I have come to Markhu, above the Kulekhani reservoir, to finish the novel I have been working on since September. It doesn't look like the novel will get published - it doesn't have enough in it, and I don't want to make it plotty. So, maybe, someday, I will put it all here. 

Some photos from the road (blockage):

Kulekhani.

Men pondering development.

This one digs into hills.

And Mr. Dong who didn't mind the long, punishing drive.

I haven't asked the dog its name yet. There is also a mastiff, so fluffy and big.

Some photos

 

I have written a YA novel :)

 Knowing that nobody really visits this page anymore, and also guessing that maybe only Maden still gets an automatic ping when this page is updated, here's a selection from my 'refabulation' of a Tharu folktale.

A little bit of the crow, a little of the child.

--

The king waited for the world to settle down before shouting to his guards. ‘Bring the rice flour,’ he commanded. ‘Draw the circle.’

Lizzie was made to stand on the small circle drawn with flour.

‘Show us how much you love your daughter,’ Adhipati said to Budhani and Korvin. ‘Pull with all of your might – we need to believe in the strength of your love, don’t we?’

Korvin snatched at Lizzie, hooking his wing around her neck. ‘Mommy!’ Lizzie called, reaching with one wing. Budhani tried to hold onto it with her beak, with a foot. ‘Mommy,’ Lizzie gasped for breath under Korvin’s wing. Budhani pulled harder – her baby was choking, suffocating, and calling out to her. ‘Mommy!’ Lizzie shrieked when Budhani’s beak dug into her flesh.

In the heat of the tussle Budhani looked at Korvin and let out a cry of despair. Look at me, she wanted to say, see my desperation. Have you no love left? I am the mother! Give me my baby!

But Korvin snarled back, tightened his grip around Lizzie’s head. It was his pride he pulled at, not his child.

Budhani let go of Lizzie and turned away – she couldn’t look her daughter in the eye, and it was too much cruelty to watch the sneer of victory on Korvin’s face. The king was far away, separated from the world by his authority over it. Close at hand was Dharmadhikari, relishing the tug of war for Lizzie.

‘Justice has been served,’ he said. The world looked on aghast at Lizzie suddenly sprawled on the floor, Korvin fenced between Lizzie and Budhani, and the king shaking with suppressed laughter.

‘Sinner!’ Budhani flew at Dharmadhikari. ‘I shit on your book!’ She splattered a hateful spray of feces on the man and his robes.

After a moment of shock, Dharmadhikari swung the book at Budhani who was trying to snatch out his eyes. ‘Madness!’ Dharmadhikari cried. ‘How dare you insult the wisdom of the gods!’

‘You are the pickled hatred of all men!’ Budhani replied.

Dharmadhikari grabbed Budhani’s beak and tried to rip them apart. She cawed with all of her might. Lizzie and the world raised hell, but Korvin and the king sat motionless, as if hypnotized by the possibility of blood.

After an age of pain and panic, Budhani heard the king say, ‘No murder in my court, Dharmadhikari.’

Dharmadhikari shook with anger and licked the froth that had gathered at the corners of his mouth. ‘Know,’ he growled as he snapped off Budhani’s lower beak. ‘Your,’ he growled as he broke off her upper beak. ‘Place,’ he screamed as he flung her stunned body into the courtyard wall.

Budhani tried to find her footing but was smashed down by the clothbound book flung at her with all the strength in a habitual bully’s arm. Pages of the great book cut sharp lines across her chest. Clumps of feather fell to the floor where they mixed with her blood.

‘And never question the great book!’ Dharmadhikari flung her out of the king’s great house.

 

A cruel rain lashed down, cold and heavy. Whiplashes of lightning seared the sky and branches broke off trees to the buffet of Budhani’s wings. Her screams mixed with the screeches of bamboo stalks rubbed together by the storm until they erupted into fire, the wet green leaves curling and crumbling on the scarlet tongues of an unseasonal conflagration.

Budhani abandoned the instinctive caution that had made her avoid the brambles and bluffs. There was no east or west in the shadow of the storm – there was only the escape, farther with each flap of the wing, farther from wee Lizzie and the nest where she had laughed, fed, hungered. A branch snapped and tossed by the storm scraped off a few of her feathers.

When the cold pelt of rain wrapped around her, Budhani forgot the pinprick sting of quills being ripped off her back and sides. She was a mother who had been chased away from her child. The crow with whom she had summered and nested, with whom she had exchanged promises of for life, had called her a murderous dam. In the garden of her mind, the unlit corner began to breathe with a menace – Korvin’s words divided and multiplied as they fell upon her from the abyss of the sky, one becoming many in how it echoed with itself to make a crowd, but also remaining the only one in how it never set aside the glum and sour blame that filled its heart.

And more thorny branches in the undergrowth of the jungle scratched at Budhani, clawing off her feathers, the great ones of wingtips and tail, the down that sleeked her chest, until, in her blind rage, she threw herself headlong at the knobbed and leather-smooth trunk of a simal tree.

Her beak broke off. Blood now ran down her chest, plucked clean, bumps where quills had been. She groaned and exhaled pain, and let it wrap its arms around her. Grief pulled her down to the ground. A few stars peeped through from the storm now abating, the clouds ringed in silver with the bask of a moon hiding just out of sight. Budhani felt her heart tear in two, and tried to cry and holler, but felt her anguish, too, tear into ribbons, some pulling her toward the comfort of sudden and quieting oblivion while some others pulling her to scream, to stay awake and fight.

Below her, for miles and miles, beads of her blood fell to the earth and were swallowed by the rain-soaked ground like seeds for a future fire.

