The Royal Ghosts: short stories by Samrat Upadhyay

Just finished reading The Royal Ghosts by Samrat Upadhyay. There is a blurb on the cover which likens Upadhyay to a "Buddhist Chekov," whatever that means...[I know what that is trying to mean...]...I have read his Guru of Love but I thought that book was a bit uneven...

However The Royal Ghosts is a wonderful collection of 9 short stories. Upadhyay has surely matured as a writer, especially as one sensitive of his characters' innermost feelings...the guy gets into their heads and lays out for us their dilemmas, uncertainities, fears, jealousies, indecisiveness...that certainly is his triumph as a writer...not so much the writing itself, for that, I felt, can be clumsy and, even text-bookish in many places, especially the narrative in the third person...

His stories have very simple and ordinary settings, and his language is very straightfoward and direct. Yet, almost all of them have some imprint of the political situation in Nepal, be it the Maobadis or palace intrigue or the quest for democracy.

His characters: bank officers, junior accountants, a servant, an aging actor, etc -- are believable and are portrayed with great empathy: they wrestle with ordinary emotions, regrets, compromises, inner turmoils. The plots are from everyday life, a tad dramatic at times, but still, poignant in places.

I loved "Supreme Pronouncements" and "The Weight of a Gun" among the collection...

The stories are redolent with little, evocative details that would be highly familiar to us South Asians -- tea and tea shops in every story and the characters stopping by for afternoon tea over samosas and pakodas and even laddus [ooooh!]; people eating dal-bhat with chicken curry or eggplant or cauliflower subzi; gossipy neighbors and colleagues; Bollywood heroes like Amir Khan and Manisha Koirala, even mentions of AB and Dilip Kumar; bandhs and tire-burnings...

There are also place names like Thapathali, Putalisadak, Bhatbateni, Biratnagar, Sagarmatha, Swyambhu that contribute to the "atmosphere"...most of the stories are set in Katmandu, Nepal.

There is an effortlessness to his storytelling and while his humor and composition may not be exactly Chekovian, the ordinariness of the tales and the human foibles and emotions he sketches so deftly make the book highly readable in its own right.