"Law and Order" by Sushma Joshi (2008) A Short Story by an Award Winning Author from Nepal

My Post from May 2012 on Sushma Joshi- Includes a link where several of her short stories can be read online

Three years ago I read five short stories by a leading writer from Nepal, Sushma Joshi and posted on a very good short story set in Nepal, "The End of the World".  Being very saddened by the terrible earthquake centered in Katmandu I decided to read another story by Joshi and share it with my readers.  Incidentally this morning I tried to tune in digital broadcasts of several major Katmandu radio stations to get local news and for background music and none were currently streaming.

"Law and Order" is set in a small regional capital in Nepal.  Bisho has just gone through the terribly physically straining application to become a Gurka in The British Army.  If you join at twenty you can retire at forty and be a very big man in your home village, the prestige is immense.  There are thousands of applications and only three hundred positions.  Bushi is doing well until he has to ride a horse, something he has never done.  He ends up being dragged by the horse for several hundred meters and loses some teeth.  Of course he is rejected.   Back home he does get a pretty decent job, a police recruit.  The catch with this is the recruits are housed in a jail and not given enough food so they must struggle just to survive.  Of course young men like to indulge in braggadocio about women and there is a very funny well done scene where the recruits compare a young girl to vegetables they love to eat.

"Law and Order" is a very good short story.  It can be read in New Nepal, New Voices edited by Sushma Joshi and Ajit Baral, 2008.

Official Bio

BIOGRAPHY

Sushma Joshi (born May 26, 1973) is a Nepali writer and filmmaker based in Kathmandu, Nepal. 


The End of the World, her book of short stories, was long-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award in 2009. Art Matters, a book of essays about contemporary art, was supported by the Alliance Francaise De Katmandou. 

Joshi contributed a widely read Sunday column The Global and the Local to Nepal's leading English daily newspaper The Kathmandu Post from 2008-2011. Inspired by Nepali history and contemporary politics, her non-fiction and reportage deal with issues of social change, environment and gender.

Sound of Silence (1997) her first documentary, was screened at the New Asian Currents at the Yamagata Documentary Film Festival. Water (2000) was screened on the Q and A with Riz Khan on CNN International, and the UN World Water Forum in Kyoto. The Escape (2006), a short about a teacher targeted by rebels, was accepted to the Berlinale Talent Campus. Her films have also screened at Flickerfest Film Festival, Sydney; Vancouver Nepali Film Festival; Himalayan Film Festival in London and others.

Education and Influences 
Joshi was born and grew up in Kathmandu. From age 8 to 12, she studied in Dowhill School, Kurseong, in the district of Darjeeling. These formative years in a school started by British missionaries instilled a passion for literature and writing. She finished her education at Mahendra Bhawan and Siddhartha Vanasthali High School in Kathmandu.

Joshi graduated from Brown University in 1996 with a BA in international relations. At Brown, she studied liberal arts and took workshops in fiction, autobiography, and poetry. She also took classes in documentary production with artist Tony Cokes. 

From 1999-2002, she was in graduate school at the New School of Social Research in New York, where she received an MA in anthropology. During the summers, she attended The Breadloaf School of English at Middlebury College, Vermont, and received another MA in English Literature in 2005. At Bread Loaf, she studied playwriting with Obie prize winning playwright Dare Clubb, as well as theatre directing and acting with Alan and Carol MacVey.

Joshi received a waiter fellowship to attend the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 2000. In 2005, she received a research and writing fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation. She was awarded a residency at the Bellagio Center, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, in Bellagio, Italy, in 2006. Joshi was a featured writer at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in 2009. In 2011, she was an Asia fellow and traveled to Thailand and Burma to do research on a book about Nepali migrants, with support from the Asian Scholarship Foundation. 

Joshi was a jury member of the Indigenous Film Festival in Nepal in 2009. She was also a member of a three-judge panel for the film competition on global warming sponsored by British Council/DFID in Kathmandu in 2010. 

Art 
In 2004, Joshi had a solo exhibit of her paintings at Gallery Nine. The exhibit featured 26 paintings depicting figurative paintings about the state of Nepal during the civil conflict. 

Joshi's multimedia installation titled "Jumla: A cyberphoto installation" was accepted to the Eighth International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA) at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1997.

