Village Life

More than 90 percent of Nepal's total population lives in rural areas, and there are few large urban centers in the hill regions that are the natural home of the Nepali language. Indeed, if a story is set in an urban environment, it is usually that of the Kathmandu Valley. It is not surprising that rural life is the backdrop to about one-third of these stories; although they may live in Kathmandu, many authors grew up in a village environment. A distinction can be drawn nevertheless between stories that are self-consciously "village stories," written either to paint an authentic picture of rural society or to point out some undesirable feature of it, and stories in which events simply happen to take place in a village context.

Village stories were rather more common during the early phase of

the short story's development in Nepali. This can be accounted for, at least, in part, by the popularity and influence of the Hindi/Urdu writer "Premchand." Almost all of Premchand's multitudinous stories are set in the villages of northern India. Despite his somewhat idealized, Gandhian view of rural life, he was often concerned about depicting the plight of the poor, oppressed by hypocritical priests and exploited by landowners and moneylenders. More than an echo of Premchand's fiction can be found in early village stories in Nepali.

"A Blaze in the Straw" (1935) is the most celebrated of Mainali's ever-popular stories and is the archetypal village story. The original title, "Paralko Ago," is rendered literally here, although there was a temptation to entitle it "A Storm in a Teacup." The concept behind the title is of a blazing row that flares up fiercely but burns out very quickly. The main purpose of the story is to paint a picture of a relationship between a man and his wife that is authentic and amusing and that ultimately imparts a kind of moral lesson. In this, Mainali is undoubtedly influenced by Premchand, especially in the use of proverbs and rural colloquialisms (for a selection of Premchand's stories in translation, see Premchand 1988). "A Blaze in the Straw" has now entered the folklore of Nepali-speaking communities; it is acted out in school dramas throughout the region and was recently made into a feature film, complete with Bombay-style musical interludes.

Shivkumar Rai is a noted writer from Darjeeling who developed this tradition further. Rai's particular talent was to write simple but evocative tales based on his observation of characters in the everyday life of the Darjeeling area, and in this he closely resembled Mainali. "The Price of Fish" (Machako Mol , 1945?) a melodramatic tale of the simple ambitions and untimely demise of a local fisherman, is one of the best-known. stories of Indian Nepali literature:

He cast his net into the same muddy pool. Again, the fish were mesmerized by the light from his torch. Twenty or thirty fell into his net. Rané found fish wherever he looked, in every basket he pulled out from around the dam. He felt neither hungry nor tired. His hopes grew wings, and he did not care how hard he worked.

Black clouds rose up in the west; a flood of water thundered down from the peaks. Little did Rané know that Yamaraj^[2] was coming, wading down with the torrent. He heard the waters dashing against the rocks, and he began to pick up his fish from the beach. But the river engulfed him and swept him away. Rané was dismayed by the loss of the fish he had labored so hard to catch; he did not realize that he was being borne away, too. As the flood washed him down river, he cried, "Is it so high then, the price of fish?" But before tie could complete the sentence he was lost in the waters. (Jhyalbata 1949, 236)

[2] Yamaraj is the lord of death and the underworld.

Ramesh Bikal's "A Splendid Buffalo" (Lahuri Bhainsi , c. 1962) is an example of a story in which the nature of rural life and society is the central topic. This is probably the most cynical depiction of village Nepal ever written and is justly famous. Its theme is reminiscent of that of Premchand's best-loved novel, The Gift of a Cow (Godan ), first published in 1936. Lukhuré, a poor farmer or perhaps even a bonded laborer, has bought himself a buffalo—a symbol of wealth and prestige in the village. His is no ordinary buffalo, either, but a lahuri bhainsi , an animal of high breeding. The dware , a powerful local official, cannot tolerate this; it is a blow to his own status. So he sets about depriving the gullible Lukhuré of his most cherished possession. Bikal conveys the atmosphere of village intrigue with consummate artistry: the dialogues are as authentic as Mainali's, but the theme of an official's corruption and the sycophancy of his lackeys sets this story apart from earlier, more idealized descriptions of rural life.

"Will He Ever Return?" (Tyo Pheri Pharkala 1940) is set in a village on the main thoroughfare between Kathmandu and India before the modern highways were built and is Bhavani Bhikshu's simplest and most popular story but possibly his most formulaic. It contains passages that are notable for their economy and effectiveness, but some parts of the narrative may strike a Western reader as overextended. It should be remembered that the readership for whom Bhikshu was writing fifty years ago liked nothing more than a tearful melodrama. A young woman, Sani, falls in love with a traveler when he stays for one night at her mother's inn, and she spends the rest of her life waiting for him to return. If the story's plot has a weakness, it is the unlikeliness of Sani falling in love with the traveler to the extent that she does: his attractions are not evident in Bhikshu's descriptions of him. Nevertheless, that a poor village girl should become infatuated with a high-caste sophisticate is to some extent credible. The most interesting aspects of the story, perhaps, are Bhikshu's ruminations on the nature of women and the unexpected psychological subtlety of his ending.

More recently, several writers have attempted to describe the stark contrast between life in the village and life in the town. Indra Bahadur Rai's "The Storm Raged All Night Long" (Ratbhari Huri Chalyo , 1960) is a straightforward narrative with little of the abstractedness of its author's later works. The story, which has not been included in this selection for reasons of space, tells of a man and his wife, known to us only as Kale's mother and Kale's father, a common form of reference in the Darjeeling district, who have moved out of the town to make a living as farmers. The wife goes into Darjeeling every morning to deliver the milk from their two cows to various households. After a violent summer storm, she decides that the hardship of life in the hills is not worth the slender reward it brings. After several encounters in the town next day, however,

she changes her mind; she finds the townspeople arrogant and petty, particularly one woman who died during the night while trying to save her cat:

She arrived on B. B. Gurung's verandah. The house had been full of people since early morning. A few stood outside, talking under umbrellas. Kale's mother went around to the back to deliver the milk. She could not discover what was going on. Something must have happened—either to the husband or to the wife; there were no children. The fat wife used to come and go all day, her wooden sandals clacking. She went all over town carrying her white cat, Nini. The husband owned a dry-cleaning shop up on Laden-la Road.

"What's happened? Why are all these people here?" she asked the woman who came from next door to collect the milk.

"Nini's mother bad a fall last night. She's unconscious."

"Where did she fall?"

She heard that the cat had been outside in the rain when the door was locked in the night. It must have mewed and mewed, but nobody heard it above the din of the storm. When the rain eased a little, there had been a search for the cat. They had looked outside and called and called, but the cat had not come. Nini's mother's sandal had slipped as she was going down the hill to look for the cat, and she had fallen down onto the road. A doctor had been called urgently, but he hadn't come at once. The woman was still unconscious.

"It's all the fault of that stupid cat!" said Kale's mother quietly. "That's it there, isn't it?"

A white cat sat warming itself and licking its fur by the fireplace. Kale's mother couldn't just walk away. She sat down on the doorstep, and soon the husband came out in tears. The woman had died.

"How astonishing! What a shame!" Kale's mother picked up her bag and the churn. (Rai 1960, 8-9)

Several later stories view the village from the perspective of the town. Dhruba Chandra Gautam's satire in "The Fire" (Aglagi , 1976) is aimed at the corruption of government officials and the ludicrous inappropriateness of projects devised at the "center" when they are translated into the realities of village society. In "A Small Fish Squats by the Dhobi Khola" (Sano Machha Dhobi Kholako Bagarma , 1983), Manu Brajaki mentions that his character Ganesh has been punished for accepting bribes by being transferred back to Kathmandu, where there are fewer opportunities for corruption.