This is especially true when there’s a lot going on, as has been the case on my last two visits. In the autumn of 2025, I arrived shortly after the September 8 and 9 “Gen Z” movement, when the central government had fallen. This spring, I arrived shortly after the Rastriya Swatantra Party won a landslide, and I was just in time to watch the new prime minister Balendra Shah, his millennial cabinet, and all the parliamentarians, old and new, take their oath of office.

“What do you think?” I kept asking everyone I met.

I also went out of my way to meet people whose opinions I really wanted to know, specifically computer scientist Dovan Rai and scholar-activist Sabin Ninglekhu, who are thoughtful, and very deeply studied, on current events.

Their views, and mine, are reflected in an article linked here, “When I returned to Nepal this spring, I found a country transformed,” that the Globe and Mail published online on April 23, and in paper on April 25, 2026.

I’m grateful to the opinions editor Mark Medley for running the piece. Nepal is not on the top of everyone’s mind in Canada, after all. But I really, really needed to write the article to get my head around what is a profoundly interesting—if strange—time in Nepal.

I’m no longer in Nepal, but am following events through my usual sources. And I’m worried.

As of today, a week after the article was published, the new prime minister is yet to thank his voters, or to address them in any way. He did not address parliament publicly during its opening session. He has since asked that parliament’s next session be postponed, preferring to govern by ordinance instead in order, presumably, to avoid having to convince the Upper House to pass any bills. He has also launched a nationwide project to raze down the temporary shelters of the landless, dispatching the police and armed police, and even the army, to oversee what has been a heart-rending project of destabilizing the lives of the most vulnerable citizens of the country.

None of this is normal.

By this time my father was in his eighties. While he was as articulate as ever in speech, he was no longer able to write long-form. My uncle, the wise and worldly former UN official Binod Sijapati, organized for journalist-editor Hari Bahadur Thapa (no relation) to interview my father and to transcribe the interviews in book form. This is a wonderful practice that has taken hold in Nepal over the past decades: a great use of journalists’ skills that led to a flowering of oral histories. My mother Rita Thapa served as the family archivist for the project, providing photos, documents, and other aids to make sure that the memoir was accurate.

About seventy percent of this work was done when my sister Tejshree died. My brother Bhaskar had predeceased her by six years. Grief overtook our family. Then the pandemic hit. Other tasks—such as surviving—took precedence.

A few years later, my uncle Binod and I decided to revive the dormant memoir project. I read the manuscript for the first time, noticed some major omissions, and asked that my father fill in the gaps. With Uncle Binod’s help, and with Hari Bahadur Thapa’s capable ghostwriting—and with my mother’s unflagging support—the manuscript eventually took shape. I requested Basanta Thapa (no relation), editor at the now-gone Himal Books, to give the manuscript a final look-over, and then I coordinated its publication with FinePrint Books. The memoir came out at the end of 2023 and can be found in Nepal’s brick-and-mortar and online bookshops.

It helps to have an author in the family, someone who knows the ins and outs of book writing, editing, publishing—and also translation.

After the memoir came out, I took charge of organizing its English translation, putting it in the hands of ace translator Prawin Adhikari. I knew it wouldn’t be easy to translate a book that ranges over the complicated subjects of finance, governance, history, and diplomacy. Accuracy was going to be as important as style. Prawin Adhikari did a remarkable job. Anagha Neelakantan edited the translation to make it more accessible to a readership who might not know Nepal’s modern history. I did a final edit to clean up the copy. The English translation is officially being launched at the end of this week by Penguin Random House in South Asia.

Do pick up a copy if you’re interested in a participant-observer’s view onto how Nepal’s modern state and governance structure came into definition in the decades following the 1950 transition to democracy and King Mahendra’s royal coup in 1960.

While the bulk of the work of producing this memoir was done by everyone else I’ve mentioned, including, principally, by my father, I obviously put a lot of work into it too. Did this delay my own work-in-progress? Yes, it did. Do I regret that? Absolutely not.

I had two clear motivations to guide me.

The private one—to gather personal family memories—is an impulse that many of us feel as our parents, and we, age. As children, and even as young adults, we’re self-centered. We look at our parents through the filter of our own lives and judge them for how they performed in relation to us. And even though we may have heard some of their stories—some far too often—we simply don’t know what they know of the world. We don’t fully understand the the times they have lived through. We don’t truly know them as individuals.

I’ve been gratified to regain this knowledge from my father’s memoirs. Like anyone, I don’t always agree with my father’s views. But now I understand them. And so I’m encouraging my mother Rita Thapa to write her memoirs next. A pioneering public health doctor, she set up Nepal’s family planning and maternal child health project, later rising to the level of director at the World Health Organization. I want to know what she was doing when my siblings and I were following her around on her field trips to supervise vasectomy camps in rural Nepal. (Such were our school holidays). What was it like to work as a woman in a male-dominated profession? What was it like to eventually be the family’s main breadwinner? I already know who my mother is as my mother. I want to know her as an individual.

My second motivation for pursuing these memoirs comes from a desire to build up collective memory. “The past,” as the LP Hartley quote goes, “is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” It’s hard to know how differently they did things in Nepal’s past, because record-keeping has always been weak, and government documents themselves go up in flames too often. This, combined with its young demographics, means that fewer and fewer people share a common sense of the past—and the present. Even the historical abolition of the 240 year-old monarchy in 2008 is a faint memory for the young. Collective memory is very thin here.

I sincerely believe that our elders’ lives, when documented well, can act as the proverbial first draft of history. This is true whether they have led noisy national lives like my parents, or whether they have led quieter lives in the community, family, and domestic spheres. ‘Major’ stories—held to be of national importance—are no more valuable than ‘minor’ ones. Indeed, stories deemed minor often reveal the truths that major stories never get to, or drown out, or worse, cover up.

Our responsibility as adult children is to take care of our elders in their old age. This includes honouring their life stories.

What was it like to be young when our elders were young? What were their dreams, obstacles, achievements? What gave them joy, what caused them sorrow? What traditions were they part of? What innovations—of technology, of lifestyle—did they witness? What rules did they break? Why did they make the decisions they made? What is their own self-assessment? What secrets have they kept all these years?

