In Lekhnath Chhetri’s Fruits of the Barren Tree, translated from the Nepali by Anurag Basnet, time plays many roles. It is a raconteur, telling the stories of seemingly insignificant men and women in the small villages of Relling, Darjeeling. It is an observer, fading into the background, rejecting the objective logic of chronology, and falling into Henri Bergson’s subjective category of la durée (duration), or “lived experience”. Time stretches endlessly, marking difficult days that seem impossible to get through. At other times, it collapses on itself, compressing years into a sentence, a shift between chapters.
Set in the turbulent years of the separatist movement for Gorkhaland, led by Subhash Ghising in the late 1980s, the book was published in Nepali in 2021, as Phoolange. Chhetri explains the term: “In the rustic speech of the villages, trees that put out flowers that do not transform into fruit and seeds but waste away and fall off are called ‘phoolange’. This is the meaning of ‘phoolange’ in the dictionary too. (…) I am not the only phoolange in Darjeeling; the movement itself is one of the phoolange.” The book is not just an account of the attempted revolution but is an unsparing critique of how power structures deny representation and agency to those on the lowest rungs of the hierarchy of privilege.
Meditation on love
At its heart, Fruits of the Barren Tree is a mediation on love. The story starts with death – that of the old man Basnet, mourned by his wife, Basnetni. In nine months, his wife passes away too. The narrative then makes one of its many imperceptible shifts and takes the reader back into the early life of Basnet, a famous jhankri, a grand shaman, who defies the law of celibacy imposed on him by his office and falls in love at age 40, with a woman many years younger. Fearing social censure, the lovers flee to make a new life for themselves:
Basnet and Basnetni, who had crossed the hill at Falelung by the time dawn broke, had nothing but a bundle each in their hands. They carried their breath. The beating of their hearts. Some songs. A few sighs. The clothes on their backs. But more than anything, they possessed the indomitable courage to crush any ill-favoured wind with the dry and cracked souls of their feet.
There is poetry in the novel’s rendering of human emotions, the magic of which must be ascribed to both writer and translator. Juxtaposed against the violence of the Gorkhaland movement, the narrative offers love in all its fragility as a counterpoint to the everyday frustrations of its cast of characters. The Basnets’s son, Jhuppay, growing up headstrong and with the reputation of a troublemaker, falls in love with Nimma. Talented and tranquil, she is the perfect foil to his chaos and unharnessed energy. The course of true love never did run smooth, we have been told, and Nimma and Jhuppay remain star-crossed lovers, destined only to “write love letters upon the breezes”. Forced apart by the momentum of the revolution, their love becomes a casualty of war.
The conflict between longing and tragedy in a community where political strife has caused the rupture of human relationships is best expressed in this description of Jhuppay’s return:
On the day he returned, he came to her at about 11 in the morning as a rumour. As the day advanced, he came as an information. Then he came to her as an alarm. He then vanished. And didn’t appear again.
The Gorkhaland movement, born of the desire for recognition and representation of the Indian Gorkha population residing in various parts of the country, remains woefully underrepresented in Indian writing in English. Kiran Desai’s Booker-winning The Inheritance of Loss (2006), did focus the lens on the unrest but did so from the outsider’s perspective, not quite giving a voice to a people denied self-actualisation.
A complex cultural situation
Chhetri brings both nuance and historical understanding to a complex political and cultural situation. Tracing the problem back to its inception, he writes of how at the time of independence, the people of Relling did not know what country they were citizens of. Muslim men who had come from across the border a few years ago said it was Pakistan. Marwari businessmen insisted it was India, the country of Gandhi. Those who had crossed over from Nepal years earlier believed they had been freed of British rule by the king of Nepal. In the absence of any communication from the government of India or from its representatives, there clearly can be no sense of national identity. The refusal of subsequent governments to recognise Nepali as a language of India further created alienation. Small wonder then that the demand for a separate state would find resonance with people ignored and denied political visibility. Chhetri identifies multiple points of tension, between communists and revolutionaries, between the state machinery and those attempting to overthrow it. The text also makes apparent the shifting dynamic between the oppressor and the oppressed and the slippage between centres of power.
This story of the hills of Darjeeling, however, is more than just the story of the demand for Gorkhaland. Steeped in local flavours, the narrative paints a rich portrait of a people and their socio-cultural practices. Chhetri’s characters are too detailed to be universal, and the narrative often breaks with conventional forms to explore their individual stories, refusing to homogenise them into mere plot points. The reader sees the eccentric Shikari-baje who could neither live nor die without his beloved catapult, Checkpost Boju, who knows every detail of her neighbours’ lives, Prem Sir, who is punished for the crime of objecting to the felling of trees by supporters of the revolution, Nimma’s mother, Malti, who is accused by her husband of not having an “Adam’s apple” and therefore not being able to keep secrets. The canvas is rich, the brush strokes are lush. Celebrations and rituals bring alive not just the lives of the people but also the landscape – the river Rangeet, the fields, the glorious skies, and the months of heavy rain. Anurag Basnet’s translation does much to keep the source text in the foreground, teasing out nuance and reaffirming cultural and linguistic specificity.
This is also the story of oppression and the impossibility of breaking free. Early in the novel, there is a scathing critique of the dehumanising system of sharecropping where a farmer works for the landowner and can barely eke out an existence for himself and his family. Basnet’s triumph over the destitution forced on him might have been inspirational, but it finds a counterpoint in the near fatalistic fact of the common man always being under the yoke of those outranking him in intermeshed structures of power. Basnet wants his child to make a better life for himself but where there is no education, no opportunities, how can there ever be equity? Basnet and his son seem to live in a pre-Foucauldian world where hegemonic power cannot always be challenged and privilege, prosperity and benefits lie concentrated in the hands of a few.
“There was no option but to remain silent. To accept everything that was happening, in precisely the way it was happening, was the wisest course of action,” Basnet concludes. Chhetri refuses to romanticise either suffering or the revolution. The reader might find resonance in Chhetri’s explanatory author’s note, where he writes of the failure of the movement and the inability of its leadership to deliver on its promise of “days of prosperity” for everyone. Communalism, nepotism, and corruption ensured that the common people remained exactly where they had always been. It is from the accounts of those who had been part of the agitation and were subsequently left disillusioned that the story of Fruits of the Barren Tree takes shape. In Chhetri’s writing, in an obvious act of subversion, the phoolange of Darjeeling tell their story in their own voice.
Fruits Of the Barren Tree, Lekhnath Chhetri, translated from the Nepali by Anurag Basnet, Penguin India.