Gopi Sapkota
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| Gopi Sapkota |
Having
wandered on campus corridors for a while looking for my classroom, I recall, I
had entered Room Number 11, where some 30 or 40 semi-attentive students listened
to a lecturer, who I would later know as Anita Madam. It was my first day of class
as an M.A. student at Ratna Rajya Campus.
On
that day, I didn’t know two things would happen in the future. First, out of
those 40 unknown faces, I would find Nirmala and marry her; and the second, I
would make decades-long friendship with Khem K. Aryal and write about him following
the publication of his book in the United States, something we didn’t hope could
happen to us one day.
In
the last 27-28 years of our friendship, you can’t imagine how many hours we
must have spent discussing writing, publishing, recognition, publicity,
contribution to Nepali literature, what not.
One
day, during our early years of our friendship, I remember, one interesting
incident happened. Khem invited me to his rented room for tea. It was a decent-size
room, painted in light yellow color, with a small book rack in a corner. When I
was scanning his room, I saw a painting hanging on the wall over the book rack,
signed by the artist as Kumar Shishir.
It
was a familiar name to me. I asked Khem whether he knew the painter. He smiled
and asked me, ‘Do you know him?’
I
said I knew him by his name but didn’t know him personally.
He
smiled again, and I sensed that he himself could be the artist.
I
asked, ‘Are you him?’
He
laughed, and then both of us laughed.
At
that point, Khem had already published a collection of Nepali poems in his pen
name, Kumar Shishir. His stories were getting published in Nepal’s prestigious
literary journals like Madhuparka and Mirmire.
As
we were completing our master’s degree, I could see that he was getting more
into English writing while I continued to write in Nepali despite writing in
English occasionally. Both of us were getting more serious about writing, while
struggling to find a space in the literary landscape of Kathmandu.
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| Khem K. Aryal, Author of The In-Betweeners |
During
those NWEN days, Khem’s two English poetry books, Kathmandu Saga and
Other Poems and Epic Teashop, were published in Kathmandu.
He took the lead to publish Of Nepalese Clay, and co-edited it with
Professors Padma Devkota and Hriseekesh Upadhyay for seven years. Most of the
Nepalese writers writing in English featured in journal. The journal was also instrumental
to producing many new writers in English.
Samrat
Upadhyay and Manjushree Thapa were our idols back then. Samrat’s debut short
story collection, Arresting God in Kathmandu, which won him the Whiting
Award, and Manjushree Thapa’s The Tutor of History, were creating a big
noise among English readers in Kathmandu and that inspired all of us. We too dreamt
of publishing our books in English from the United States or United Kingdom one
day, though that one day didn’t appear anywhere on the visible horizon.
I
decided at one point, though, I would not bother about writing in English. I
was making my space in Nepali writing, with books published from the Academy
and Ratna Pustak, which were considered top publishing venues those days. I
continued to concentrate on Nepali writing, whereas Khem continued writing in
English. His dedication, passion, and his belief in himself has finally led to the
publication of collection of his stories, The In-Betweeners,
from an American publishing house, Braddock Avenue Books, and that makes me feel
that the dream we saw together long ago has come true. I cannot be happier for
him and for Nepali writing in English as a whole.
The
number of Nepali writers writing in English is growing, within Nepal and
outside Nepal, but we have yet to see writers of major consequence since
Upadhyay and Thapa. I genuinely hope that the publication of The
In-Betweeners will be just a beginning for Khem.
Khem
is a happy person in life, but when it comes to writing he is never happy. The
time and effort he invests in editing, crafting and revising amaze me. It seems
that he enjoys the process of writing more than the writing itself. I am
envious of his patience in waiting for publication. I remember that a novel he
wrote about twenty years ago was accepted by a small publisher in Delhi, but he
stepped back and never got it published.
In
terms of his subject matter, Khem deals with socio-political and family issues.
He picks up simple but somehow weird characters from the society, examines them
closely, and crafts their stories in carefully designed plots with artistic
details; most of the time, playing with their ambivalent mental states.
On
the surface, the stories in The In-Betweeners are stories of Nepali
immigrants in the USA, struggling to establish themselves in the new country while
still thinking of their life back in Nepal. However, you delve into them more,
the stories will open new windows to understanding human predicaments in
general. I feel that these stories are more than just the stories of
in-betweeners, or they make me feel that all of us are in-betweeners. They deal
with human weaknesses and resilience, and they deal with personal and social absurdities
we all are part of.
Khem’s
stories are unique as they deal with seemingly minute issues that most of us
even don’t think of writing on. While reading some of his stories, you may get
irritated with his characters and feel like shouting at them for not sorting
out even a minor problem. The main character in “Shopping for Glasses” suffers
for long simply because he is unable to decide which frames to buy and the
shopkeepers are not forcing him to buy any, unlike in Nepal. The stories feel so
deep that readers will find hard it to come out from the fictional well that
the writer has dug. I think, that’s the success of a writer. I wish The In-Betweeners
a big success.
(Courtesy: The Rising Nepal, Friday Supplement, 26 January 2024)