It is, perhaps, middle age that makes us interested in these questions, that makes us appreciate that everyone is a valuable repository of knowledge. Many of my contemporaries have also set about trying to record their elders’ life stories. In Nepal, it is possible to engage journalists as ghostwriters. AI-generated templates have also come into use worldwide.

I won’t lie. It’s not easy. Getting someone to write their memoirs can require a multi-year commitment for them and for those who are helping them.

My advice would be to start with short-form essays. Try asking your elders to write (or talk) about one specific time in their lives, or a particularly important experience either for the nation or for society or for them or for you. Have them share their expertise in their area of specialization. Or ask them to go by stage of life: birth, childhood, coming of age, young adulthood, and onwards. Create an outline that they can follow.

And don’t feel you have to have everything written down and published in book form. Record your elders on your phone, create short reels, start a podcast, share clips on social media.

Just try something.

At the end you’ll have done your bit to build up collective memory. And you’ll have regained personal family memories.

I promise you won’t regret it.

It’s on India, and its cover is unlovely, featuring Modi in one of his many trickster avatars, performing ultra-nationalist pride as is his wont. It’s disappointing to have this depressing image representing India.

Not disappointing is the table of contents, with essays, stories, and interviews by writers such as Sujatha Gidla, Salman Rushdie, Snigdha Poonam, Raghu Karnad, Karan Maharjan, and many other sharp, critically engaged writers, including yours truly.

My essay is on the many meanings and confusions around the word ‘Nepali.’ It’s free to read at this link.

My essay is part of a symposium on India’s national languages, thirteen in total: Malyalam, Punjabi, Gujarati, Telugu, Marathi, Urdu, Sanskrit, Nepali, Hindi, Assamese, Tamil, Bangla, and Kannada. The entire symposium is available for free at this link.

Many of the other essays, stories, and interviews are closed off by a paywall, but they will rotate and become free to read from time to time on Granta’s website. You can check there to see what’s available to non-subscribers.

I am, of course, Nepali Canadian, and not at all Indian, so my inclusion in an issue dedicated to India was unexpected, even to me.

It came about after a senior editor emailed me. She had read my diary piece on Nepal’s post-war Constituent Assembly elections of 2008 in the London Review of Books and my introduction to an edition on Nepali literature in translation that I guest edited in La.Lit in 2017. She asked if I would write an essay on a single word from the Nepali language, and gave me about a month’s deadline.

It could be any word. I chose the word ‘Nepali’ so as to explore its complexity: the ultra-nationalist cry that it inspires, and also the multiplicity that it cloaks. Who, and what, is Nepali? The word, like all words, is polysemic. It contains worlds. It’s important, when you’re from a generally inward-looking Nepali milieu, to remember how expansive an existence you can inhabit.

This is my first time being published in Granta, and I’m pleased. I, like many, sent them many pitches as a young writer—always in vain. It’s a pleasure to have them seek out my work, particularly at a time in my life when I’m quiet to the point of appearing unambitious.

Perhaps it’s middle age. Perhaps it’s the fallout of having my beloved siblings die young. Perhaps it’s that my partner is retired, and I’m enjoying the immense privilege of sharing his more leisurely, untroubled life.

I’m still ambitious, but my ambitions center entirely around the quality of what I’m writing rather than around career accomplishments. I’m determined to make my novel-in-progress the absolute best it can be. Who will publish it? I’ll worry about that when it’s done.

This slacker-ish (dare I say Gen X) attitude isn’t entirely new for me. I’ve always cared more for the private—creative, exploratory, meaningful—side of writing than for the public side. Still, I do remember how, as a young writer in Nepal, I hurled myself with great ambition at the world, trying to get my work published outside of Nepal. Every now and then an editor would accept a pitch. My writing showed up in the New York Times, Walrus, Foreign Policy, Outlook, and elsewhere, yes. But along the way I received so many rejection notes.

Had one of my pieces been accepted in Granta when I was young, I would have been over the moon with joy. I feel tenderly towards that young self who instead heard back from so many editors, “It’s not right for us.”

To that younger self my present-day self says: just keep writing. Because it’s the writing that matters in the end. There’ll come a time, yes, for publishing and publicity and career-building.

But first, we write. We write well.

I do want to share some observations in this post from the two months I’ve spent in Nepal. (And I hope this doesn’t disappoint those who are here for posts on writing and creativity).

I arrived in Kathmandu two weeks after the ‘day of destruction’ on September 9 following the shocking police killings the day before in what was originally intended as a peaceful demonstration against corruption, poor governance, and bad (or horrendous, depressing, soul-crushing) political leadership.

This had been the single most murderous day in the country’s history, which, it should be noted, has not been without its share of political violence. Victims from the police shootings were still in hospital. The remains of charred buildings and vehicles littered the city. Many were saying they didn’t feel like celebrating Dashain or Tihar this year. Gen Z activists, politicians, and the business community were all living in fear. The mood was sombre.

Still, when Dashain came around, the country mostly celebrated. (Prime Minister Sushila Karki refrained). When the rains stopped, people hit the road in what felt like record numbers, jamming up all the religious sites both on- and off-road. During my own trek with my partner to Nar Phu, I saw the mountaineering industry hard at work helping climbers summit Mount Himlung. When we crossed over Kang-la to the main Annapurna circuit trekking (and now also motorbiking) trail in Manang, we found the lodges crowded to capacity, mostly with Nepali travelers. Everyone—except for those who were suffering high-altitude sickness from having reached that elevation too fast—was having a great time.

Not even a month had passed since I’d arrived in Nepal. It was impossible not to be struck by the dissonance.

Back in Kathmandu during Tihar and Chhat, the revelries continued. But as they came to an end—and as the rains returned—a collective anxiety resurfaced. It was as though everyone understood that the crisis—as serious as any Nepal has ever faced—remained, and we would all have to return to it eventually.

Return we did. The weeks since then have been consumed with dialogue: dialogue between the many Gen Z factions, between them and the government, between and within each political party, in civil society, and—exhaustively—in both traditional and social media. As every group forms and reforms, and aligns and realigns with each other, it’s fair to say that the country is in upheaval.