And Budhani tumbled and bounced off the trees and skidded along the slippery earth to slump to a final rest outside a little hut at the edge of a village. A man came to the door with an oil lamp and gave a startled cry.

‘Is that a baby?’ the woman standing beside him whispered urgently.

Budhani tried to scream, to warn them about coming too close, warn them against mentioning her babies, warn the woman against motherhood, which had only just now ripped out her heart and filled it with cold lead. She tried to scream.

Instead, what came out was the wail of a newborn human. The rain had washed away the blood clotting around the wound where her beak had been, and now the glistening red flesh had become the toothless, helpless mouth of a babe. The man picked her up, tenderly.

‘Look!’ he said to his wife.

‘A newborn girl!’ she said.

The man cradled Budhani in his arms. ‘She is the daughter we have been asking for!’

The Girl

 Budhani had barely the time to look at the pair of human faces cooing over her before all light was blotted out and she slipped into deep, stony sleep.

Later, in another hour, she felt the upward weight of their arms and the wide warmth of affection as they cradled her between them. While the woman caressed the raw split of her beak, the man blew cooling air across her brows. Budhani tried for a moment to gather the strength to speak up, struggled to fill her lungs with the air needed.

What came out was just the wail of a newborn. Then she fell asleep again.

A part of her mind awoke when something sweet and wet was pressed upon her broken lips. She sputtered and spat out clots of blood. Her eyes were clouded with a dull film that hid most of the world. Later, when she smelled the cool and sweet wash of the liquid approaching her maw, she parted her mouth and cawed.

‘Poor baby,’ the woman sang. ‘She is hungry.’

Again, grief cloaked Budhani. She had fed babies; she had watched babies wilt with hunger. She felt guilt and anguish; she felt a flaring of anger at the woman for the kindness of sweet milk and unsought love.

Budhani felt strength return to her wings and neck. She threw her legs about to see if she could still grasp with them. If she could open her eyes, if she could find her footing once again, if she could leap off a perch and flap her wings hard, harder than ever before – Budhani told herself this – if she could fly out of this long night into the bright blue day, she could return to Lizzie, she could find a new nest and keep fighting for what remained of her family.

But fatigue pulled Budhani back into sleep before she could speak up.

Time slips forever forward, stubbornly, unyieldingly, cruelly. It carries away the truth of a moment in its snake-jaws. Days immediate to events in which the heart was splintered feel dense and sluggish. The desperation to awake from the dream-world overpowers the mind, but the here and the now return ceaselessly, stubbornly, unyieldingly, cruelly, like the tattoo of a war-drum beating onward through the desolation of a foreign land.

And after a while, snippets of the past that had clung to the mind so far also slip away. Some fall away abruptly, others foretell their absence. First the drumbeat dulls, then it vanishes. For some, this forgetting is aid and rescue. For others, to forget is to dissipate, to be unmade, a curse worse than death, or even its bright mirror – life.

It was such to Budhani. She had to never forget Dharmadhikari, who had condemned her. She had desperately to never forget Lizzie, poor chick, orphaned even though both parents still lived. She had to never forget the king who had coolly sent her away from his house, bereft of justice and daughter.

And she had to never forget Korvin, the mate whom she had loved once, and the crow she wanted to hurt now.

 

Budhani cried one morning after waking up in a swaddle of soft, old cotton clothes because she remembered her home high up in the nesting tree. She remembered all at once the four shiny eggs that had emerged from her, and the three faces that had chirped their names, and the two she had pushed out of the nest, and the one she had left behind. She remembered all at once the dew of the morning and the lazy heat of the afternoon, the ruffle of a breeze and the sting of raindrops. And she remembered the coziness of feeling crowded into a nook by others moving and chatting and laughing all around her.

The woman picked her up, looked at her mouth, looked into her eyes. ‘You have a loud voice, don’t you?’ she whispered to Budhani. Her man stood behind her, asked to hold Budhani. ‘No,’ the woman cooed. ‘She is all mine,’ she stepped away.

No, Budhani said. I am nobody’s, and never will be, she said. Put me down, let me return to the sky, she said – except, no sound came from her but the mewling of a hungry babe. The man and woman laughed.

Budhani reached with a wing to hit the woman’s nose. The web between the splintered bones in her wing had melted away, giving her five stubby claws. She scraped at the woman’s nose, but instead of flinching away with fear the woman laughed more. Budhani grabbed her nose.

‘Noo, noo, noo, noo, noo,’ the woman sang. Her man came to stand behind her once more. They looked at Budhani with eyes that slowly glazed over with fresh tears. ‘She is strong,’ the woman whispered to her man, who first kissed the woman on the temple, then leaned over her shoulder to kiss Budhani’s feeble hand.

‘Our baby,’ he whispered.

Budhani remembered her parents looking at her sometimes, in the old nest in the forest, as she ate. She had once been the reason for warm tears to a pair of parents, but the memory had dimmed and faded. She must have shared such a moment with Korvin, in the first months of Egg and Mouse and Lizzie emerging into the world. But that memory had now become fouled. Now, here, in the house of this human pair, she had switched to the other side of that veil, and caused warm tears of joy to cloud their eyes.

‘She will grow up strong,’ the man said. ‘I can tell from her voice. She has come home now, the daughter for whom we have been praying.’

‘And she will laugh, soon,’ the woman said. Then she gurgled with a laugh that spoke of a pain which she carried for long but was ready to forget.

In that moment, Budhani saw the possibility of one life slipping aside to make place for another. She drew the naked, branched palm of her new limb over her face and found it plucked smooth of feathers. In the pupil of her woman’s eyes was another person reflected – more an infant of the human race than a mother crow, more moved by curiosity than puzzlement.

