Identity Of Women In Prasai’s Bagheni

• Suji Hyongoju

Bagheni by Indira Prasai is the very first creation that I got through. This piece of Nepali literature was handed to me by Ms. Pimala Neupane, under whom I am learning, and exploring English literature. I somehow felt the depth of significance that Indira Prasai's Bagheni carried. Particularly, I was unaware of the Nepali literary world at the time I got this book. Bagheni is a collection of thirteen unparalleled stories sharing a common theme, 'position of women in the society', along with other different secondary themes related to the main topic.

The stories in Bagheni are built based on different situations, behaviors, intentions, desires, and goals of both men and women. In the stories of women, their struggles, hardships, and everything, men can't be left behind the scenes. When the context is about hate and the only hate, one can feel a sense of love even in its absence. A similar picture can be visualized in Bagheni.

Prasai has been able to put together multiple dimensions of society that ultimately affect the prosperity and harmony of either side of an individual or the entire projection of the society. The stories, indeed, reflect the different aspects of the society where people have been trying to avoid or ignore the bitter consequences, but they really could not.

The first few stories revolve around the themes of human interrelationships and the inability of human beings to understand each other. The story entitled '11111' (referring to an amount of money), the very first one in the collection, is a story of an honest person and how society fails to accept that person by considering him a failure. Another story in the list deals with mental health and how not discussing things can lead to unresolvable complexities and hard-to-bear losses.

Moving with the pages, Prasai puts surprisingly powerful stories that a reader like me could not get prepared for while going through the first few stories. The story of the imagination, the description, and the vocabulary is just too precise and raw for a new reader who finds it hard to believe it to be true. For a reader who grew up in a society where sex, sexual organs, masturbation, different curves and holes carved in the human body, are never a matter to be discussed. So, Prasai's stories are really fierce in that sense. The balance of boldness and simplicity in Prasai's writing is a chef's kiss. Despite the complex plots and situations, the smoothness in the stories is definitely something to be praised.

The other stories deal with themes of unhappy marriages, divorces, misuse of political power, unfulfilled sexual desires, devastations invited by foreign employment and so on. The way Prasai has depicted the society, human nature and impulsion, a reader would feel and resonate with the stories around them from within. How society is corrupt, how some male figures are addicted and limited to sex, how people fear getting criticized by society, and still end up doing shameful things, is well-portrayed. Anything more about the story would disturb the thrill of reading, and that would not do justice to the greatness the stories hold.

Bagheni would always be a recommendation to anyone who is interested to know more about Nepali society, human behavior, and a deeper understanding of human emotion.

The writer is the student of literature in Bhaktapur Multiple Campus, Bhaktapur.