Where will this upheaval lead?

Far be it for me, a non-resident Nepali on a family visit to my homeland, to predict.

But I’ll share the questions I’ll be asking in the coming months as I look for indicators of hope (an improvement on the pre-September 8 federal democratic republic, meaning: more democracy), disillusionment (a deepening constitutional crisis), or the usual-usual (the status quo):

Questions on justice: Will anyone up or down the chain of command be held responsible for the police brutality on September 8? Or will only perpetrators of the arson of September 9 be prosecuted? Whether or not Nepal moves towards justice and rule of law will ride on this. We’ve seen the transitional justice process following the 2006 peace treaty being stymied again and again by the security forces’ and political parties’ dogged pursuit of impunity for the perpetrators of atrocities. The TRC, as it stands now, is not even acceptable to the victims of the Maoist conflict. Many other smaller cases of injustice remain ignored. So it would be a good indicator if justice were to prevail in the atrocities committed during the Gen Z movement. That would indicate a true, historical breakthrough.

Questions on rule of law: Will anti-corruption and pro-accountability measures ever be acted on, or will they remain hidden away in unpublished government reports?

Questions on the political sphere: Will the three main political parties retire their discredited leaders KP Sharma Oli, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, and Sher Bahadur Deuba? Will they democratize internally? Will they root out their own corruption? Will they bring in new leadership that focuses on governance instead of only on power? So much is up in the air right now.

Questions on governance: Will governance improve, either before or after the elections slated for March 5, 2026? This improvement can come through administrative reform or through more responsible behaviour from the political parties in government after the elections. Let’s leave aside the latter for now—there are too many unknowns. In regard to the former, there has been some improvement already. An example came when the interim government simplified voter registration for those who already have national ID cards, saving them the cumbersome process that was in place previously. Service delivery immediately improved with this decision. So much public disillusionment with the state stems from the state’s dismal service delivery. I don’t think it would be unfair to say that many people feel that the bureaucracy seems to aim to make government work as hard as possible for Nepalis. Administrative reform is just as urgent as political reform. Will this happen?

Finally, the main question: Will the elections take place in the Spring? It’s not unusual for elections to be postponed by a few months. Even if March 5 elections prove unfeasible, April or May elections would give the country a way out of the constitutional quandary it’s in. But obstacles remain, mainly from the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist)’s leader, the ousted Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli, who refuses to acknowledge the constitutionality of the interim government or to accept that there must be new elections. The Supreme Court is also hearing a case on the reinstatement of the parliament that was dismissed as per Gen Z activists’ demands. At this point, its decision either way will be as much about politics as about legality. It’s anyone’s guess how the justices will rule.

The reason all Nepali brains hurt right now is that each of these questions is connected to the others. The answers to one will directly impact all the others.

Is the current situation knotty and hard to untangle? Yes. But as a wise friend reminded me, it is also recognizably Nepali for all sides to tie each other up knots.

As all the actors who are directly involved work towards undoing these knots, life is returning to something like normal for everyone except the victims and the families of victims of September 8 and 9.

All the questions remain. They will be answered, satisfactorily or otherwise, in time.

Nepal has never seen violence of this scale in such a short time. But it has seen plenty of violence over the years, including the everyday violence structured into the hierarchies of caste, gender, and other identity markers. Spells of peace and stability are the exception in this country that has been trying very hard—for seventy-five years—to become, and remain, democratic.

“We want democracy!” That was the cry of the 1990 democracy movement, the first of my lifetime. That cry keeps ringing in my head now, as an entirely new, digitally savvy, globally exposed generation of Nepalis appear to be doomed to do what the generations before them have had to do: spend a lifetime in the struggle for democracy.

I wrote about this multi-generational struggle for the Globe and Mail this week. Here is a gift link: Despite decades of setbacks, Nepal still dreams of democracy.

Just before posting this, I checked the news. The bodies of the young Gen Z protestors are being cremated today. The thirteen days of mourning that most Hindus observe are not even over. It is a very dark time for Nepal.

The longlists for both the poetry and prose prizes are at this link: https://literarytranslators.org/the-2025-national-translation-awards-in-poetry-and-prose-longlists/

And the book citations from the judges, which will help you decide whether or not each book is for you, is at this link: https://literarytranslators.org/awards/2025-national-translation-awards/

I was one of the jury members for the prose prize this year, and wrote a little about what it was like to read so many truly excellent books—so meanly, with an eye to eliminating them from the longlist—in my last Substack post. I won’t write any more about that here, but I will say that based on the 60+ books I read (and the same number the other judges read) many, many excellent books didn’t make the longlist.

There’s a lot of excellent literature out there! So if you see a book of translated literature that isn’t on this longlist, read it too.

The shortlist for the National Translation Prize will be announced in October, and the winner will be announced in November. You can check ALTA’s website for updates, and I’ll also keep you informed.

Happy reading.

That reading was also fun, though. I’m one of the jury members on the American Literary Translators Association’s National Translation Award in Prose for 2025. Along with the other jury members Ilze Duarte, Peter Constantine, Hoyoung Moon, and George Henson, I read 60-odd books to determine the longlist, the shortlist, and the winner—which will all be announced later this year.

I’ve served in literary juries before, but this was the most intensive reading experience I’ve had, mainly because of the sheer number of submissions. For several months I had to carve time out of my work, and put aside all of my free time, to get through all of the books. All of my waking hours were occupied. I forgot to call family members. I didn’t meet friends. The usually active social life that my partner and I pursue fell quiet.

But I felt immensely enriched by the reading, because this is one of the prizes I consult every year to put together my own reading list. I was getting to read books I would have sought out anyway—though at a far slower pace. I read books from so many different languages, literary traditions, and aesthetic sensibilities: I was left in awe of the brilliance of human creativity. It shelltered me from all the bad news in the world, and inspired me in my own creative pursuits. When I was done reading—and had to turn to the very unfun task of deciding which books would make the longlist—I missed all that reading.