Over the days that followed her arrival at the house of the humans, Budhani suffered the indignities of being bathed and oiled, sunned and fanned. The man and the woman would talk among themselves as they picked and upturned her, wiped and bundled her, fed and burped her. She cried through their urgent or lazy chatter about what needed doing, who needed going where, why a neighbor was happy or upset.

She cried for every moment she remembered – from when the ivory dome of her eggshell asked to be tapped, right up to when her feathers and the feeling for life had abandoned her in that stormy night. Or sometimes she leaned on their shoulders and listened, letting their low voices lull her into sleep. By and by, she even learned to enjoy the woman’s songs full of silly rhymes about goats on swings and baby elephants getting into a tussle and asking for an older sister to separate them.

One morning, the man picked her up and whispered into her ear, ‘Call me Baba.’

Later in the afternoon, the woman picked her up and whispered, ‘Call me Dai, my little dove. Call me your mother.’

And one day not long after, another man crept close to her and examined her face. He was brown like a chestnut, wrinkled like the flesh of a walnut, tufted with white hair on an otherwise shiny head. She looked defiantly back, tried to shout a challenge.

‘She gurgles and tries to talk back!’ the old man seemed astonished. ‘How old can she be! Two months? Three?’

‘Uncle,’ Dai said, ‘she came to us already gurgling and crying.’

The old man stuck a finger into Budhani’s mouth, and Budhani tried to bite it off.

‘She has no teeth, but she is strong,’ the old man became puzzled, walked away to the door. ‘From which direction did she drop?’

Baba stepped out with the old man. They murmured outside while Dai gently rocked Budhani back and forth. ‘Where did you come from, my dove?’ she asked.

‘It isn’t unheard of, not entirely,’ the old man sat by the fire and told Dai and Baba stories. He spoke of a drop of sweat that fell into the salty sea to become a fearsome warrior. He spoke of a scream that became a hated demon. In a faraway land, a sunbeam entered the ear of a child and birthed a baby boy who had to be put on a reed basket gliding downriver. A god dreamed of itself and became a flood of other gods battling each other’s inner demons. It wasn’t unheard of, this sudden and surprising forming of a child or a god.

‘Sita came from the earth,’ Baba added helpfully. ‘The king plowed his field, and she came to him from the furrows.’

‘And our child has come from the storm and the forest,’ Dai added with hope. The husband and wife waited for the old man to begin nodding – slowly at first, but with cheer and vigor when the weight of the idea convinced him. The old man took Budhani into his arms.

‘Yes – that is your name, Budhani! We will call this your sixth week on earth,’ he said. ‘Budhani! Budhani! Budhani!’ he put his breath into her name and whispered it into her ears.

How to fake a poem in Nepali: Timure ko Bilauna

It is very easy to fake a bad poem in Nepali. All you need is a list of predictable imagery and sentiments, a vague undertone of nationalism washed with an inferiority complex, repeated mention of mothers and wives.

Sample: 

टिमुरेको बिलौना

आमाको टिका र जहानको अँगालोले सजिए पछि     

ऐनामा देखिएको छविलाई मैले 

बन्द गरेर राखेको छु ऐनाभित्रै ।

गोरेटो ओर्लंदा लेकदेखि बेँसीसम्म

मेरा खुट्टा कामेका थिए लाजले — 

त्यसको सम्झना पनि बन्दी बनाइ राखेको छु कतै ।

अहिले भर्खरै चिसो पानी पिएको थिएँ 

काभ्रा मुनिको मूलबाट — 

उहिले आँत भिजाउने यो पँधेरो 

कति तीतो भएछ ! यसलाई पनि 

रुमालमा गाँठो पारि राखेको छु ।

पुर्ख्यौली बहादुर ! नुनको सोझो गर्न जानेको !

लप्पन छप्पन, चोरीचकारी, बेइमानी 

केहि नजानेको बुद्धु । थपनाको बुङ्गे भूत । 

पाँच फुट दुइ इञ्चले आकाश धानेको, नाङ्गै खुट्टा 

धरतीमा जरा गाडेको । नाम्लाको डामले 

निधारभरि जिउनुको इतिवृतान्त लेखेर 

पासपोर्टको लाममा लम्पसार — हजुर, मलाई सस्तैमा लैजानुहोस् ! 

महिनौँसम्म आकाश — वा दामलीका अनुहारमा हाँसो — वा 

रुखका डालीमा खेल्दै गरेको जोडी चखेवा वा — 

ऋतुहरूले चोला फेर्दाका बेजोड रंगहरू वा — 

ऐनामा मलिन आफ्नै प्रतिबिम्ब हेर्न नपाए मैले 

अघि ऐनाभित्रै बन्द राखेको छवि सम्झुँला । 

गरम रेतको बादलभित्र सास फेर्न नपाउँदा 

आफ्नै लेकको शितल सम्झनालाई बोलाउँला ।

      

मेटिने तिर्खा होइन मेरो — यो त सँधै झन् झन् जलि रहला ।

काभ्रा मुनिको मूल मेरो रुमालको गाँठोमा छ 

अनि मेरा पाखुरामा बल, मेरो छातीमा सपनाहरू 

यौटा काठे बाकसमा अटाउने भन्दा कति, कति धेरै ।    

म मुगलाने, म लाहुरे, म सँधै देश पस्ने मान्छे — 

मै बहादुर, मै गोर्खा, मै हली, मै गोठालो —  

मलेशियाको प्लास्टिक गोदामदेखि 

अरब मरुभूमिका ऊँट गोठसम्म 

मेरै भरमा घाम बित्ता बित्ता सर्दै पश्चिम धस्सिन्छ ।

तैपनि म सस्तोमै बिकाउ छु, हजुर —    

मलाई सस्तैमा लैजानुहोस् !

