. She tolerates Kanchhi’s waywardness but remains a woman bound by the shackles of a rigidly conservative and patriarchal society. Maiju and Kanchhi are contrasts. Each tolerates the other’s eccentricities and proclivities, even if they might not understand it completely. It’s a very honest portrayal of a relationship between mother and daughter.
I thoroughly enjoyed the conversations between Kanchhi and Maiju. Alternately hilarious and poignant, rarely have I read dialogue that feels so authentic. It can be difficult to translate conversations in Nepali or any other language into English without losing some of what makes them special. Dialogue is as much about what is unsaid as it is about what is said. The tensions, the expectations, the unspoken love, all find echoes when Kanchhi and her mother speak to each other.
Like the dialogue, the prose anchors the story in a very Nepali mid-hill milieu. Nepali words litter the novel and it is perhaps best that there is a glossary at the end. Although most Nepali words give away their meaning through context, there are often whole sentences, quotations, and insults that will require non-Nepali readers to turn to the glossary for enlightenment. There are also many references to music and poetry, with Weena quoting stanzas wholesale from songs popular at the time. These extracts add spice to the narrative and place the plot within a specific timeframe. Kanchhi is a story of the 90s.
Weena’s prose is spare and direct. Although there are lyrical passages, the writing, for the most part, is matter-of-fact and gets to the point without beating around the bush. Extended internal monologues are rare, and the story moves briskly from plot point to plot point. I found it amusing how Weena almost always refers to sex as “fucking.” There is little sentimentality about the act, little effort to couch it in something more than it is. Even during tender scenes where Kanchhi and her paramour are in bed, “fuck” intrudes like a nosy neighbor.
To me, Kanchhi is a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story. It is less concerned with the world at large and what is happening in Nepal outside of Torikhola. The Maoist civil war, which was in full force when the novel is set, has little to do with the story itself. The conflict acts as signposting but rarely shapes the story itself. It only enters the narrative in full towards the end of the novel and again lays bare how Nepali society, even if revolutionary, treats women. “The civil war, while horrendous no doubt, was just one battle in a long line of battles that women in Nepal have been dealing with for generations. Thematically speaking, a girl/ woman’s life in Nepal is a gigantic war in itself,” Weena told me over email.
The book's sociopolitical commentary is subtle, read between the lines. Even then, it is more concerned with the everyday. I don’t believe that every Nepali novel needs to tackle the Maoist war and the many, many changes that the country has gone through in recent decades. It is enough to tell a story well, and Kanchhi is a story very well told.
Kanchhi is not a heavy book, although the ending does cut into you like a knife. Kanchhi the novel is as lively as Kanchhi the character. This is not a doom and gloom story, at least for the most part. It is brimming with life and laughter. Kanchhi is as much a celebration of girlhood and growing up as it is a critique of woman’s place in Nepali society. Weena is an astute observer of village life. She does not judge, and she does not pity. Perhaps that is the journalist in her.
Kanchhi follows recent novels in English by Nepali women writers like Manjushree Thapa, Shradha Ghale, and Smriti Ravindra. They bring a perspective that’s been long been missing in Nepali writing in English. My response to certain ideas and plot points in the book was perhaps colored by my own experiences as a Nepali man writing in English. It is good to have that limited perspective challenged and expanded. That the lives of Nepali women are so much more constrained is not an earth-shattering revelation, but the small banal ways in which society attempts to shape young girls into becoming docile women can be illuminating.
Kanchhi is an excellent debut. Go pick it up.
Kanchhi
by Weena Pun
Hachette India
352 pages, Rs 896
Available at all major bookstores in Kathmandu and on Amazon.
That’s all for this week. I will be back next Friday, in your emails, for the next edition of KALAM Weekly.
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