The Fiction of truth, the truth of fiction

SUSHMA JOSHI ECS Magazine, 2009 My mother is a big gardener. Ever since I can remember, she has snipped off tiny branches of this plant or that from other people's gardens, from the ditches of abandoned roads, from the corners of dusty junkyards, bringing that life back home to replant in her garden. Flowers, she's decided, belong to everybody. This means that she will happily sweep up an entire basketful of yellow forsythia for devotees who ask for it in the morning, and uproot a flowering plant if a visitor asks for it. She will hand the plant over since she believes flowers and plants must be shared. This sometimes causes us annoyance since we'd rather not hand over our fern to some stranger who takes a fancy to it—after all, our friend from Australia hand-carried from the forests of Nimbun, and perhaps it would be nice if our mother asked permission before uprooting it. But all of this seems not to matter to our mother, who, like birds or bees, is inexhaustible in ...

H.E Finn Thilsted, Ambassador of Denmark inaugurated a reading on Narratives on Art and Nature , at 4:00 pm in Gallery 32 @ Dent Inn, Heritage Plaza, Kamaladi. Narratives on Art and Nature is a compilation of short articles by four writers based in Nepal writing on the themes of art and nature. During the event Sushma Joshi, Rabi Thapa and Pranab Man Singh read pieces they wrote for the compilation. Narratives on Art and Nature was published by Quixote’s Cove and the reading was organized by Gallery 32 and Quixote’s Cove. The readings started with a short reflection by H.E. Finn Thilsted on the art event, Trees: Artifacts of Nature, organized by Quixote’s Cove on 3rd March 2009 at the GTZ Office gardens in Sanepa. Narratives on Art and Nature is an attempt to establish a unique Nepali narrative for art and nature. It was published and launched during the art event, Trees: Artifacts of Nature . The exhibition, Trees: Artifacts of Nature, runs at Gallery 32 till 30th March 2009.

Longing and loss Sophia Furber Hunger, both literal and metaphorical, is the driving theme behind Sushma Joshi's The End of the World. A diverse cast of characters, ranging from a policeman driven to stealing vegetables to stave off his hunger to a young worker returning to his famine-stricken village, grapple with their desires, resentments and everyday sufferings in this engaging collection of eight short stories. Loss and longing are dealt with against a variety of social backdrops; a rural village stewing in a pre-monsoon torpor, the living quarters of small-town police station, an uptight upper-caste Kathmandu household, the living room of a wealthy Allahabad family during the Second World War. Joshi's stories plaintively ask the question of whether the hunger of the human heart can ever be satisfied. The first story, Cheese, stands out as the most well crafted of the collection. A young boy, Gopi, sent to Kathmandu to work for his wealthy relatives as a household help, i...