सम्झनाको गाँठो फुकेर यदि म भक्कानिएँ भने, 

आमाको टिका, जहानको अँगालो सम्झेर रोएँ भने 

मलाई फिर्ता पठाउने काठे बाकस 

कत्तिनै महँगो छ र, हजुर ?

मलाई सस्तैमा लैजानुहोस् !

Happy New Year!

https://lalitmag.com/i-really-gotta-have-those-fries-man/

I think I should return...

to these old haunts...

begin again to write

pretty words...

For a writer, I've been remarkably unproductive these past couple of years.

I have written one (flawed) screenplay, and a whole lot of half-finished nonsense :(

I have published only two things in all of 2019:

https://lalitmag.com/four-distances-found-on-a-page-in-a-book-on-a-bookshelf-in-a-hotel/

and

https://www.recordnepal.com/art-letter/a-bowstring-snaps/

Okay, also an account of my days living hungry on the streets of LA, in La.Lit... but that's all the material I have produced in 2019. Published stuff amounts to about 8k words only.

Sneak! 

Land: How Much Reform Is Enough Reform?

The High Level Commission for Land Reform, chaired by Ghanendra Basnet has submitted its report to the Prime Minister. It recommends measures that are inadequate, and in fact regressive compared to the failed land reform that was attempted during Sher Bahadur Deuba's first tenure as Prime Minister around the year 2000.

The only "revolutionary" suggestion here is that the government shouldn't provide compensation to landowners for land exceeding the old limit [70 ropanis in the mid-hills] while implementing the new ceiling on the amount of land allowed per household. This reduces the budget required to implement the recommendations--this is obvious. More importantly, it helps in reducing the gap between the rich and the poor. It takes away significant amount of wealth from the already rich, and injects the poor with a significant amount of new wealth.

If a farmer [most likely, though, an absentee landlord] who had 70 ropanis of land will lose 15 ropanis without compensation. That is approximately 21.5% of land value gone without compensation. But this calculation means nothing: the old reform wasn't really implemented at all.

The report says that 125,000 new hectares of land will be freed through the proposed reforms. The amount of land required for the estimated 1,407,100 families of squatters [sukumbasi], marginal farmers [owning parcels too small for meaningful farming] and non-landowning [bhumiheen] farmers is at 421, 770 hectares.

Even after the reform, three-quarters of the farmers/squatters who need land will be left without land.

What sort of a reform seeks to leave 3 out of 4 citizens, for whose sake the reform is being implemented, without any reward?

Instead of aiming for a more or less equitable distribution of land, it recommends giving non-landowning farmers a minimum of 10 ropanis in the mid-hills and 5 Kattha in the Terai. Somebody who has been working the land of absentee landowners will likely see the parcels they have been working reduce [to 55 ropanis] with an addition of 10 ropanis to their own land.

Let us assume Annapurna Nepali worked on a 70 ropani parcel for an absentee landowner. She would have been entitled to the produce of 35 of those ropanis. After the reform, her share reduces to 27.5 ropanis, but, with new land she owns now, it goes up to 37.5 ropanis. That is a 7% increase in her income. Good for her. Also, she gains this from a *reduced* amount of effort spent: from 70 ropanis, she is working only 65. That is a reduction of approximately 7% of labor, assuming the size of a land parcel corresponds to effort required. I know this is not scientific at all, and it doesn't hold true for other figures.

If she were working 45 ropanis previously, and got 22.5 ropanis worth of produce, she could work 55 ropanis now, and get 32.5 ropanis worth of produce. That is a 44% gain in income from a 22% *increase* in labor.

If she were working 20 ropanis of land and previously recieved 10 ropanis worth of produce, she could now work 30 ropanis and get 20 ropanis worth. That is a 50% increase in labor that returns a 100% increase in income.

Let us assume Annapurna Nepali worked a 10 ropani parcel of land--much closer to the average size of land owned by mid-hill farmers. She would be entitled to the produce from 5 ropanis, but with the new gains, she will have the produce from 15 ropanis, after working 20 ropanis. Her labor doubles, her gains become three-folds.

Although, if her new possessions approach that of her old landowner, she might no longer want to work the absentee landowner's parcel. Why would she?

Assuming that land costs Rs 30,000/- per ropani in a village in the mid-hills, the absentee landlord stands to lose, in one go,Rs 30,000/- per ropani over the 70 ropani limit, while Annapurna stands to gain Rs 300,000/- worth of new property.

This is no mean gesture. It will empower the poorest, while impressing into the landowning class that the state is capable of enforcing measures aimed at equality.

This can then translate to other spheres of culture: more empowered women means less tolerance of discrimination based on gender. More empowered dalits means less tolerance of discrimination based on castes.

More empowered indigenous farmer in the Terai means less tolerance towards ethnic discrimination by Pahadi zamindars, etcetera.

According to the report, a very large fraction of agricultural land in Nepal is owned by absentee landowners, while a very large fraction of agricultural workers are non-landowning or squatters, or own insignificant parcels of land.

This dissonance between ownership and labor leads to inefficiency of production. Available capital is not put to work at its prime capacity.

Where is the most obvious flaw in this report?

In its apparent lack of assessment of land by its quality.

