BackBook review: All Of Us In Our Own Lives
The Nepalese writer explores themes of identity, displacement, caste and gender in this accomplished slice-of-life novel
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Somewhere towards the end of this slow-burn book, one of its four protagonists plays a game of dare, all by herself. Born and brought up in a remote Nepal village, she has successively lost her parents to death and her brother Gyanu and best friend Chandra to migration. On this day, this girl in her late teens travels to the India border, from where her friend had crossed over to work as a domestic help in Ghaziabad, near Delhi. The samosa vendor’s Nepali has a Maithili accent, Indian government buses run on the other side. Driven by loneliness and longing to breathe the same air as her friend, Sapana gives the sole policeman the slip and walks across the border.
“Standing on Indian soil, she feels herself part of the big world, part of its charge and energy, part of the light that swirls around and the force that brings together constellations—of people, objects, circumstances—and draws them apart, making everything change, always change. Entire days pass, nowadays, without her thinking about Ba and Ma. Everything changes. She’s changing too. Just as the world is Gyanu Dai’s and Chandra’s, it’s hers too. Her life isn’t small. She swirls with the whole big world."
All Of Us In Our Own Lives is a slim novel about a big ambition: The self-actualization of a sidelined people in a country caught between two Asian giants. For too long, the only way has been out. In a 2014 interview with now defunct litblog Bookslut, All Of Us author Manjushree Thapa—herself a product of a hybrid upbringing between Nepal and Canada—acknowledged as much: “Nepal is one of those countries where everyone is travelling and living elsewhere for a while. Nepali identity is very transnational right now."
It is these themes of identity, of displacement and of the age-old issues of caste and gender that Thapa explores through the prism of the aid industry in Nepal. In the same interview with Bookslut, she goes on to say: “Aid is a huge industry in Nepal…aid often supplants the private sector in Nepal. There’s a lot of money, and power, in this sector. And it’s almost entirely unaccountable, to the citizens of Nepal, or to the citizens of donor countries. A lot of good has come from aid, but there has been a lot of misuse as well."
Despite three fiction titles, including the Tilled Earth, a collection of short stories, Thapa continues to be better known in this part of the world through her op-ed pieces and non-fiction essays: She makes no bones about her activism or her political leanings and this book segues rather neatly into those interests. In the hands of a less perceptive writer, this combination could have easily blown up into a strident, agenda-driven treatise. Instead, we get a restrained, understated novel that somehow manages to blend an Eastern sense of infinite time and established community with a Western respect for urgency and individualism. In the political and social flux that is Nepal—where female agency, especially, is the elephant in the room—this is a tightrope walk like no other and, indeed, each of the four protagonists will find they need to walk a different talk.
The conventionally powerful Ava is the designated driver of the novel—removed from Nepal at an early age, brought up by committed, causerati parents and in between relationships herself—but it is Sapana, innocent, impetuous, intelligent, who is the heart of the All Of Us, pulling together the various threads and taking the story beyond the last page. As the youngest of the four and the only one who has never left the country—well, excepting the border sojourn—she also finds it in herself to tap into a wellspring of conviction and belongingness that makes her hard decisions easier.
“We’re not like other girls, we don’t want to have the lives of our mothers, we want to be modern," she tells the cynical Gyanu at one point. “If we don’t make things better, who will? We’re the youth, we’re the future, we’re the hope of the nation. If we work together, there’s nothing we can’t do," she concludes, borrowing a few lines from a speech she has been preparing and, somehow, sounding believable instead of bombastic.
Of the three women, however, I found Indira the most intriguing: Placed firmly in a man’s world—at work and at home—with neither Ava’s natural advantages nor Sapana’s uncorrupted idealism, Indira (the name is deliberated, of course) represents every developing country woman who has evolved more rapidly than the menfolk but discovers that patriarchal systems have ways of keeping power close. As she juggles an old-school mother-in-law, recalcitrant children, a wayward and desperate house help with conniving men’s clubs at her NGO and her own ambitions, she uses all the skills she possesses and some she does not. Her appeal to Ava, woman-to-woman, her attempt to bribe a male subordinate, her breakdown at the big meeting may not appeal to the feminist reader but, as she says, “It is too impossible (to be a Nepali woman)."
This is not a big book, of the kind marquee subcontinental authors produce ever so often, but it is an accomplished slice-of-life novel that takes readers beyond the floodlights and behind the screens where hearts break, mistakes are made, resolve rules and empathy conquers all.
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