Indra Bahadur Rai, the Darjeeling-based Nepali-language writer, has written on the life of Nepali speakers in and around the Himalaya throughout his literary career. His writings are seminal to contemporary Nepali literature, and have played an instrumental role in shaping the popular understanding of the Nepali conscious. Writing in the Nepali language, however, has always meant that his writing has been accessible to Nepali readers only – like most literature of Nepal, it remains insulated from a global audience. This new work, which contains translations of eight short stories and two essays by Rai, thus goes a long way to fill an otherwise clear dearth of Nepali literature in translations. Though the book's introduction, it should be noted, while going into considerable depth about the work of translation and Rai's own philosophical inclinations, does a poor job of introducing Rai to a non-Nepali audience, offering little in the way understanding Nepali literature and the author's position within that sphere. Fortunately, this is a lacuna that is made up for in the quality of the stories themselves.
Born in Darjeeling under the British Raj, Rai holds a graduate degree in English literature and is well versed in the teachings of Western philosophers such as Derrida, Lacan and Baudrillard. Indeed, it is perhaps the interests of his mentors in language and linguistics that drove him to establish the All India Nepali Language Recognition Committee, through which he successfully fought for the recognition of the Nepali language as a national language in India. Also stemming from his mentors' philosophical leanings is the tesro aayam (Third Dimension) movement, launched by Rai in the early 1960s along with two other stalwarts of Nepali literature, Ishwar Ballav and Bairagi Kaila, in an attempt to capture the three-dimensional nature of the subjects in their stories. The three writers continue to produce works based on the movement's thinking, with Rai's last publication, Lekhanru ra jhya, also incorporating Tesro Aayam-influenced elements. The foundations for the movement were also established in a literary periodical, likewise entitled Tesro Aayam, by Rai and his contemporaries.
The short story 'Maina's Mother Is Just like Us', one of the translations offered in this new collection, is an example of this style. The Tesro Aayam movement stems from disillusionment with the 'realist' writing styles that had until then been a fixture of Nepali literature – an attempt to express the true depth, the 'reality', of the subject at hand. In 'Maina's Mother is Just like Us,' Rai explores the internal conflict of the diaspora that combines tremendous hope with the sorrow of displacement. The story is interspersed with thoughts of moving, doubts of having moved, attempted justifications and that persistent question, 'Why then did you come here?' Utilising the narrative fragmentation that is native to 'third dimension' writing, Rai attempts to delve into Maina's inner being:
A rock swished down from overhead (man goes to the moon). Maina's mother dodged it; it just missed her. Then came a stave (live as men). It caught her in the chest; she doubled up and fell. All her sorrows stand before her; they come continually to her home. Joys for her are unknown and haughty. She wanted to sink underground in case great ews came rolling down and crushed her. Her load of weighty hopes buried her deep, but she struggled to rise up and become a mountain.