A family of 5--close to the national average--would need at least 5 ropanis of very good, spring-fed paddy [abbal] to grow enough rice to feed it through the year. If it is non-irrigated land that relies upon rain alone, the family needs more than 10 ropanis for rice alone. Forget about how much land is needed if the family is to survive on maize corn, or millet, or wheat, etc. Each is a different scenario.

I can think of at least one reason this reform might fail: sale of newly acquired land by rural families who see it as an opportunity to move to urban centres. Often times, the single largest purse of money sought by small rural farmers is not to add capital to their farming operations, but to leave the country to go work in the UAE or similar labor purgatory. Out of ambition and necessity, the next generation of children from these families tend to grow up in small urban centres, gaining formal education while losing out on traditional training in farming [almanac] knowledge. If this happens, the parcels of land owned by small farmers might change rapidly, and agricultural land newly begotten might soon change into residential land once remittance money starts flowing in.

The report has recommendations for zoning laws to regulate and enforce optimal utilization of various grades of land. But that is yet another set of laws to create and enforce.

Ithari bazaarai ma...

Oh timro hamro maya basyo
Itahari bazaarai ma...

I passed out while writing the previous post, two nights ago. Much has happened since--mostly, the filling of a vast and empty vessel--my ignorance about this area. I can't get into the specifics, for lack of time, what what, but, here are a few points:

There is a real and intense friction between groups, ethnic and political, of which the poorest are the perpetual victims;

There is a really good chance that the best beef/veal to be got for good money in Kolkata actually comes from the Koshi Tappu Wildlife Reserve.

I am not kidding. One half of my mind thought: WTF? How can that be allowed?
The other half thought: sweeet... grass-fed, wild beeves, fit for the gods...

There is no real consensus among responsible scientists about how many species of birds there are in Nepal, of how many of each. Those who flaunt numbers around are usually not scientifically trained, and don't have any stake in serious scholarship.

The Warden is the King.

The King has courtiers. Some of these courtiers keep herds of cattle inside the reserve, thus depleting grass and grazing/roaming area. This forces wildlife towards artificially created and managed grasslands where improved varieties are available: farms, with wheat and rice. This leads to a direct confrontation between the small farmer and the smaller animal: Arna, deers, boars. This leads to the punitive trapping of wild animals.

In one method, farmers put small hooks in the ears of corns: wheat, for instance. Fishing hooks, with barbs. Cheap, but efficient. Deer strays away from the reserve, discovers rewarding pastures in a wheat field, nibbles on some fresh wheat grass and corn, bites into a barb. Deer panics, moves the barb around in its tongue, throat--but the barb doesn't give. It digs in deeper, or moves from

Khagendra Lamichhane

The Right to Action

-Prawin Adhikari

In a generation there is a handful of artists that shapes a community's experiences of the arts. Rarely is there a figure who spans across genres and disciplines and, quietly, patiently, over a significant span of their own youth, create a body of work that immediately becomes treasured. If one is to take the past fifteen years of the theater in Nepal, one name shines bright: Khagendra Lamichhane.

As disclosure, I must boast here that I call him a friend. I have known him for about five years now, in different capacities. We have collaborated, sometimes successfully and sometimes with nothing to show for it - but always amicably, and with each hour spent in his company, my esteem for his humility, his talent and his ambition has grown. A goat-farm obligation drew him away from Kathmandu when our interview was scheduled, so I am relying upon myself to report on him, drawing on the many conversations we've had over the years, over heaps of boiled mutton and a bottle of whiskey, or riding on his scooter to reach a studio in time to finish something, or when we spent days and nights frenetically working through a screenplay.

Lamichhane was born in Syangja to a family of farmers. He grew up in the village, with the usual village boyhood experience of playing truant occasionally and falling in love secretly, reading whatever he could get his hands on, and fancying himself a poet and a writer. His parents are hardworking farmers, and had raised him within the vicissitudes of a hill farmer's life in a village where all forms of inequalities existed. Flavors of that childhood are recorded in quite a few memoirs published in Kantipur weekend supplement Koseli and its Nagarik equivalent, Akshar. One, available at , speaks about his first novel, published and perished in short order, and gives a good insight into the man himself.

Khagendra Lamichhane moved to Pokhara after passing the SLC exams and enrolled at the I. Ed. course at Prithwi Narayan Campus, only to fail both Compulsory Nepali and Compulsory English. It was then that he realized he wasn't the studying kind at all - he had read enough novels to write one for himself. Lamichhane set out to do just that - write a novel so beautiful it would win the Madan Puraskar. Had it typed out at a Cybercafe, sold a gold chain to get it printed. Burned it when the cattle at home needed kudo. The final two sentences of the memoir read - 'There was no smoke at all. But the corners of my eyes were wet.' (Translation mine)

In this story is the seed of - or, a mirror to - most of the characters Lamichhane has created for the stage and the screen: a character with a tender worldview and an endearing naïveté, but also someone given to the extremes of desperate romanticism. In his stories characters the least and the most awesome conflate in the smallest moment: think of Tulke in Talakjung vs Tulke, blowing on hot potatoes picked out of the hearth while bragging about his revolutionary credentials. Or, in Peeda Geet, his one-man play, going from the helpless plea of, 'Include me in your team, young men, so that I can get work and feed myself,' to shouting at the young and strong for making fun of him, to accepting a doughnut and hot tea and eating with gusto. His characters for the stage, especially the men, seem to swing between tenderness and egotism, between bracing themselves to the enormity of the universe's inherent cruelty and complaining with a childish insistence upon being heard.