But I was also glad to get back to reading in a more forgiving manner. When you read for a jury, you read cruelly, to (at worst) eliminate books from consideration or (at best) to compare them with other books. The mind is always in judgement.

I would hate to always read that way.

The first book I picked up was one that would decidedly not win any awards today, though it did win Canada Reads in 2005: the novel Rockbound by Frank Parker Day. Published in 1928, this is the tale of a young clansman claiming the land, and the livelihood, that is by rights his in his family’s fishing community in Nova Scotia. The dialogue is written in dialect, with a local accent so thick it took me some time to understand it. And the book comes with a warning from the publisher that the text contains language that is considered offensive today.

This was not a novel I’d normally be drawn to, but I quite enjoyed it, because I was traveling in Nova Scotia when I picked it up. Reading the literature of any place I’m traveling in is hands down my most favourite way to read. When I’m organized about it, I research my reading list before the start of my journey and lug around the books as I travel. This time I wasn’t organized. In Lunenburg Bound Books, I saw that there was a section on Atlantic Canadian writers; and I picked up the one that felt the most exotic to me. And I learned a lot about traditional fishing practices on the islands of southern Nova Scotia, very close to the areas my partner and I were traveling through. I also got a feeling for the land in the way I wouldn’t have got without the book.

After that, I looked up other novels about Nova Scotia, or by Nova Scotian writers, and I plan to spend this month reading them at a leisurely pace, not worrying about whether they’re good or not, just taking from them what I can, or, in other words, enjoying them.

And then I’ll consider my next reading project. To expand into the rest of Atlantic Canada? To return to reading memoirs and autobiographies, as I’d been doing last year? To read literature in translation? To catch up on the Booker longlist? To make another go (of many) of trying to catch up on Nepali literature? There’s so much to read—and so many ways of reading.

Drop me a line and tell me what you’re reading—and pass along recommendations, too.

One final recommendation from me: Peter Beinart’s Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. It’s essential reading for today: not simply for the information, but for the deep feeling with which Beinart discusses matters Israeli and Jewish. Do pick it up if you can.

I can’t even remember when I started it. But I know when I’ll start Draft Nine: next week.

Why the rush? Because Draft Nine will be the final draft. I feel the end coming, and it feels good.

When I began Draft Seven, I wrote a short Substack post about my process when I write novels. (TL;DR: it gets fun only in the later drafts). The later the draft, the funner it gets, because most (though not all) of the structural work is done. The craft considerations, about which I’ve also posted before, become subtle. I get to put the final touches that make the story breathe to life.

The final draft is the one in which, years after beginning the novel, I finally get to play. And the material I’ll be playing with is, of course, language—in all its elasticity.

To write about non-English subjects in English is to translate; that was the argument I made in my Master’s thesis in English. This is still how I approach my creative practice today. Translating and writing are equal parts of the same act for me: I write about Nepal in English, and I also translate Nepali literature into English.

Which is why I’m inspired by the process of translators as much as that of writers. Recently, I read an interview of International Booker Prize winner Banu Mushtaq’s translator Deepa Bhasthi in Scroll. You can read the full article here, but this is the extract that resonated with me:

“…The aim of translation, especially in former colonies like ours where English is acquired along with a complicated baggage, should never be to write in “proper” English. When one translates, the aim is to introduce the reader to new words, in this case, Kannada or to new thoughts that come loaded with the hum of another language. I call it translating with an accent, which reminds the reader that they are reading a work set in another culture….”

Yes, exactly.

So in the final revision of my novel-in-progress, I’ll be stretching and molding and shaping the English language to find the pitch of my first-person narrator’s voice. I’ll imprint the Nepali language onto English, yes, but in ways that serve her personal voice. You know how all of us have an inner voice, one that speaks in staccato rhythms, in broken sentences, in half-formed, flyaway fragments? I’ll be bringing those to the page in the final draft.

What fun.

Before I get to that part, though, I’ll begin with a less fun but necessary errand: to check on the story arcs of all the characters—primary and secondary and tertiary and also fleeting background figures—to make sure that I’ve resolved each adequately.

This is the thing about writing a novel: there’s always structural work to do, from the very start right up to the end.

These letters take time to compose, and they feel like gifts: confidences from people I like and admire and feel attached to. They also prompt me to look back at my own year, to take measure of what I did and didn’t get up to—and figure out why.

I value this chance at introspection. Several years after moving from Kathmandu to Toronto, I began to write year-end letters myself so that I could feel connected to those who were too far to meet any more. Sometimes the ties that bind us to our sense of community grow so faint that they vanish. I wanted them to remain in sight, still.

My move to Toronto coincided with a new phase in my life: living with my long-term partner. For lack of a common country where he, a Canadian, and I, a Nepali, could work and live together, Daniel and I had maintained a long-distance relationship till we decided to set up in Toronto. So much of what went into the year-end letter was about our now-conjoined lives, which felt novel and unexpected and wondrous and fun. Daniel added his bit after I wrote the first draft, and in the spirit of merriment we coined it the “KathManDanJu Post,” (playing off Nepal’s largest newspaper The Kathmandu Post) and sent it out, in a newsletter format, to share our joy.

And when there was sorrow—my brother Bhaskar’s death in 2013, followed six years later by my sister Tejshree’s—our year-end letters shared that news too. It felt helpful, in those years, to find words for our grief.

We stopped writing the KathManDanJu Post during the pandemic. It didn’t seem like a year when we needed to share personal news. But after a few years’ hiatus, we resumed with shorter letters.

Unlike with some of our friends, whose year-end letters are part of an annual ritual, we still remain unsure, year to year, whether we’ll get around to writing one this time around. We don’t schedule it in, the way we do the buying and decorating of a Christmas tree.

“Shall we write a letter this year?” I asked Daniel a few days back, and for reasons that I haven’t asked him to explain, he said, “No.”

I agreed at the time. So many of our friends are in touch with us (possibly more than they want) over social media. It feels like overkill to also send them a summary at the end of the year.

But over the past few days I’ve begun to want to find words for the year that’s ending. It’s a need I feel, clearly. As over the past years, I want to take measure of what I did and didn’t get up to—and figure out why.

