Darkmotherland

by Samrat Upadhyay

Genres: General Fiction; Disaster Fiction

Synopsis

“A Dickensian sweep and a vast cast of characters, Upadhyay created an ancient world saturated with the spirit of our time and shaped by political ambition and dark vision . . . A grand novel indeed.” —Ha Jin, National Book Award–winning author of Waiting

An epic tale of love and political violence set in earthquake-ravaged Darkmotherland, a dystopian reimagining of Nepal, from the Whiting Award–winning author of Arresting God in Kathmandu

In Darkmotherland, Nepali writer Samrat Upadhyay has created a novel of infinite embrace—filled with lovers and widows, dictators and dissidents, paupers, fundamentalists, and a genderqueer power player with her eyes on the throne—in an earthquake-ravaged dystopian reimagining of Nepal.

At its heart are two intertwining narratives: one of Kranti, a revolutionary’s daughter who marries into a plutocratic dynasty and becomes ensnared in the family’s politics. And then there is the tale of Darkmotherland’s new dictator and his mistress, Rozy, who undergoes radical body changes and grows into a figure of immense power.

Darkmotherland is a romp through the vast space of a globalized universe where personal ambitions are inextricably tied to political fortunes, where individual identities are shaped by family pressures and social reins, and where the East connects to and collides with the West in brilliant and unsettling ways.

Release date: January 7, 2025

Publisher: Soho Press

Print pages: 768

Sample

1.
When the Big Two struck, people got into cars and taxis, motorbikes and bicycles, and formed enormous lines to get out of the Valley. They were stopped by the Loyal Army Dais carrying machine guns. The highways out of the city had been ruptured or blocked with debris or landslides, the Loyal Army Dais said, so no one could leave. It was hard to see anything in the billowing, swooning dust. People only saw hardened, commandeering faces of the Loyal Army Dais and snouts of machine guns, and voices, shouting, scolding, haranguing. “Turn back! Back!” Small pandemonium broke out in the line, with people pushing, shoving, weeping, praying to their ancestors.
     A pillion rider on a motorbike was carrying a massive boombox on her shoulder. She turned up the volume of a Beatles song that penetrated the air, telling the good folks of Darkmotherland to get back to where they once belonged.

Two days after the Big Two, a small band of protestors wearing masks took to the streets, fighting the sandy grit in the air that got into their eyes, ears and mouths, shouting slogans about accountability and transparency. It was a small group, timid and furtive, as it made its way through the rubble that cluttered the lanes of the inner city. Their masks looked like they were borrowed from the set of a 1950s movie depicting space aliens. The residents of the surrounding houses, some of which were tottering and heaving, threw things at them: small stones, bunched-up paper, old dolls, water. When the group reached the Lion Palace, these masked men and women were apprehended and taken to an unknown location, where they were beaten and tortured. Other protest groups in the days following faced similar fates. When the media tried to find out what had happened, the Rajjya officials feigned ignorance.
     The media was also not its former self. A couple of high-profile newspapers simply stopped operating because the buildings in which they were housed had collapsed. A big TV station’s owner died when he was buried in the rubble of his own home. The remaining media outlets, which began their operations in fits and starts, were now under the control of the Ministry of Communication. Blogs and podcasts were also monitored, or simply shut down. A popular, fast-talking host of an FM talk program was replaced by a regime media official who spoke in a slow drawl.
     The Rajjya changed its face: new people were announced as ministers, cabinet secretaries, and ambassadors. The new PM declared a State of Emergency. All political activities were immediately banned, and the Loyal Army Dais went to the offices of political parties and shut them down, putting big government padlocks on their doors. This happened within days of the Big Two, before the people had a chance to assess the damage that the earthquake had inflicted. Darkmotherland had a history of sweeping changes in the government every other year, so this was not unprecedented. It’s natural, Motherland TV assured its citizens, for a new Rajjya, filled with responsible adult Darkmotherlandites, to emerge at a time of such unfathomable tragedy. After all, the Big Two had happened under the old Rajjya’s watch, hadn’t it?
     Billboards with photos of the new PM, clad in daura suruwal and wearing a dhakatopi cap, multicolored and tapered at the top, sprung up at key intersections. His right fist was thrust in front of him, and, underneath it, the words, “Pure Darkmotherland.” The Loyal Army Dais began patrolling the streets in greater numbers. The Big Two was so named because this bhukampa was as big as, or even perhaps bigger, than the big one that had struck the country in 1934.
 