In Pokhara, Lamichhane met two people who would shape his future: the actor and director Anup Baral - who is, in his own right, a fine painter of water colors; and with the poet, novelist and playwright Sarubhakta, who now heads the Academy. Lamichhane moved to Kathmandu to begin his career as a writer and actor, and immediately sank into the despairing life of a young man displaced in the city, living in want, but pursuing his heart's desire.

He started writing plays for the stage while he was training under Anup Baral to be an actor. Not many people know, but, apart from the first novel that went up in smoke, Khagendra Lamichhane has written enough plays to be published under two titles by Gurukul: Pani Photo and Katha Natak. He has been among the most prolific writers of original plays in the past decade - his contribution not limited to the stage alone. But, plays like Jaar (adapted from IB Rai's short story by the same name), Talakjung vs Tulke (adapted from Lu Xun’s story The true story of Ah Q ), Paani Photo, Peeda Geet, Khuma (adapted from Mahesh Bikram Shah's short story), and Atal Bahadur ko Aatanka are familiar names to lovers of the Nepali theater scene. He has taken his plays to numerous festivals around the world, including the prestigious Edinburgh Fringe Festival and festivals across India, and to Japan and Thailand. Remember - these plays didn't travel as most Nepali artists travel, to cater to a Nepali diaspora desperate to dance to a few songs after drowning themselves in the liquor of nostalgia, or as a billionaire poet's readings of his own poems. They traveled on their artistic merit alone.

He is also an award winning producer of radio plays. Lamichhane was an integral member of the team behind BBC Media Action's series Katha Mitho Sarangi Ko, for which he wrote a number of radio plays and also directed them, although he was also involved as a producer of the series. Katha Mitho Sarangi Ko was at one time the most popular radio play series in Nepal. A wandering minstrel singer - played by the very talented Dilu Gandarbha, who was also the musician for the series - traveled through Nepal, finding stories about our society, the good and the bad, and narrating them to a wider audience. One story could stretch to four or five episodes, each 'shot' in location: the actors and locally cast non-actors went through lengthy rehearsals to get everything right and, tracked by a group of sound engineers, performed until every nuance of sound was captured. The series was so successful that it became emulated by the BBC in other parts of the world. It succeeded in capturing the vast diversity of languages and dialects that is the essential characteristic of a nation like ours. More than that, it brought together a scattered network of actors from across the country. Go to any theater performance in the city and talk to the people behind the production, and you'll likely hear that they have each worked with Lamichhane's BBC Media Action production, and enjoyed the experience, too.

After a long absence from the traditional stage and  a successful stint as a writer, producer and director of radio plays, Lamichhane was approached to act on the silver screen. In Badhshala, he plays a captured Maoist, tortured and blindfolded through the length of the movie, except at the very end where the audience briefly sees his bearded face. I happened to meet him and the actor Dayahang Rai a few days after that, and saw the camaraderie that had developed from their days of acting at the Gurukul stage. After a brief agreement to dedicate themselves to making the acting appear as realistic as possible, Lamichhane realized that he had got the short end of the stick: Rai was playing an Royal Nepal Army man, in charge of beating the shit out of Lamichhane's character, and he didn't hold back his kicks and punches. Lamichhane had bruises all over his body from that experience.

Soon after that, Bhaskar Dhungana approached Lamichhane for a role in Suntali. Concurrently, Lamichhane was also working on polishing up the screenplay draft for a third-degree adaptation of Talakjung vs Tulke. I had the honor, along with Lamichhane's longtime friend and colleague Shivani Singh Tharu, of going on a three-day retreat to Nagarkot. There, we dedicated ourselves to the task of polishing the draft, starting around noon and finishing late into the morning, warming ourselves with an excellent home-brew at a tea shop down the road, cordially arguing, conceding, accepting, challenging, correcting, until, exhausted, we couldn't think anymore. I saw his dedication to the craft and purity of intention, and he won my respect.

Therefore, when Suntali was about to go on the floor, we asked him to help polish the dialogues. I had written it for the region, but the patina of lived, lively sounds that Lamichhane brings to his dialogues, and the subtle inflection that adds to his characters was far superior to anything I could write. When Suntali came out, and people liked or hated it, uniformly the dialogues resonated with the people. But a lot of that effect was created by Lamichhane, again over a few nights at his place, with platters of fruit (he was trying to lose weight for the role in Suntali, and also for Talakjung vs Tulke, which was slated to commence within days after the Suntali schedule), and of course, that bottle of whiskey - which we barely touched out of excitement for what was happening on the page. Suntali had already been acted out, for every role and every line, by Bhaskar Dhungana. Now, Lamichhane and I acted out each line, weighing it, testing it for the tongue. So much of the comedy was in the sounds.

Talakjung vs Tulke finally brought him to the larger Nepali audience. (My mother hasn't seen the movie, but she saw and recognized him in a television promo. His line 'manmaa lageko kura bhanna ni ke ko sharam laaunchha ni!' bowled her over. She is a fan.) After a very long time - and quite generously, I believe not since Madan Krishna and Hari Bansha's earlier works - had a comedy been so full of such rounded, complicated characters. To the thoughtful viewer, Tulke's place in the world was a metaphor for a lot of the change that our nation has seen in the recent decades. 'Karantikari bhaye ni munchhe marna chahin nahuni,' Tulke says at one point. That is the ethos of the common Nepali person: even the most oppressed in our society - the women, dalits in the hills and the Terai, the landless tillers - they seem too reluctant to be brought over to the side of total violence required for a total revolution. It is not that Nepalis are given to quietly enduring, although fatalism does inculcate that habit in most: it is that the lull of the land, the neighborly empathy makes people averse to quick and cathartic violence. Talakjung vs Tulke fully captures this disrupt, through diction and humor of a sort that is becoming more and more familiar as it hews closer to our soil (and farther from external influences), and by bringing back the empathy and pathos characteristic of our societies.

