Man of the People

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Seen from a distance, today's Nepal is an otherworldly place. Its hills are overrun with young and frightening Maoist guerrillas. Until a few weeks ago, its cities were brimming with baton-swinging riot police in blue fatigues and protesting students with torches in their hands. Average people doing average things seem about as common as yetis—except in the work of Nepali author Samrat Upadhyay. The Royal Ghosts, his new collection of short stories, is full of characters who care for sick parents, fall in love with the wrong people, cheat on their spouses or get drunk in the afternoon when they should really be more responsible. In short: normal folk living normal lives.

Upadhyay, who teaches at Indiana University in the U.S. and writes in English, doesn't ignore the violence and political strife of his native country—he just keeps it in the background with controlled plots and measured prose. The title story takes place immediately after the 2001 massacre of the royal family by Crown Prince Dipendra. While the country is thrown into confusion and grief, cab driver Ganga is confronted with a more personal upheaval—learning that his brother is gay. In Supreme Pronouncements, another story, when the student organizer Suresh is thrown in jail for writing a provocative editorial about a government contract, his biggest concern is not his cause or his safety, but discovering that his cellmate was his new girlfriend's old flame. In A Refugee, a young woman moves from the countryside to the capital after Maoists murder her husband. That violent act underpins the story. "It was hard to believe that this country was becoming a place where people killed each other over differences in ideas about how to govern it," ponders Pitamber, a man who gives shelter to the widow. But her influence on Pitamber and his family, which almost splits apart after she moves in, drives the action far more than the violence in her past.

As in his first short-story collection, Arresting God in Kathmandu, religious themes are everywhere in The Royal Ghosts. Through them Upadhyay reveals the universal in the apparently exotic. In The Weight of a Gun, a mother of a mentally ill son consults a clairvoyant believed to be possessed by a goddess. But in Upadhyay's telling, this hardly seems odd. He pares down the extraneous bits to reveal the characters' underlying humanity, rendering clear the woman's reasoning—she is simply trying everything she can to save her son.

In Upadhyay's hands, characters whose lives seem impossibly foreign become intimately familiar. Even when facing the saddest of circumstances, they often find hope in the end. One wishes as much for their troubled country.