For my own sake, then, if not for the sake of my community, should I? Send our friends a year-end letter, that is.

I genuinely don’t know. What I do know is that I’ll draft one in the coming days. I might keep it as a journal entry, private, meant only for me. Or—perhaps the desire for community will win out—I’ll send it out. I’ll figure that out once I’ve written it, hopefully before December 31.

In my teens, I got hold of a diary with a flimsy lock, and though it was easily picked, that lock was assurance enough to make me feel safe in a family situation that afforded little privacy. (Nepali families are not known for enabling interiority). Though we lived in Washington DC, ours was a Very Nepali Family. I shared a room with my sister till my brother left for college and I could move into his room.

This was when I began to write about my thoughts and emotions, working out my youthful confusions by writing through them to arrive at equally youthful certainties. Who was the greatest tennis player of all time, Bjorn Borg or John McEnroe? (Borg). Which artists were the best? (The Abstract Expressionists). What was it with boys? (I vowed to never marry). Was I a feminist? (Decidedly, yes). Was I Nepali or American? (American—in my heart, if not in reality).

Horrifyingly, after I went to college and my parents packed up and left the US, my mother saved that diary, and the other unlocked ones that followed it. I found them in the storeroom of my parents’ home in Kathmandu more than twenty years later. And though I rescued them, I haven’t read them again, because what I wrote in them wasn’t of lasting importance. The value of journaling lay in the process: in allowing me to seek, and to strive, aching for intellectual clarity and emotional growth—and independence. Adulthood.

Since that first locked diary, I’ve generally not been fussy about what kind of notebook I’ve used, mainly because I couldn’t afford fancy ones. In college—at art school—I switched from using notebooks to sketchbooks so that I could draw alongside my writing. Afterwards, in Nepal, I switched back to lined notebooks, sometimes indulging in pretty lokta- or rice-paper notebooks, though their irregular surfaces made them harder to write on and less practical. Nowadays, when I feel like spluring, I buy a Leuchtturm notebook, but when I find myself without the notebook I’m currently using, I’ll write on any scrap of paper and paste it on.

I simply have to journal. I still can’t deeepen my thinking without writing, even now. I journal, therefore I think.

There are ten empty pages left in my present journal. I started it in January 2023. This journal took me through time with family in Oxford, a family visit to Kathmandu, a trip to London Ontario to receive an Honorary PhD from Western University, a summer of home renovation in Toronto, a wilderness outing to the Northwest Territories, another family visit to Kathmandu, a trek to Makalu Barun Base Camp, a winter of settling back into our newly renovated home with my partner recovering from a leg injury, another family visit to Kathmandu, a trip to Turkey and Greece, and a summer of swimming in Canada—as I worked on my novel-in-progress all the while.

When I fill its remaining pages, I’ll add this journal to a pile of old ones in a box under the stairway. And unless I need to jog specific memories, I’ll never look at it again.

That’s the thing about journaling: the journal itself is less valuable than the process it enables. That’s why I’ll never share my journals publicly.

Not all writers feel this way, of course. I recently picked up Amy Tan’s latest book, The Backyard Bird Chronicles, because like her, I’ve returned to my first love, visual art. I’ve also started to keep a visual journal, and to combine art and text to put together mixed-media essays. I wanted to see how Amy Tan brings these two media together in her work.

The chronicle is, in the true sense, a journal. Putting it together was, as Tan says in the preface, “pure fun, spontaneous, a bit of a mess, come what may.” Writing a novel, by contrast, is “torment,” for her. A novel “needs structure, tending of language, constant shaping, refinement, excision, and cumulative insights that might give it breath and breadth. I have to carry a thousand pieces in an increasingly complex configuation toward the luminous vision of a story that remains a mirage.” Perfection is her goal in a novel, whereas in this chronicle, “Perfection would have been the antithesis of spontenaety.” And so the chronicle follows “the moment in front of me, one day, one page, one sketch.”

I enjoyed the chronicle but recognized that it was not for me.

It’s not that I’m not interested in reading anyone’s journal. Like anyone who writes, I too am curious about the inner lives of other writers. I’ll seek out their diaries if I’m researching them and hoping for insight into their life or work process. But my first choice will always be to read their main creative writing.

This is true even when, for example in the case of Anais Nin, the creative writing and diaries are intimately related. I love Anais Nin’s diaries. But as a reader I enjoy my writing less first-draft, more crafted. I love Nin’s novels, like Cities of the Interior, more.

And so I’ll never subject anyone—and maybe not even myself—to my journals.

But if you’ve read some journals you enjoyed, and think I should read, let me know?

I’d been wanting to write it since the end of our trek to Makalu Barun Base Camp in the autum of 2023, and finally found time in the Spring, after my partner Daniel’s leg injury—which is mentioned in the essay—healed enough to free me from care duties. (As he found out, you never fully appreciate how able-bodied you are till you’re temporarily not. And as I found out anew, caring for loved ones take priority over everything else).

I was worried that waiting so long to write would make me forget the details, but I had journaled throughout the trek, and as I consulted my notes, I found that the memories came back vividly. (Always journal!) I also researched the area retrospectively, and found that the knowledge I acquired after the trek helped intensify the experience.

I found, too, that I recovered my voice while writing this essay.

Friends know that I’ve been working off and on on a novel since my sister Tej died in 2019, only six years after my brother Bhaskar died in 2013. Recovering from these losses has taken time. Though I’m back to writing, I haven’t quite nailed the voice through which to narrate that work of fiction. I’m still working on that.

But in this essay, I found my own voice—the one I speak with, the one I write nonfiction with.

It’s been hard to know how to accommodate grief into my writing, even though it has found such a central place in my life. I haven’t wanted to write about my siblings’ deaths, not directly, at least.

With this essay, I found I could find a place for death, alongside life. This was, to be honest, a revelation, and also a relief.

Let me know what you think?

To read the essay, you’ll have to set up an account for Himal Southasia, doing so is free. And if you feel moved to subscribe to Himal Southasia’s worthy newsletters, or to become a patron to them, please do.