I envy this man. Apart from running a fully organic orange orchard and vegetable farm in Syangja, he is toiling away on his novel. The last time we talked, we was well past the half-way mark, while I have been deleting the first few pages of mine. His production company is preparing for the second venture - Pashupati Prasad - which promises a radical new story set in an unusual and challenging setting. He recently staged Peeda Geet, his one-man play, and filmed it in its entirety, so that he can slowly, over the years, make all of his work available online for free. Talakjung vs Tulke will soon come out on DVD, with English subtitles - and this will only help bring his talent and dedication to a greater audience. And, as a farmer and the son of farmers, he knows intimately that efforts take a long time to take root, longer to gain the nutrient of experience and hardship, and even longer to day take to enrich themselves with the light that comes from practiced patience before they can bear fruits.

And he lives without the burden of anxiety or regret: he will readily commit to the fire of a new beginning anything perceived failure from the past, and barely flinch. Nepal needs a few more of Khagedra Lamichhanes - for its arts to attain greater refinement; for the voice of a region to be represented before the entire nation, for the slow labor of love to bear bright fruits. Until we have more, we will have to be content with just the one Khagendra Lamichhane among us, and take pride in him.  

Menuka Pradhan

Confounding Expectations

Her mother tongue is Manipuri. Her father was in the Indian Army's Manipur Rifles, and while stationed in Manipur, he met and married a local woman and started a family. She was born in Manipur, and spent her childhood there, before returning to her father's village in Nawalparasi of the Nepali Madhesh. She learned to speak Nepali, and bloomed into her extrovert self. Perhaps the need to express herself to her peers in an entirely new language forced her into a habit of performance, of representing and reserving different aspects of herself. When she was in the 7th grade, a local television channel cast her in a television series. After all, she was a well known face: even as a child she had enjoyed performing at cultural shows, dancing with precocious talent. Like most people who go on to become performers, she had been performing at home - her parents loved Bollywood, and nearly everyday the family sat down to watch the latest Bollywood movie. After finishing her high school education, everything pointed towards Kathmandu: there was the bigger stage, there was the seat of glamour and the possibility of stardom. The television screen is too small for a grand ambition; and to be confined to a local television channel in Chitwan was unacceptable to her. Eight movies later, we know her as Menuka Pradhan. And, today her star is rising bright. Today, there is no looking back: the world of Nepali cinema is for her to conquer.

I had forgotten that I had seen her first in a thriller called Ek Din Ek Raat, directed by Dev Kumar Shrestha. Like most movies in that genre, it assembles a dysfunctional group of friends who then are murdered, one by one. Her latest outing on the silver screen, Zhigrana, directed by Pasang Lama, enjoyed a successful release recently, and also featured Pradhan as a member of a group of friends who go on a journey into unknown territory, and where the attractive young people are killed, one by one. Vigilante, directed by Dipendra K. Khanal, also had her run terrified in full 3D, before being killed off. Perhaps Menuka Pradhan  gets cast in such soles because she possesses the perfect blend of histrionics and vulnerability - the cockiness that makes a character perform the sort of indiscretion that upsets the balance in an unknown place and invites reprisal, and the vulnerability and beauty that makes the audience root for the character, for them to escape their forewarned grisly fate at the last minute. Or, perhaps she is just a good performer, with the grace and subtlety required to play a diverse range of emotions and characters.

Because, she has also shown us another side of her capabilities as an actor. In director Prachanda Man Shrestha's Visa Girl,

a work admired by industry insiders for its balanced handling of the myriad characters and for a lush visual aesthetic, Pradhan plays an inner-city Newar girl, secretly in love with the boy next door. He dabbles at being a musician; she is a talented songwriter. Pradhan plays this character with the restraint and charm of a girl on the cusp of realizing her womanhood; of insisting to be seen and noticed by the boy she loves and whom she waits patiently for as he grows out of his extended adolescence into becoming a man. There is a moment in the movie when, out of frustration, Pradhan's character draws a veil over her face, refusing to let her paramour see her face full of frustration. Perhaps another moment of perfect vulnerability and perfect strength hasn't been created in Nepali cinema, with just that simple gesture.

A director essentially shapes an actor's performance on the screen. The actor must meet and surpass the director's vision for the character, in service of the wider narrative. "The way he explained small details about the character was the best thing about working with Prachanda," Pradhan says. "Whatever performance you can see on the screen in Visa Girl owes to him." It is sweet of her to credit her director fully with her breakthrough role, but those who saw Visa Girl in the theater did take immediate notice of her potential. This was followed by a series of other roles that didn't require her to be killed - the tomboy in director Kumar Bhattarai's Utsav, a blink-and-miss appearance in Subarna Thapa's same-sex love story Sungava, and now, the most widely anticipated movie in recent Nepali cinema history - as a village belle in Pranab Joshi's already a viral hit movie, Resham Fililli.

There is a division of sorts in our industry between what is deemed the rural world and the urban - in terms of production, and in term of consumption. Since director Alok Nembang's Sano Sansar, movies have either been produced with a decidedly urban aesthetic, geared towards the 16 to 24 year old market of young men and women, or they have been decidedly of the rural stamp. This division isn't present just between the aesthetics for the movies - this division also exists among the pool of actors available to populate either kind of movies. Karma and Vinay Shrestha, who started with Sano Sansaar, perhaps used to most vividly typify the urban. Menuka Pradhan has been in at least two movies with Vinay Shrestha and Karma by now, and in three with Shrestha alone. Yet, she has also acted in the decidedly art-house Sungava, and will soon be seen in Rato Ghar, a movie by the decidedly mainstream writer-director Suraj Subba Nyalbo. In this way, like Reecha Sharma before her, Pradhan is bridging the gap between the extremities of the industry, while also creating her own presence.

