Nepal’s Terror Alert

Palpasa Cafe
By Narayan Wagle
245 pages, Kathmandu:
Publication Nepalaya, 2005
(in Nepali)

When Nepal opened up to the outside world 50 years ago with the overthrow of the Rana dynasty, word quickly spread about this idyllic land, its stupendous mountains, and its tranquility and rich cultural heritage. That — and the openly available hashish — was what drew hippies to the capital of Katmandu during the 1960s. Then came the trekkers and backpackers, who found even the poverty here photogenic.

So when the Maoist insurgency turned increasingly violent in 2000, it seemed as though editors in newsrooms in London, Hong Kong, and New York couldn’t quite believe that there was trouble in Shangri-La. And even if there were, they believed it would be over soon enough. It was only after Nepal’s crown prince murdered his entire family as well as himself in a massacre at the royal palace on the night of June 1, 2001, that parachute journalists who came to cover the story realized something was seriously wrong in the mountainous kingdom.

More than 11,000 people have been killed in the past nine years, and, because of the number of disappearances of its citizens, Nepal is now mentioned in the same breath as Sierra Leone and Rwanda. On Feb. 1, 2005, King Gyanendra, who became the constitutional monarch after the massacre, sacked the prime minister and seized executive powers, claiming the incompetence of elected leaders was hindering his army’s counterinsurgency operations. Political leaders were jailed and strict censorship imposed. Overnight, Nepal’s press went from being one of the freest in the world to having armed soldiers sitting in newsrooms vetting every story.

The person with a ringside seat to all the mayhem is Narayan Wagle, editor of Katmandu’s most popular Nepali-language newspaper, Kantipur. From an early point in his career, Wagle wasn’t interested in reporting on the corridors of power in the capital, like his laid-back colleagues. He’d rather be trekking in remote corners of this rugged country, bringing stories about the neglect and apathy of officialdom to the notice of a government in faraway Katmandu.

I have known Narayan Wagle for 10 years, and I’ve followed his career through his bylines from far-flung places. His stories were always exclusive and original — like the one of an impending food shortage in the remote district of Humla in 1994 because of heavy snow on the passes, which forced the government to rush aid before starvation hit.

As a fellow editor, I empathize with Wagle’s feeling of inadequacy about journalism’s capacity to provide a true picture of our nation’s current trauma. We present endless reported pieces, columns, and editorials, but somehow what isn’t getting through is the conflict’s brutalization of society. Nepal’s social fabric is being torn apart, and all we journalists are doing is reporting it as if it were a crime beat. "Many things don’t fit into the news format, so, paradoxically, you have to turn to fiction to tell the truth," Wagle says, explaining what prompted his first novel, Palpasa Cafe.

Facts are often more dramatic than fiction in societies wracked by messy conflict. In Nepal, every story of landmines killing children, rebels abducting students, young women disappearing at a checkpoint is a heart-wrenching family tragedy that the rest of the country must hear. Instead, they are often reported in a manner that turns such victims into meaningless statistics. We rarely see, hear, or share the pain and personal loss of the bereaved.

Palpasa Cafe is a fictionalized account of several actual events, of the lives and deaths of ordinary Nepalis caught in the grips of war. Wagle makes an early cameo as the editor of a paper in Katmandu who hears of the abduction of a friend by soldiers. That much is fact, but in the next chapter, Wagle turns his disappeared friend into an imaginary artist named Drishya, and the rest of the book is the artist’s story told in his own voice. Wagle admits that much of what Drishya goes through is semi-autobiographical.

Early on, Wagle offers a hint about why he is writing the book. As he takes dictation from a district reporter about another firefight in the mountains, he thinks: "Nothing new here. Every day it is the same. Tomorrow’s paper will be the same as this morning’s. The same stories of an army patrol being ambushed, suspected spy executed by Maoists, a bomb going off somewhere. We are just chroniclers of carnage."

The plot weaves the fragile and undeclared love between Drishya and Palpasa — a first-generation Nepali American who has returned to the land of her parents after becoming fed up with post-9/11 racial stereotyping in the United States — into the artist’s reunion with his old friend, Siddhartha, who is now a guerrilla. When Siddhartha comes to Katmandu in the aftermath of the royal massacre to seek shelter in Drishya’s house, the two argue over whether the goals of revolution justify the means:

"How can you ever justify violence?" Drishya asks.

Siddhartha replies: "Without destroying, you can’t build anew."

"But people are dying; they crave for peace," Drishya pleads.

"The people don’t need peace, they need justice," says his Maoist friend. "If there is justice, there will be peace."

"But you are carrying out injustices in the name of justice," says Drishya one last time. But the two can’t even agree to disagree. It’s clear that Wagle is deeply troubled about the impact of the fighting on the national mind-set, and he is appalled by the Maoist methods: the brutality, the intolerance of dissent, and the use of terror as a weapon.

Drishya travels to his home village to meet Siddhartha and finds it torn apart by war, the Nepali psyche irreversibly scarred by the violence. Page after page, it is all there: the atrocities, executions, disappearances, abductions, landmines, and people caught in the crossfire that we read about every day. But because these events happen to characters we have grown to know intimately, the incidents seem more real than the headlines.

Not only is this novel as fresh as an open wound, it is also written in a nonlinear style that is almost experimental in the world of Nepali fiction. Wagle’s Nepali language is simple and colloquial, and his voice is genuine and sincere. Although Drishya’s character is unnecessarily abrasive, Palpasa comes across as an authentic diaspora child caught between love for her motherland and alienation from her adopted home.

Sooner or later, some outsider was going to write a novel about Nepal’s Maoist insurgency and the country’s present turmoil and transition. Lucky for us, Narayan Wagle beat them to it and has produced what is essentially an understated but powerful anti-war novel that will be read and talked about for years. It drags us beyond Shangri-La and forces us to look at the abyss below.