Thanks for reading this post, and subscribing to my Substack. These occasional posts have been very much part of my procsss of recovery. It means a lot that you’re interested.

To end, I’ll post a view of Mt. Makalu from Base Camp. How otherworldly is that?

It took the pandemic—being locked down for eight months in Toronto—to start sketching and painting again. I mostly used it as a form of journaling, to record my everyday experience, and to still my mind. Making visual art can be a form of meditation in the way that writing never can.

It had not occurred to me to make anything of my visual journals till a friend, Sujata Berry, pressed Leanne Shapton’s books into my hands and told me to try to mix the visual and the written.

If you don’t know Leanne Shapton’s work, do look it up. She doesn’t subordinate one medium to the other. Her visual images aren’t just illustrations of the text. Rather, the visual and written forms accompany each other, and add up to a whole.

I admired that. I kept sketching and painting. And I began to think about how I might bring my journals into my main creative practice.

My first attempt was published in Globe and Mail on May 11, 2024. The online version is available through this link, and the paper version—a two-page spread—is below.

I’ll be honest, I was surprised a piece with such a handmade arts-and-crafts vibe made it to the Globe and Mail. I was thrilled, of course. And I began to think about how I might make mixed-media work again, and how I might develop and deepen my aesthetics as I continue.

For now I’m just thankful that I got to pull together my first graphic essay. Thank you to everyone who inspired it, and of course to my partner Daniel for taking me on the oddest “dream holiday” ever.

These essays are yet to be edited and published, but in both cases, I felt a jolt of surprise when I realized that I’d said everything I wanted to say in the way I wanted to say it.

As a novelist I work for years at a time without finishing anything. I’m accustomed to having one or more works-in-progress, some near completion and others not, always on the go. The knowledge that so much is half-done doesn’t bother me. I feel it’s true to the human experience. So many things in our lives are unfinished—our relationships, our ambitions, our personal trajectories, and even, quite often, our thoughts. We are suspended in a constant state of becoming and unbecoming. It is a fiction that we can fix anything permanently.

Yet it’s satisfying to feel, for a moment, that something is done.

Final.

Set.

That feeling will disappear as soon as the essays go for editing.

And even if I regain that satisfaction upon their publication, it’ll be fleeting, I know. With every article or story or novel or nonfiction book I’ve published, there have been regrets afterwards—usually, but not always, minor. There are things I might have put in or taken out or phrased differently. Synonyms I might have substituted, sentences I might have broken up or joined. A stylistic tic noticed too late. A few typos, inevitably. And perspectives, or some information, that I lacked at the time.

And I return to my normal state, knowing that so much is half-done.

These are my thoughts as I resume work, now, on my novel-in-progress. (I put it aside last autumn halfway through Draft 7, and think—though I may be wrong—that Draft 8 will be the final one).

I think of all that remains incomplete, and I write.

On Week 1, I’ve calculated how many days a year I spend on my phone—and it’s shocking. (Calculate your own: your average screen time per day multiplied by 365 and then divided by 24). I’ve created a physical barrier to accessing my phone (by putting it in a cloth bag when it’s not in use), and I’ve made a snazzy new wallpaper which is aimed less at scolding me and more at asking myself, out of genuine curiosity, why I’m getting on my phone this time.

I’ve also thought about what success would look like in terms of smartphone use. I’m not sure I really know. I use my phone for many things: calling/texting with family and friends and acquaintances, primarily; and: emailing, reading the news, taking photographs (for fun and work), and—problematically—to connect with the many communities that I care about, and that I want to be part of, via social media.

My phone becomes a problem when it opens up the world via the Internet. Or, “the world”—the virtual world. Long after I’ve known that the sense of connection that the Internet fosters can be illusory, I’ve succumbed to the desire for it. But also, I do want to be across some (not all!) social media “discourse.” The challenge, of course, is to not let it dictate what you pay attention to.

Because as Christian Dillo says in The Path of Aliveness, a book that will always stay with me, your life is what you pay attention to.

So: to me, success at the end of the next five weeks would look like me picking up my phone only purposefully—to accomplish a task that’s meaningful to me—and putting my phone aside when that task is accomplished.

I know from past attempts to gain control of my smartphone use that there will be rewards. (Most profoundly, serenity). And those rewards are what I’m really after. But for now I’m going to focus on behavioural achievements, and let the more psychological, and profound, rewards follow.

I might post about my progress over the next five weeks in the comments.

If any of this appeals to you, join me and other Guardian readers in the challenge. The link to sign up to it is above.

(I wrote this on my laptop and uploaded the image, which I made on an iPad, through my smartphone).

Then I stopped worrying and learned to love the rest of my life. It was a deliberate act, a decision I made in January 2023. I spent the year attending to everything else that I wanted to pay attention to: my and my partner’s family, mainly, and home affairs. By the end of December we had sold my partner’s family farm, spent quality time with our family members in Canada, Nepal, the UK, and the US, and celebrated the launch of my father’s memoir Rastra-Pararastra: Ektantradekhi Ganatantrasamma. To top it off, we went on two big wilderness excursions to celebrate my partner’s retirement (yes, there is such a thing as a retired journalist). We went canoeing in the Northwest Territories over the summer, and in the autumn we hiked to Makalu Base Camp. In between, we also renovated our Toronto home.

I wrote when I could, and though I longed for sustained writing time, I knew I wouldn’t get it till 2024.

Well, here I am now.

As I resume work on the novel—which is on its 7th draft—I’m asking myself questions that journalists have put to me in the past: what’s your writing process? Do you write in the morning, the afternoon, the evening, the night? Do you write at home, away from home, in a shack, at a residency in an exotic locale? Do you use a laptop or a desktop? Do you ever write by hand? Do you sit at a desk, slouch on a sofa, lounge in bed? Do you write in cafes? What software do you use? Do you take breaks? Do you drink coffee or tea while you write? What are the conditions that foster creativity for you?

My answers have varied, becoming less romanticized, and more pragmatic, over time.