Menuka Pradhan's journey to this space wasn't straightforward. She did arrive in Kathmandu nearly like a cliché - she moved from her hometown Nawalparasi to pursue a career in acting, with no more than a few contacts in the acting circles. Right away, she acted in a music video for an Anju Panta song. But, after that, despite showing up at numerous auditions, she wasn't being cast in anything worthwhile. While auditioning for the movie Baghchal, the director Jagadish Thapa asked Pradhan had come to Kathmandu to become a heroine - Heroni banna aayeko?  No, Pradhan replied - I have come to become an actor. This tenacity and self-confidence endeared her to people in the industry. While auditioning for Ek Din Ek Raat, her co-star and also the casting director for the movie, Anup Baral, encouraged her to train for the theater.

Pradhan went on to act in a number of stage productions after joining the Actors' Studio in 2011. She appeared in Studio 7's production of Conference of Gods; Angels in America directed by Deborah Merula; the Actors' Studio production of Kafka, presented at Moksh; and as Rhea, the protagonist in A View from the Bridge; in Chekhov's Seagulls. The knowledge she gained from those busy years on the stage has helped her a lot now - to every character she brings the same meticulous preparation and imagination that made her time on the state so memorable. 

Menuka Pradhan then began her stint in the theater, staying away from the movies for a good few years. She trained at Baral's Actors' Studio, and appeared in many productions. She played a village dog in the Actors' Studio production of the poet and playwright Sarubhakta's Malami. Pradhan still thinks of this as her fondest role on the stage. As an actor learns to embody a character, to interpret the world through the movement of the body alone, the experience can be very liberating for the actor. Pradhan described the experience just so - that, to play the village dog lolling about while catastrophic events unfold int he background, was very liberating. This ability to fully commit to the character must have come handy for Pradhan when she played a pretty young thing unable to keep her hands off her boyfriend, in Zhingrana. In the uncensored version was perhaps the most frenetic sex scene. Was it difficult to shoot that?

    'No,' says Pradhan. Nikun Shrestha, who shares the scene with her, was apparently nervous before the shot. But, Pradhan asked that he adopt a 'take no prisoner' approach to the scene. Director Pasang Sherpa guided the duo through, but it was really the presence of the director of photography Shailendra Karki that assured Pradhan that all would be well. Remember the time when Nepali cinema had come under the thrall of the brief success of Chapali Height, and a slew of movies like ATM were set to assault us with their tacky aesthetics? Pradhan was worried that without the careful and graceful work of a director of photography like Karki, the work would come out vulgar. But she was happy with how the scene came out.

'I need to know all the details about the character and her back story. It helps me, but it can be irritating to others,' Pradhan says. She repeatedly quizzed Lama, the director of Zhigrana, about her character, her motivations, the choices she makes at any given time. At times, the director and others in the production team were annoyed at her insistence, but it helped her, it helped the movie. That is the sort of person Pradhan comes across as - exhaustively inquisitive, explosively full of energy, insisting upon a disarming sincerity towards her work. When she committed to the stage, she did it with a single-minded devotion, playing in as many stage productions as she could get her hands on, honing her craft so late in her performing career - but so early in her life. Everybody speaks well of her, everybody appreciates her work. That is no mean achievement in an industry where nobody is a permanent friend or a permanent foe.

Her affability has created some interesting opportunities for her. After he finished shooting Talakjung vs Tulke, director Nischal Basnet wanted to inject additional magic into his movie, repeating a formula that had worked well for him in Loot - an item song with a pretty ditty and a beautiful woman. Menuka Pradhan had hesitation first: she wasn't sure if she had it in her to do an item dance. But she auditioned anyway, dancing to a song from the movie Dhoom 3. When Basnet assured her that the song would be a tribute to the history of Nepali cinema, full of praise for the giants who have passed before. The song became a viral hit, and Pradhan danced beautifully in it.   

Menuka Pradhan has high hopes from Resham Fililli - produced by a long time co-actor Vinay Shrestha, and written and directed by the talented Pranab Joshi, who has proved himelf over and over again in the music video scene. Pradhan plays Sunita, a peripheral character, if the narrative thrust of the movie revolves around Shrestha and Kameshwor Chaurasiya. But, the trend will change, she says. 'Earlier, only men had access to the wider world, to the experiences that come out of living in the world outside the home. But now more and more women are seeing the world outside their homes. They have more and more interesting experiences - and stories need interesting characters with interesting experiences,' she says. As more young women have a wider range of worldly experiences, more such voices will find a place in literature and in cinema. Of course, until then, young women will have to keep confounding the expectations of the men who form the establishment everywhere - including the world of Nepali cinema.

Menuka Pradhan, whose maternal grandfather was a Hindu priest, and whose mother eloped to marry a Nepali Newar in the Indian Army, was born in her great aunt's home. In the days after her birth, the infant threw her feet and arms around a lot, prompting her great aunt to remark that she would grow up to become a dancer. Thence the name - Menuka, a celestial nymph, whose beauty would derail many a great fate across many a myth from South Asia of the Puranic times. It is no surprise then that the slow gyration of destiny has brought Menuka Pradhan to our hearts, to remain there and intrigue us with her talented performances. This is but the beginning of a shining and accomplished career, one hopes.