The narrator of "The Immigrants", the final story in this collection, surely expresses Prajwal Parajuly's own exasperation when he says of New York: "When I told people I was of Nepalese origin, they instinctively asked me if I had climbed Mount Everest." These eight snapshots of the Nepali-speaking diaspora in India, Bhutan, Nepal and Manhattan should do much to correct such stereotypes. Crisp, inventive and insightful, The Gurkha's Daughter paints an almost irreducibly plural picture, but exodus to the west is a shaping theme.
Half Nepalese, half Indian, Parajuly was raised in the Nepalese-majority Indian state of Sikkim and educated in English; he worked as a Village Voice ad executive and was doing a masters in creative writing at Oxford when, at 27, he became the youngest Indian ever to secure an international book deal. His own background is an example of the complexity of the Nepalese experience riven by caste and kicked around like a political football while giving him an international sensibility.
Despite Himalayan potential for the picturesque, no ink is wasted here on landscape or appearances. The writing is unshowy, at times affectless. The focus is on character as revealed by domestic incident, even when the theme is the potentially epic one of the 106,000 Nepalese exiled from Bhutan. Only the title story deals with a cultural facet familiar to a British audience, namely the mercenary Gurkhas; but Parajuly ignores their fabled ferocity, examining instead what their post-imperial limbo means to their families.
The daughters of two Gurkhas don fake moustaches to play-act their fathers talking about booze and Brits. Seeing the men's jaded experience through the nine-year-olds' eyes is both funny and poignant, and a superb example of Parajuly's urge to toy with modes of presentation. In "Passing Fancy", the protagonist's marital conversations are given in direct speech, but dialogue with a neighbour is presented indirectly, Mrs Dallowaystyle: we witness the flirtation only as the woman replays it secretly in the recesses of her mind.
Ignorance extends its tentacles through the stories: often the ignorance of people looking across wide cultural divides. The Gurkha daughters, despite their mimicry, don't truly grasp their fathers' situations. All they know about Britain is that it has no mud. In "No Land Is Her Land", a dysfunctional clan of Bhutan refugees cherishes an American dream as chimeric as the image of the "perfect family" that they somehow convey to their green card interviewer. In "The Cleft", the servant Kaali muses on a fantasy of Bollywood stardom which seems at first tantalisingly tenuous, and then cruelly illusory.
Manifold human weakness is exposed from this opening story onwards. The cleft of the title refers as much to caste division as to Kaali's deformity. Despised but indispensable, only she seems free of the vast range of prejudices her social superiors consider their right and privilege. Meanwhile, post-imperial influence gets short shrift from the Gurkhas: "I haven't been in any danger since the Gulf War, but they might have some useless war for me to fight again. They are the British after all."
Nor does Parajuly spare the system which puts his own Brahmin caste at the apex. In the touching "A Father's Journey", a child's naive questioning exposes the inequalities of the caste system; yet she embraces its strictures when, as an adult, she chooses a Brahmin as her husband in a misdirected effort to please her father. What gives Parajuly's characters warmth is an energy born of division or dispossession: a desire to be loved, to be better off, or to be elsewhere.
Some of the earlier tales resolve their propulsive frictions rather too neatly, and the sheer versatility in topic and treatment may seem scattershot at first. But an underlying purpose coalesces in the second half of the collection. The maps prefacing the first seven stories show the same intersection of Nepal, Bhutan and India. But the eighth map shows New York, the setting for the partly autobiographical "The Immigrants", in which two arriviste Nepalis have to overcome their mutual native prejudices in a strange land. Like a screenplay composed of vignettes, each of the final four stories opens a further perspective on departure for the west.
Parajuly's debut novel The Land Where I Flee, a family saga of the Nepalese diaspora, is due out in a year's time. It should give him the breathing space to exercise his considerable strengths, but it would be a marvellous novel indeed that could match the energetic play of perspectives displayed here.
John Garth's Tolkien and the Great War is published by HarperCollins.
