One dark November morning in 1995, Maiju surreptitiously escorts her 16-year-old daughter down the slippery, rain-drenched slopes of Torikhola in Nepal to help her catch a bus to her aunt’s house in Pokhara. Maiju never hears from her daughter again. Kanchhi never reaches her aunt’s place.
What happened to Kanchhi? Did she run away? Did she join the Maoists? Had she been alive would she not have thought of Maiju? Got in touch at least once? She was so full of life, only 16. “The age apsaras are when they are sent to lure wise old sanyasis out of their meditation.” Pulling the reader in with the question of Kanchhi’s disappearance, Weena Pun’s debut novel unrolls an intricately observed tapestry of life in rural Nepal.
Kanchhi
Hachette India
Pages: 352
Price: Rs.699
Ten years later, Torikhola has piped water, a morning jeep service to transport passengers, and a full-blown civil war, with Maoists imposing their diktat on the village. Through all this, Maiju’s solitary life of wait continues as before. She labours in the millet fields, awaiting news about her missing daughter. Told in an omniscient, third-person voice, the chapters toggle between Maiju’s life in 2005 and the pre-1995 story of Kanchhi.
Kanchhi’s father, Kal, took Maiju’s hand in marriage and left for Assam, dumping the homestead and his old parents on the new wife. He came back years later, only for the last rites of his parents. Ironically, Kanchhi is conceived at the same time that Kal confesses his inability to take Maiju with him as he has a second family in Assam. The illiterate Maiju, who expects nothing better of a man, births and brings up Kanchhi single-handedly. Saili didi and other village women, whose husbands also work elsewhere, constitute the extended community of support as well as control.
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Kanchhi, highly intelligent and rebellious, grows up cooking up stories, yearning for her absent father, questioning rules, fighting, and dreaming big dreams. Good in studies, she wants to go to college in Pokhara, likes listening to music, reading crime magazines, and talking to boys. Maiju’s hardscrabble life has given Kanchhi an instinct to make space for herself, to do anything to escape the suffocating predictabilities of Torikhola. When the local policeman, Jhalnath, pays her attention, she does not mind it. But she does not think marriage is of any use to a woman. Can a dirt poor, fatherless Nepalese girl in a remote hamlet, dream a dream outside matrimony? Is someone with such a heart-stoppingly fragile toehold on a world owned by men and governed by their rules even allowed to?
Rich in local flavours
Reading the lyrically rendered story of Maiju brought to mind a cool October day from 10 years back, when I had been stuck somewhere on the road out of Pokhara in a chakka jam called by Maoists that lasted for over six hours. The Trishuli river gurgled in the ravine below and across the road nestled a hamlet connected to this side only by a narrow rope bridge—the village was all picturesque huts, terraced fields, and the forbidding wall of the Himalaya. The village women—wrinkled, weather-beaten older faces, younger faces with shy smiles and vermillioned foreheads, rosy-cheeked toddlers tied to their backs—traipsed across the swaying bridge. Every time I asked a question, they pushed quail eggs, rice beans, roasted pork belly, and glistening green okra at us. I got more laughs than answers.
But I could figure out one thing. The men were all away, working in the sahar (city). The women did everything in the village, from raising kids, cattle, poultry, pigs to tilling, hoeing, planting, and harvesting. I came back with the rich taste of pork belly and pumpkin flower curry lingering in my mouth, alongside a great yearning for the stories of these women who welcomed tourists from all over the world, while they themselves remain locked in cycles of endless work and perpetual wait.
Kanchhi’s triumph is in the compassion with which it lays bare the peculiar shades of patriarchy, poverty and backwardness in the Himalaya. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement
Weena Pun recreates in intimately observed, elegant prose that sense of a locked life and perpetual waiting. Sumptuous details evoke the beauty and harshness and inaccessibility of the mountainous landscape: the rows of terraced fields flanked by trees; fields yellow with millet and beans; the slopes thick with sal (teak), chilaune (needlewood), simal (silk cotton), amaro (gooseberry) trees; the sounds, songs, and rhythms of rural life; the ditties little girls chant, the games they play; the way women harvest and thresh grains; the ordeal of every uphill climb; and the absence of connectivity, and of news and knowledge about the way the world runs.
The dialogue is rich in local idioms. Liberally using Nepalese words, Pun retains the local flavour and tucks a glossary at the end. Some may find it distracting, but I am not complaining. The rich descriptions of the landscape and people, however, contrast curiously with the sparseness with which Maiju’s and Kanchhi’s inner lives are rendered, especially in a book about a grief so intense that it cannot be acknowledged. We infer Maiju’s pain at her daughter’s disappearance, or Kanchhi’s motivations, mostly through dialogues and action, with very little access to their minds. In the intimacy of the novel, this distance between the main characters and the reader vexes.
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The novel’s triumph is in the compassion with which it lays bare the peculiar shades of patriarchy, poverty and backwardness in the Himalaya, otherwise so rich in natural wealth. Kanchhi opens a fictional window to rural Nepal, and the view is as breathtaking as it is chastening.
Varsha Tiwary is a Delhi-based writer and translator. She recently published 1990, Aramganj, a translation of the bestselling Hindi novel Rambhakt Rangbaz.
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