Thapa peers at the wider world and its large issues through her characters’ everyday concerns. For instance, her stories about inter-racial couples – with their delicate, almost unnamable tensions – say more about the politics of development than lengthy articles could. Of these, Sounds that the Tongue Learns to Make is sharply poignant in its exploration of mixed coupledom.
In Friends, life is viewed through the eyes of a small shopkeeper, and the exchanges that she imagines between other people. Through Three Hundred Rupees and Ta’angzoum Among the Cows, Thapa explores rural landscapes and poverty robustly, with no self-consciousness or romanticizing. The big issues are all here, but they are organically and subtly woven into the stories.
The Buddha in the Earth-touching Posture is a stunning account of a retired Civil Servant’s sense of disquiet with himself, his religion, and the idea of ‘development’. The Girl of No Age is about urban angst and divorce, but also looks, through that cracked glass, at the reality of a child’s murder in a village.
Thapa’s characters are refreshingly real, and her writing is entertaining. There are no embarrassingly over-written descriptions or exhibitions of the exotic. The crispness of her tone and her gentle humour speak volumes for her self-assurance as a writer. Her people – old woodworkers, retired babus, lyricist-politicians, engineers, feminists, NGO employees, old Civil Servants and American Leftists – are all etched in precisely, with fondness and dignity.
Thapa also plays with form – The Hungry Statistician reads like an imagist poem in prose – and some stories are barely half a page long. These are the ones that while interesting, don’t always work. They leave you with the feeling that Thapa is aiming for a punch-line, which, honestly, her writing is almost too good for!
Penguin Books
(Anita Vachharajani © Timeout)
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