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Busting the Kathmandu myth

Samrat Upadhyay had a typical middle-class upbringing in Kathmandu. His parents were government officials who sent him to a Jesuit school in the city.

By the eighth grade, his reading ranged from the Hardy Boys series to Tarzan comic books, apart from racy bestseller novelists like Sidney Sheldon and Robert Ludlum.

With his mind firmly set on American writers, he was nevertheless intrigued by how Kathmandu had become a mythical place for Americans.

"So you had Bob Seger and Cat Stevens and the belief that the streets were filled with hashish and hippies walking around," says Upadhyay, author of the newly minted Arresting God in Kathmandu.

"I knew that was the kind of image most people had" of Kathmandu, says the 38-year-old author from his home in Berea, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, "since I did most of my schooling here and that's the kind of questions people would ask."

Upadhyay, who is an assistant professor of English, teaches creative writing courses at the Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea.

Arresting God in Kathmandu is published by Mariner Books, a division of Houghton Mifflin, whose authors include the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri and Anita Desai.

The nine stories in the book cover a gamut of middle-class lives in Kathmandu. They are about people coping with such daily issues as unemployment, professional and family jealousies, extramarital affairs, and loss of spouses.

"As I was writing these stories I did not consciously try to counter the myths, but it was in the back of my mind," he says. "I wanted to shatter the myths of Westerners going to Nepal for spiritual search and the Nepalese mired in poverty, but extremely happy and spiritual people. And I hope I show that these people struggle with everyday life issues. They struggle with their spiritual self, but most of them also struggle with their material self.

"The world that I write about is pretty much the world I grew up in. The stories in this book are my attempts to reconcile my self-imposed exile with a nostalgic hunger for the city in which I grew up and which occupies my mind everyday," says Upadhyay, who is reportedly the first Nepalese writer published by a major American company.

"One of the reasons that there has been this kind of interest in my book is because there aren't that many writers from Nepal who write in English," he says. "Because Nepal doesn't have the legacy of colonialism, the kind of literature the likes of Salman Rushdie and Amitava Ghosh wrote did not emerge there."

Though he grew up admiring Western writers, in his college days he began to pay attention to writers from the subcontinent. His favourites include Anita Desai and Rohinton Mistry.

"In Custody [written by Desai] is my absolute favourite novel and I have seen the film version [directed by Ismail Merchant] of it a number of times," says Upadhyay. "I love the direct prose of Rohinton Mistry, this very storytelling narrative. He captures you in his world and you can't let go.

"In terms of craft, I remember liking Ruth Prawer Jhabvala a lot," he adds, although he acknowledges the existence of the debate about her being anti-Indian. "But I loved her stories and I understand the political implications of this debate."

Upadhyay came to the United States at the age of 21 to attend the undergraduate business programme at the College of Wooster in Ohio. After the first semester he knew where his heart was and quickly switched to English. He earned his master's degree from Ohio University, which included course work in journalism.

In 1992, he took up a yearlong teaching assignment at the King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia. This was followed by a two-year stint as a journalist in Nepal during which he also got married. [His wife Babita is a graduate student in education at the Wallace Baldwin College and the two have a ten-month-old daughter Shahzadi.]

In 1995 Upadhyay returned to the US to work on his PhD programme at the University of Hawaii.

The stories in Arresting God in Kathmandu were written over a decade since he started his master's programme. Some of them were published in literary journals, but his big break came in 1999 when his story, The Good Shopkeeper, was picked up for the Best American Short Stories anthology edited by acclaimed and best-selling novelist Amy Tan.

Most of the writing was done in the US and some while he was in Saudi Arabia.

"Strangely when I was in Nepal from 1993 to 1995, I could not write much fiction," he says. "Somehow I felt I needed a distance. It allowed a certain degree of objectivity for me as a writer. Likewise I haven't been able to write a single story set in the United States while I am here."

Upadhyay describes himself as an "imagistic" writer. He does not plot out his stories. He simply sits in front of his computer and follows the images that come to his mind.

"And that's the way I write," he says. "It's only after I go back to my second and third drafts, I emphasize more of my critical and analytical faculties."

During a trip to Nepal in 1997, he saw more and more computers being used in businesses. "I thought, well someone has to lose his job," he says. "I had this image of a guy coming home to tell his wife that he had been fired. And I took it from there."

That's how The Good Shopkeeper was born -- a story about a laid-off accountant who unexpectedly has an affair with a servant woman he had not known for more than a few hours and looks anew at his life.

Upadhyay is usually up by 4.30am, working furiously. "I write for a couple of hours before my daughter wakes up," he says with a laugh, adding that his best critic is his wife. "She gets the first draft and she just blows it to smithereens -- and then I have to go back."

Currently, Upadhyay is working on a novel. He had written two unpublished novels while he was in Hawaii, but he was not pleased with them.

"The novel form is very different and I think I have struggled with those two, but I needed those two to write the third one," he says. "I think the third one that I am working on is a lot more controlled and it has some of the strengths of my short stories."

The novel is also set in Kathmandu. "I feel that there is so much to explore in Nepal that I can't envision myself writing anything entirely set in the United States for a long time."

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