For this year, since I don’t already have a process in place, my ideal process, or dare I say my resolution, is:

On writing days, I’ll work in the morning for several 45-minute stretches, with the meditation app Enso ringing a bell to remind me to take yoga/stretching breaks in between. I’ll have the phone on silent mode, as always. I’ll be wearing wrist braces, as I have been for years now. I’ll mostly be in our study at home. I’ll generally sit on a sofa with a laptop, but I’ll also work at an office desk or a standing desk from time to time. I’ll try to have a view out of a window because I like being able to see the outdoors. I’ll have a thermos full of herbal tea to sip from. I’ll use Scrivener till the final few drafts, then I’ll switch to Word and edit by hand on a print-out of the manuscript.

There are other conditions that foster creativity for me, and I resolve to pursue those too: to meditate, and exercise, and cut back on social media, and read a lot, and see art, and be informed about and engaged in goings-on in the world.

The good thing about not being able to write is that you get a clear sense of what you’d like to write when you finally can. In the middle of the seventh draft, the novel has revealed its full scope to me. I’m going back to revise it intrigued by all of its possibilities.

I’m happy to be writing again. I’m finding fulfillment in my creative life. And I hope you’re finding fulfillment with your creative endeavours too.

A final resolution: I’ll be back here on Substack this year, but promise, as I did when I started, not to clutter the inbox of subscribers with emails.

Happy New Year, and here’s to keeping resolutions!

It still does, every now and then.

It’s not fashionable right now to praise it, but I will—with deep apologies. I’m not trying to convince anyone who wants to quit to stay on. Go ahead and quit it if that’s the right thing for you to do.

But I’ve decided to stay on till the end. Why? Because I once loved it. Though my love for it has waned, I’m curious, as one is with ex-loves. I want to see what it goes on to do.

And I’ll grieve for it if it gets worse and worse, as it seems likely to do.

I got on Twitter in 2009, a year or so after it started. At first it felt like a site for journalists to share their news or views, which we could already read in the newpapers they wrote for. I warmed to the site only when I began to follow users who tweeted as individuals, rather than as representations of media organizations. And especially after I began to follow writers on Twitter, the site came alive for me. Suddenly, I could listen in on writers’ internal monologues and on freewheeling conversations they were having with each other. I could join in too, if I could overcome my abiding introversion. But even when I didn’t join in, I could learn about the passions, quirks, habits, and inner lives of writers whose work I read and admired. It was—it still is—an unexpected generosity to be let into the lives of strangers.

My falling in love with Twitter coincided with my move from my hometown, Kathmandu, to Toronto. I was longing for a community of the likeminded. And though I never mistook the virtual community on Twitter for a real one, I did make some IRL friends there. Just last week I met Anakana Schofield over a momo dinner in Parkdale after getting to know her, a few years back, on CanLit Twitter.

From Toronto Twitter I learned about local goings-on and politics. From Indigenous Twitter I learned to reframe Canada not as a shiny liberal democracy, but a rapacious settler-colonial state. From Black Twitter I came to understand that reparations had to be part of the conversation in North America. From LGBTQ Twitter I learned of the persistence of the last bastion of bigotry: transphobia. On Twitter I found I could expand my mind intellectually—all while staying in touch with Nepal’s latest crises through Nepal Twitter.

Through all this, I wasn’t just gathering information about the world, but sharpening my own thoughts and feelings. Because voice is everything on this site. To this day, its least interesting users are those who approach it as a tool to boost their careers. “Pleased to announce that my umpteenth book is being published next year,” is a snooze, even if it comes from one of your favourite writers, as is, “Re-upping my column from last week ICYMI.” Whereas, “You know what’s a crime? True crime, that’s what,” is abrasive, and makes you think. Why would someone feel this way about an endlessly popular, endlessly profitable genre? What’s not to love about transforming people’s real-life suffering into riveting page-turners? Is there a moral argument to be made against true crime? Is true crime just appealing to the voyeur? (I think so, but I’ll leave that subject for another post).

All of this stimulation is, of course, often overwhelming. It is also incredibly addictive, as we all know. Like most other writers, I’ve used apps to block the internet on my laptop, and have rationed the time I spend on the socials—not always successfully. I feel for every writer who has tweeted a version of, “Taking a social media detox!” only to resume tweeting a few days later. I too have been that writer.

So it may be a favour to us all that the site’s new owner is making it less and less palateable. Perhaps he’ll do us the greatest favour of all by making the site collapse entirely.

If so, and if this site does cease to exist one day, I’ll miss my Twitter. But I won’t miss what Twitter has become recently.

Till then, I’ll stay on—salvaging whatever joy it is still possible to salvage from the wreck.

Full information about my writing is on my website.

Or I do.

So let me rephrase that:

I need a writing routine to write a novel. I need stretches of time—a couple of weeks at least, or better, several months—to spend my mornings and early afternoons writing uninterrupted.

That’s hard to get at the best of times. Life makes incessant demands on us. We all have to attend to day-to-day survival and the pragmatics that enable it. And also, we are so attached to the world.

Or I am.

Let me rephrase that too:

I’m so attached to the world.

When I started out as a writer, I was willing to sacrifice a lot to set up the writing routine of my dreams. (Not that I had much to sacrifice—that’s what made it easier). In graduate school I came across a book called Your Money or Your Life, aimed at helping structure your life to maximize the time you could spend writing or painting or pursuing similar creative passions which didn’t necessarily pay the bills. The book’s tenets were easy to follow as a freelance writer in Kathmandu, where the overheads of rent, utilities, and food were low. It helped to be bohemian—independent, but also mostly single, with only myself to support. Well into my thirties, I could spend most of my time writing on an income of less than $12,000 a year.

Life is more expensive in Toronto. And also, with age I’ve accrued attachments—many, many attachments. In my fifties now I’m deeply attached to my family and friends, my community and society, and to my relationship with my partner of more than fifteen years. I’m attached to a certain quality of life, a certain level of comfort, a certain feeling of ease. Yes, I want to go to that yoga class. I want to swim in the lakes too. I want to travel as much as I possibly can. And sure, I’ll attend your social gathering, because I’m attached to you.

