Ajit Baral interviews Manjushree Thapa exclusively for the Daily Star Literature Page.

AB: Manjushree, you have published two books so far. One, a novel, published in India by Penguin and the other, a non-fiction, by Himal Books, Nepal. Both the books received critical acclaim. You are working hard on the third book. When in your life did you decide that you wanted to be a writer?

MT: I decided to write quite late in life--when I was 26, or 27. I had come back to Nepal from the US when I was 21, and had thought that the creative life wasn't useful--or that it wasn't as useful as doing "development" work through NGOs. I still feel this to be true, to a large extent. In a country like Nepal, especially, creative work is about allowing people to have a decent quality of life, whereas sometimes NGO work, or other "development" work, can be about allowing people to have a life at all. So immediately after returning to Nepal I branched out into NGO work. It took me years to find out that I wasn't capable, as some people are, of doing this kind of work. I needed to do some kind of creative work. So after knocking my head against a wall for many years, I finally gave in to my need for creative expression, and began to write seriously around the age of 26 or 27.

AB: You dabbled in painting, photography, did undergraduate BFA degree at the Rhode Island School of Design. And, after returning to Nepal, worked for the Annapurna Conservation Area Project while writing in between. It's only 7, 8 years after that that you decided to take a creative writing course. What made you do it?

MT: By the time I had decided that NGO work wasn't for me, I had many stories in me, but didn't have the skill to write about them well. Or that is how I felt. I decided to apply for a creative writing program in the US because I wanted to learn the techniques of writing. Of course, writing isn't a purely technical, or mechanical thing: if it is purely technical, or mechanical, it amounts to propaganda. But I lacked the basic confidence to launch a major work, such as a novel. The creative writing programs in the US, and now in Europe, are great for familiarizing you with the basics of creative writing, so that fiction techniques are not a mystery to you. They equip you to look further than the techniques, to your main message, to your main style.

AB: Mustang Bhot in Fragments is your account of a place in transition after the arrival of electricity. How did you come to write this book? I have a feeling that this account of a place where you have lived for some years began with journal entries but later panned out into a book.

MT: I was very new to Nepal when I took the trip to Mustang that became the basis for the travel narrative, Mustang Bhot in Fragments. The trip had affected me very deeply, and I wrote the book as part of my query as to why this had been so. I was lucky, of course, that Himal Books would want to publish such an enterprise, because basically I was trying to answer some very personal questions by writing the book. I wrote the book as an exploration about what it means to live in Nepal, or to identify oneself as Nepali.

AB: We know that you wrote the one-third of The Tutor of History as part of your dissertation. Why not a full novel?

MT: I didn't have the time to complete the full novel for my dissertation. And it wasn't required. The University of Washington--a great writing program--required that MFA candidates working on short fiction submit 100 pages of a manuscript; and those working on a novel submit 150 pages. I did the latter. Shawn Wong and Maya Sonenberg were my advisors, and they were amazing, insightful--yet at the same time extremely open-minded--guides for my thesis. Their input into the first 150 pages of the novel helped me complete it, two years later in Nepal.

AB: You have lived outside Nepal most of your life. Yet you have been able to depict a small Nepali-village life in its barest details. Where does this eye for details, do you think, comes from?

MT: You forget that I spent my early 20's in Nepal, outside of Kathmandu, in villages. Later in my 20's and 30's, when I began to be noticed as a writer by the Kathmandu elite intelligentsia, I was regarded as someone very new to Nepal. In fact I was only new to Kathmandu's elite intelligentsia circles.

AB: The third book you are working is woven around the royal massacre. Is it a reportage of the accident or what? Would you like to spill the beans?

MT: The book is on the political circumstances that led/are leading to the failure of democracy in the post-1990 period.

AB: How easy has the writing in English been to you? I mean writing about un-English reality in English.

MT: Writing in English about Nepal is like translating Nepali literature into English. There is no other way to do it, since I am not writing about the English-speaking classes of Nepal, and since there is no vernacular "Nenglish" (like Hinglish) in Nepal. I try to write as though I were writing in Nepali for a Nepali audience. This sometimes makes my writing a little too "local," or too detailed for an audience that doesn't know about Nepal, or care about it. I prefer that than to write "universal" stories that could be set anywhere. I'm interested in Nepal's particularities.

AB: Writers like you and Samrat are being noticed internationally. What will this do to Nepali writing in English?

MT: Because Nepal was never colonized by Britain, we do not have a long tradition of English writing. Now, in the new millennia, Samrat and I and a few others belong to the first generation of Nepali writers for whom English is a first language. We will undoubtedly be followed by many others who will challenge us, expand upon our efforts, break new ground. I am looking forward to the English literature from Nepal that will emerge in about a decade. Things will get exciting then.

Ajit Baral is a frequent contributor to The Daily Star and various Nepalese newspapers. He lives in Kathmandu.