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There has never before been a Nepali author published in the West. ARRESTING GOD IN
KATHMANDU ends that drought and gives a fresh and truly bright voice to family-driven
angst and dysfunction. Since topics like arranged marriages aren't all that common in your
everyday American short stories, Samrat Upadhyay has the opportunity here to mine caverns
of human existence that will be news to us.
God is a big presence in a place like Kathmandu. Prayer is a very public thing, and
privacy is hard to come by. Your family is what defines you --- their status in the world
and your status within it. "I don't think all that much. What's there to think about?
Life is what God gives us." In "The Good Shopkeeper," Upadhyay's Pramod
does not want to settle for what God has given him, and that seems to be in complete
conflict with the laissez-faire, "what-does-it-matter-it's-predestined" attitude
his happily-servile wife has adopted. In "Deepak Misra's Secretary," it is only
when someone has left his side that Misra finds the appropriate emotions for their
relationship, unable to accept what has happened between them and wishing to return to a
normalcy from which he had once run. Love and desire are dangerous --- they can get you
branded as criminal, contribute to growing rifts in your family security, drive you mad,
run counter to your destiny and, thus, fortune. Kathmandu, according to Upadhyay, suffers
from so much subversive and subjugated emotion that it might be as dangerous to love
freely there as it would be to live on the streets of any rousing urban American
metropolis.
The translation is excellent and contributes to our being moved by the sharp and exacting
words the author uses to give voice to the hidden and unspeakable desires and dreams of
his characters. Samrat Upadhyay has made literary history in two ways: besides his general
introduction of Western readers to Nepal, he also introduces to us a whole new genre of
family dysfunction. In fact, maybe he should come here and get a job writing for "The
Sopranos." An auspicious debut that screams for him to take on the novel as his next
project.
--- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano
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