Rabi Thapa’s Nothing to Declare, seems to “declare” the same, though in a fictional rather than in a theoretical manner. “Night out in Kathmandu” for example is about the middle-class youths who smoke pot and get drunk on Screwdrivers and Bloody Mary during a night out at Thamel, a local urban space teeming with global tourists and phoren-returned middle-class Nepalis. In “After party” the youths search for dope in Thamel and gaze voyeuristically at a scene of cops interrogating a tranny before visiting a dance bar. It is the acts of consumption—drinking, smoking, gazing at the dancers—that define the class location of most of the youths populating Thapa’s fictional universe.
Thapa’s stories also, however, show that a homogeneous idea concerning the Nepali middle class might itself be a fiction. Generational differences cut across the terrain of middle-ness since the middle-class people youths of today differ from their parents and grandparents. While the class identity of earlier generations was defined by the “foreign” films and TV serials arriving from India, middle-class youths of today project their desire upon other foreign locations, including that of UK and USA, and Australia and Thailand; consumption of cultures coming from those locations not only defines their class location but also creates a fantasy of transcending class borders to become “almost, though quite not” upper class.
Thomas Babington Macaulay coined the formulae of “almost, though not quite” to describe the brown people adopting masks of whiteness to imitate their colonial masters. It seems that the middle-class youths of Nepal today have to wear two different types of masks: That of imitated Western modernity while they are with their peers and that of imitated traditional values while they are with their parents and grandparents. Sometimes they adopt the cultural values of the West, trying to behave like “quire” or white youths, and sometimes adopt other masks, behaving like the upper class youths of their own country who have greater access to Western lifestyles. It is no wonder that many of them, unable to understand the moments when the masks acquire reality that exceeds the “real” of the faces, seem confused about their identities.
It seems that the middle-class youths of Nepal today have to wear two different types of masks: That of imitated Western modernity while they are with their peers and that of imitated traditional values while they are with their parents and grandparents.
The masculinity of contemporary middle-class youths seems to be constructed at a middle space between tradition and modernity, by the new modes of consumption, and by a desire to go to US, UK and other foreign locations. Thapa’s collection begins with “Initiation,” a story describing the bratabandha ceremony of a middle class boy Ashok. Traditionally the ceremony signifies rite of passage for Hindu males; after the ceremony the boy supposedly becomes a man. Within the social imaginary of contemporary middle classes, however, what transforms a boy into a man is a passage to “America” or other centers of Western modernity.
Initiation into the rites of contemporary Western youth culture—including familiarity with the “fashion” of drugs, bars and malls, is not only what creates the class identity of the youths but also make them “proper” men. Leichty argues that middle classes of Kathmandu describe themselves as both suitably modern in contrast to the upper classes who are excessively modern, and the lower classes that, cut off from the rituals of modernity, are “seen” as too uncouth, almost pre-modern. Thapa’s stories portray middle-class youths that are searching for a suitable model of “proper” manhood that is caught up between tradition and modernity. If the initiation of bratabandha forms one side of such middle-class manhood, the lure of the foreign, especially Western cultural forms, constitutes its other side.
Narrators of Thapa’s stories are extremely self-conscious about the middle-ness of their class location, leading to what might be called a “narcissistic closure”; a total preoccupation with the emergent rituals of their own class.
At the same time, however, such narcissistic borders of class are punctuated by political upheavals, by the threat of the Maoists who kidnap the middle-class hero of “Home for Dasahin,” and by uncompromising portrayals of subaltern characters such as Gauri in “Nepali Maid.” In this story, the narrator breaks through the narcissistic horizons of his class in order to understand the institution of “servant-hood” that supports the middle-class Nepali cultures. Gauri is a lower-class woman from the village who labors in a middle-class household in Kathmandu. It is her labor that allows the household to uphold its virtues of cleanliness and order; virtues that help it distinguish itself from the supposed “filth” and chaos of the lower classes, and probably also from the excessive modernity and resultant chaos—including imagined sexual chaos—of the upper classes.
While Thapa’s stories are written in a realistic vein, it is interesting to see that “Valley of Tears,” the last story of the collection, ventures into the realm of fantasy. In this apocalyptic tale, the entire valley is drowned after a prolonged rainfall and turns into a lake again. The description of actual city structures and places—bridge of Bagmati, gorge of Chovar, Swayambhunath, Thankot etc—gives a realistic flavor to the story. At the same time, descriptions of drowned valley and the control of the nation by the rebels bring fantasy into the realistic frame, transforming the real into what might be called magically real. It is interesting to note that the natural chaos caused by perpetual rain is paralleled by the political chaos wrecked by the rebels. Equally interesting is the description of American helicopter gunships arriving at Pokhara to “engage the new republican army.” In this fantasy, rebels representing the lower classes are imagined as perpetrators of natural/ political chaos, and American military might is shown as trying to reassert order in a chaotic world “where both India and China cancel each other out as neither would risk nettling the other.” This fantasy might be yet another middle-class fantasy.
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