Mel u

"The Discovery of the High Lama" by Sushma Joshi (2009, 16 pages)

Sushma Joshi (Kathmandu, Nepal, 1975) was long listed in 2009 for her collection of short stories, The End of the World for the Frank O'Connor International Award for Short Stories.    She is also a well regarded documentary film maker.    She was educated in her high school years at a school run by British missionaries.   It was here she developed a passion for literature and decided she wanted to become an author so she could speak for the people of Nepal.   She received grants that allowed her to obtain degrees from Brown University and The New School of Social Research in New York City.   She also was awarded a writing fellowship by the  MacArthur Foundation.    She is also an Asian fellow.   She is the leading author from Nepal writing in English with an international readership.


I have previously posted on two of her short stores,"The End of the World" and "I Woke Up Last Night and I Cried", both of which I enjoyed greatly.   Both stories deal with matters relating to immigration and the poverty in contemporary Nepal and its impact on the population.   Her stories also deal with the cosmic irony of young western intellectuals, often disaffected, who come to Nepal for what they see as the deep eastern wisdom while the people of Nepal are in quest of western consumer good and the best young people in the country strive to get out.   


"The Discovery of the High Lama" is a very wise, funny story that can, like the best of short stories, tell us as much about ourselves as it does the people in the story.  The story is narrated by a young man, twenty something, who succeeded in getting a grant to study in the United States.   He comes back to Kathmandu for a visit and he begins to wonder what happened to his old friends.   One of the members of his circle was always considered quite slow mentally but his father, on the National Sports Authority of Nepal, placed him in a karate program at age five and he is now so good he is invited to go to Mongolia to compete on the team from Nepal against the Mongolian team.   I won't spoil the fun for you by telling how it happens but he ends up being taken for the reincarnation of a High Lama and in time becomes a much sought after speaker on "eastern" wisdom on the  international circuit.   


The ending of the story is really well done and I will let you discover it for yourself.


The story can be read here.

A Kindle edition of her collection of short stories set in Nepal, The End of the World,  is available for $4.95.

Her first novel, Loving the Enemy, a love story set in the civil war in Nepal, will be published in 2012

Mel u

Sushma Joshi: An Award Winning Short Story Writer From Nepal

A number of book bloggers stated in their reading goal posts for 2012 that they wanted to read works written by authors from a wide range of countries.    This is a very good goal and one which I share.


Sushma Joshi (Kathmandu, Nepal, 1975) was long listed in 2009 for her collection of short stories, The End of the World for the Frank O'Connor International Award for Short Stories.    She is also a well regarded documentary film maker.    She was educated in her high school years at a school run by British missionaries.   It was here she developed a passion for literature and decided she wanted to become an author so she could speak for the people of Nepal.   She received grants that allowed her to obtain degrees from Brown University and The New School of Social Research in New York City.   She also was awarded a writing fellowship by the  MacArthur Foundation.    She is also an Asian fellow.   She is the leading author from Nepal writing in English with an international readership.


We are fortunate in that five of her short stories can be read online for free.   (There will be a link at the end of this post.)  


"The End of the World"   (2009, 7 pages) is the title work in her collection of that name.    As the story begins, a local religious leader who has a large following announces that the end of the world is coming in two weeks.    It seems this is a fairly common practice among Holy Men who perhaps are not getting the attention or respect they feel they deserve.   Some of his followers take it seriously and are thrown into a despair driven religious frenzy of devotion to their faith.    Women rush to the stores to stock up on supplies they need to prepare last meals.  Teenagers tell their parents they do not see the point of doing their homework if the world will end in two weeks! (Any parent of teens could see that coming.)    Some react with cynicism and derision to the claim the world is coming to an end.    I will leave the rest of the story unspoiled other than to say that the world goes right on  spinning.


"I Woke Up Last Night and I Cried" was selected for inclusion in the 2010 anthology of short stories, New Asian Writings.  In three pages Joshi does a great job letting us see the life of the wife of a worker from Nepal whose husband is working offshore in Saudi Arabia.   The husband has been gone for six years now.    For the first few years he sent money home regularly.   Now the wife has to beg for anything.   The wife has very mixed emotions.   She loves and pities her husband and she also nearly hates him now.   She sends him a letter one week asking him to come home please and says they would be happier together in poverty than with him gone.   The next week she will send him a letter telling him not to even come visit her or their children when he comes back.   The emotion in this story is real and made me think of the millions of men and women from the Philippines who work offshore to support their families and the very large emotional cost of this.   


The stories of Joshi can take us into a world most of us can only glimpse on CNN or The National Geographic Channel.


"The End of the World" and three other of Sushma Joshi's short stories can be read at East of the Web.




"I Woke Up Last Night and Cried" can be read here.


You can follow her blog also.


Her collection of short stories, The End of the World is listed on Amazon.   The Kindle edition is only $4.99.




Mel u