A remarkable short story collection worthy of acclaim

Status dominates, often to the point of ruin, always to the brink of despair, though to outside eyes the details and variations between the poverty-stricken and the privileged remain semantic at best.

A low-caste but moderately successful shopkeeper struggles to deal with a relentless shoplifter who happens to be the daughter of one of the town’s most powerful families. A young man, qualified as an engineer, has moved back to his impoverished mountain village to look after his ungrateful grandmother, and spends his days arguing with a couple of gentle Christian missionaries.

The greatest value of The Gurkha’s Daughter is its ability to evoke utterly foreign worlds. The world presented to us here is one of rigid caste, implied violence, endless cruelty, poverty and servitude, one not only coloured but defined by its absurd taboos. And even when the tales escape the geographical boundaries of Nepal, Bhutan and the provinces of north-east India, they can never stray far from their emotional grounding.

The prose is clean and spare throughout, stripped of sentimentality and with little in the way of descriptive meandering, and the stories are all the more powerful for such restraint. In fact, these stories feel big, each reading like a novel distilled into 30 or 40 pages, capturing entire lives and unyielding circumstances. Each displays elements worthy of recommendation, but two stories, ‘The Cleft’ and ‘No Land Is Her Land’, stand out as being particularly masterful in their characterisation.

In ‘The Cleft’, Kaali, a servant disfigured by a cleft lip and given away by her family, accompanies her widowed, childless mistress on a long van journey to a funeral. She is constantly mocked and ridiculed, yet retains a rare dignity. Her focus keeps to dreams, and to a remembered promise that seems emancipatory at first, whispering of surgery and Bollywood stardom, but which becomes more and more sinister as the story progresses. And in ‘No Land Is Her Land’, a Nepalese refugee has the chance to escape her Bhutan camp existence for the freedom of the United States. Because she has married twice, both of which ended in disaster, she is considered by everyone, including herself, to be a woman of ‘low moral character’. And her liberation will be assured only as long as she can put on a happy family front.

Having grown up in the Himalayan region of Sikkim to an Indian father and Nepalese mother, Mr Parajuly was educated in America and then at Oxford. In 2011 he came to public attention as the youngest ever Indian writer to sign a major international two-book deal. The Gurkha’s Daughter is on the longlist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. It is a remarkable collection, cohesive, original and vividly rendered, one deserving of such recognition.