The bohemian me of the past is wrapped up in conventional, unmistakeably bourgeois trappings. And so: nowadays I steal a few hours here and there to write, tacitly accepting that at this point, writing is secondary to living. It just is—at this point.

This is the choice I’ve made, I remind myself when I wonder whatever happened to my writing routine.

I also remind myself that this won’t last.

Because I need a writing routine to write a novel. That’s just how the creative process goes for me.

Without a writing routine, I can tinker, plod on, make minor revisions, take notes, research, come up with an occasional insight or formal breakthrough. But only with a routine can I immerse myself in the fictive world of my novel. Only with a routine can I answer the yet-open questions I’ve raised in the work.

So in between living, I wait for the next opportunity to settle into a writing routine. That’s coming up—in July, and also in August, and in the following months too. A couple of weeks here and there, and finally, because that’s the only option in the end, as much time as it takes.

Uninterrupted time.

Uninterrupted time to write.

The dream.

Full information about my books on my website.

As an art student in the US, I dabbled in the book form, drawn to the unfolding of a narrative, if a non-linear visual narrative, in time. But I stopped making visual art in my twenties, when I moved to Kathmandu and began to write. This more discursive form of expression helped me make sense of the confusing, politically volatile world there. Logic, argument, and polemic helped me respond to my environment and feel in control creatively.

I’d always stayed in touch with my high school art teacher, Susan Easton, who had encouraged me to go to art school in the first place. When she visited Toronto in 2019, we spent a few hours at the Aga Khan museum. Later, over dinner, I said a bit ruefully, “I keep meaning to return to art.”

“You’ll do it when you do it,” she said.

I did.

During the pandemic. I wrote about it for a program on ‘pandemic projects’ by the CBC.

And afterwards, I’ve stuck with it, alternating between sketching, painting, and writing as my new creative practice.

I’ve never been happier creatively.

I’ll write more about the visual book I’m working on in a later post. For now, I’ll end with a few of the images I’ve worked on for it recently.

How will these images form a narrative? How will they fit into the book form?

The end. (For now).

*

For more about my writing: www.manjushreethapa.com

Phew and yay.

This post is purely to share my exhiliarion. Please indulge me. It’s very hard earned.

It feels like I’ve spent years building a house, painstakingly focusing, for the most part, on the rudiments of engineering and architecture, making sure that the structure is sound and elegant and functional as well.

Now I get to work on the details.

What kind of finishing do I want on the doors and windows and on the exterior walls and the roof? What kind of flooring in each room, what palette and surface texture for the walls? Lighting: ceiling, wall, natural light—what works best in each space? And let’s not forget the furniture, the decor, the art.

Diligence gives way to pleasure, to flights of fancy, to experimentation and risk-taking and inventiveness and thrill. The structure is sound, after all. There’s no fear that the house will collapse. It’s still important to heighten the elegance and functionality of the house, but otherwise, fine aesthetic considerations are all.

What works best in each corner? What intrigues? What clicks, what pops? What creates the most gratifying space to dwell in? What makes me (and the reader) never want to leave?

I write, now, filled with the creative exuberance I’d hoped to eventually feel when I first outlined the novel years back.

This is what I write for. To feel the euphoria of creating something beautiful, something right.

It’s finally happening.

Phew and yay.

I arrived at this thought while wrapping up Draft Five.

As have my previous novels, this one was feeling interminable by this stage. Not that I’d expected differently. Having written nonfiction books as well, I know that for me, writing a novel is a uniquely time-bending endeavour. This, because it entails a fight to the finish between the novel and life itself. Each is intensely jealous of the author, each places unreasonable demands that the author must figure out how to meet. All the while, time slips by and keeps slipping by.

The first draft took me the longest, from January 2018 to February 2020. The person I loved most in the world, my sister, died during this time, and I could barely write. When I resumed, I was no longer the same person. Somehow, though, I was still a person who wanted to keep writing the novel. And so I persisted.

The following three drafts took five or six months each, all while the city I call home, Toronto, adopted varying forms of lockdown. Bleakly, I joked that global conditions were ideal for fiction writers, but like many of my peers, I found prolonged isolation and anxiety distinctly uninspiring. I plodded on dutifully.

Then, in Draft Five, it was the novel’s turn to issue a preposterous ultimatum when it became obvious that I’d made a serious mistake by choosing a true-to-life protagonist out of a loyalty to authenticity, to verité. Draft upon draft, I hadn’t been able to animate her. Reluctantly, I conceded that I had to replace her. I spent eight months gutting the novel before I could hear the reimagined heroine’s clear, ringing voice.

In this manner, four years have passed. Of course, I’ve spent less than two of those years actively writing, which is not enough time to complete a literary novel in the best of circumstances. But mostly, I’ve waited to transform into a person who could write this novel.

Who that will be still remains unknown to me. And this is alright with me. As Buddhist thought has it, everything that appears stable, including identity, is in flux. Whether or not we want to, we keep changing. But if we pay attention, and are lucky, we can try to steer this change somewhat. Because when we launch ourselves into a years-long mission, what we’re really doing is drawing up a contract with ourselves to become the person who will fulfil that particular mission in time. Setting out to write a novel is my way of navigating how I change.

I’m curious about who I’m becoming as I start Draft Six – which may or may not be the Final Draft. I know that the novel is already asking me to learn some things I didn’t know. It also wants me to follow through on plotlines and develop new images, to capture richer tones and more resonant moods. It will surely place other demands as well. And mostly, it will ask that I imagine it more fully, more fiercely.

As for the demands of life, well, I’ll also keep figuring out how to meet those. I can say that when I become the person who is this novel’s author, that is to say, when this novel is finished with me, it will feel inevitable that its writing took as long as it did. I’ve felt this before. Everything I’ve experienced during the writing process – the grief and loss and persistence of love and joy – informs the writing. Afterwards, it will feel right that I, at that juncture and no sooner, should author this exact novel.

I’m looking forward to the day I’ll feel this way.

* * *

This essay was originally published in The Author: Journal of the Society of Authors, UK, Winter 2022. Thank you to Merryn Glover for alerting me to its publication through the tweet below.