 
2.
Planning for a counteroffensive began in Beggar Street. A massive rally was envisioned, similar to a protest years ago against the monarchical rule that made tens of thousands of people take to the streets.
     The entire Darkmotherland is in ruins, Kranti thought, and these fuckers are scheming to bring down the new Rajjya. Kranti knew that Bhaskar, if given the opportunity, would join the Beggars. As it was, Bhaskar liked to listen to the Beggars, who sat at the feet of their leader, Professor Shrestha, Kranti’s mother, in the living room, while Kranti fumed by herself in her bedroom next door. The house was small: an average-sized living room where the Beggars gathered, a tight kitchen, a tiny room for Kranti with a narrow bed and a desk on which sat an eight-inch TV, and a larger bedroom for Professor Shrestha. Behind the house was a lawn, one that Dada, when he was alive, talked about being a perfect space to construct an in-law suite, where he wanted Kranti and her husband to live. “A son-in-law suite,” Dada liked to joke.
     Voices in the house carried, so when she lounged in her bed or worked at her desk, Kranti heard everything they said in the living room. Sometimes she peeked her head out and called to him, “Bhaskar, can you come back in?” The Beggars looked at her, then at him, then at Professor Shrestha. They knew Professor Shrestha, whom they respectfully addressed as Madam, ran a liberal household, but this was too liberal, wasn’t it? Allowing your daughter and her boyfren to cuddle in her room while people discussed important matters, such as the fate of the nation, only a few feet away? But of course, the Beggars weren’t going to say anything to their beloved Madam, or to Kranti, who they knew had always been a difficult daughter. Amongst themselves, the Beggars whispered that Kranti’s hostility toward her mother had increased after her father’s suicide.
     She’ll take Bhaskar away from me, Kranti often thought, just like she took away Dada. Madam Mao. This was the nickname that Professor Shrestha had received, from her critics and the Rajjya. In her mind, this is how Kranti referred to her mother. She needed to leave Beggar Street once and for all and whisk Bhaskar away from Madam Mao’s pernicious influence.
     Kranti also fretted over whether Bhaskar’s family would accept her.
     Bhaskar laughed when she expressed her worries to him, in her room and in cafés across the dusty valley. “Darkmotherland is devastated, we’ve just had a koo, and you’re worried about what the Ghimireys will think of you?”
     Kranti knew she was being irrational, given what had happened to Darkmotherland, but her mind had abandoned the rational course long ago, after Dada’s death. Now she latched on to one worry and stubbornly clung to it until it consumed her. It seemed as though the destructions in Darkmotherland were only a backdrop to her personal drama. When she looked at it objectively, she saw it. Half of the country was in utter ruins, as Bhaskar said. A major highway out of the Valley was ruptured. Rice and dal, the two staples of the Darkmotherlandese diet, were scarce. Bread had disappeared from the market. The price of eggs had quadrupled. The poorer residents scrounged for nettles and other grass for their greens. Prostitution was rampant, and, for some inexplicable reason, so was gambling. Dead bodies were strewn by the sides of the roads, often unclaimed by relatives. Hospitals overflowed with patients struck by diseases that had no names—that attacked their vocal cords, made them bleed profusely, or forced them to speak in languages that sounded like radio static.
     Bhureys, a derisive nickname for earthquake refugees, kept pouring in from the mountains, cramming the city center, especially the core of Diamond Park and the Parade Ground, now called Bhurey Paradise. “A paradise for halwais and honeys,” Bhaskar’s elder brother, Aditya, said, using the street slang for pimps and prostitutes. Bhaskar had relayed this to Kranti. Aditya could barely contain his disdain for Bhurey Paradise, Bhaskar said. “A cesspit for crooks and looters, rats, and homeless and disease-infested humanity.” He applauded the Fundys for prowling the Bhurey Paradise for signs of “hotbeds of immorality,” for roaming the area with lathis, and picking out honeys and halwais to beat.

When the earthquake hit, Bhaskar and Kranti had been eating in the Head in the Clouds restaurant in the Tourist District, the very place where their romance had started.
     Bhaskar had picked her up from her work at Bauko Bank, where she was a clerk in the section that handed out loans to farmers and small businesses. She’d started working not too long after Dada died, partly to drown out the voices in her mind. Although the job could be boring, she liked the routine and her coworkers. At times Professor Shrestha seemed to suggest that Kranti wasn’t ambitious in terms of her career, but Kranti largely ignored her, thinking, Look at where your ambition got you—you led your husband to suicide.
     At Head in the Clouds, Kranti was in the middle of a sentence when there was severe rattling, then the floor of the rooftop restaurant had convulsed. “What the—” Kranti said, clasping the table with her hands. But the table had bucked and flown away from them and disappeared over the edge of the roof. The rooftop swayed like a swing. Loud booms sounded around them. Birds swarmed the sky above, raising hell. The house across the street burst into dust. She clung to Bhaskar, and the two of them crawled across the rooftop, where large cracks were appearing. At the top of the stairs, the dishwashing boy lay slumped, his head against the wall at an impossible angle.
     They struggled to get to the bottom through the churning dust and rubble in the staircase. On the street, bodies were scattered, some writhing and moaning. Debris—almirahs, chunks of concrete, iron bars—blocked their way as they moved toward the Tourist District chowk. A wooden beam hurtled toward them from a nearby house, forcing them to let go of each other. Bhaskar became lost in the eddying dust. “Bhaskar!” she cried, and she thought she heard him respond, but how could she be sure in the cacophony of screams and shouts and wails surrounding her? She heard a rumble, and when she looked back, she saw a stampede of sheep charging toward her. Sheep? In the Tourist District? Why? (Kranti never found out. Later, there were reports of several species of animals, both domestic and wild, frantically running through the streets in packs when the Big Two struck—jackals, goats, chickens, bulls, wildcats, and, according to some, even rhinos.) The sheep charged past her, as if they were late for an appointment, and somehow, behind the last sheep was Bhaskar, the side of his face cut and bleeding.
     “This way,” Bhaskar said, taking her through an alley. They reached another chowk, which appeared to Kranti like a photo from a bombed-out courtyard in World War Two. Then she realized that she and Bhaskar had passed through that chowk dozens of times in their strolls through the Tourist District. Finally, they found shelter in the nearby Iconic Guest House, where the daughter-in-law of the owner, her face normally charming but now marked with worry, ushered them to the garden (she knew Bhaskar, as half of the Valley did). Guests and the hotel staff were sitting and standing, conversing in panicked voices.
     Kranti and Bhaskar sat by themselves in a corner, and she told him, clasping his arm tightly, “Earlier, when we separated, I thought I had lost you.”

Perhaps the fear of losing Bhaskar had made it important for her now that the Ghimireys liked her. She didn’t like feeling clingy, hoping to gain the Ghimireys’ approval. But what choice did she have? She couldn’t imagine a life without Bhaskar.