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More than a decade ago, it would be news when coffins arrived at Tribhuvan International Airport on the cargo hold of airliners, bearing migrant workers who had died in the Gulf or Malaysia. The plywood boxes would be carried by grieving relatives to Aryaghat, the bodies in plastic sheeting unwrapped for cremation.

The numbers escalated from the occasional coffin to two, three, then several a day. As the far-flung regions also started sending out migrants, the returning bodies had to be taken for cremation or burial to the home villages. Even as the returning dead stopped making news, a transport industry sprang to provide delivery service from TIA.

The Red Suitcase is a film of short dialogues and long silences, tracing the journey of one driver (Saugat Malla) on his Bolero pick-up as he picks up a body and carries it along the Sindhuli Highway and scenic backroads to deliver it to the village of Beyul.

Among the many fascinating elements in the film is the choice of name for the hamlet. In the Himalayan Buddhist belief system, ‘beyul’ is a valley of refuge for those escaping sectarian strife, political subjugation or failed crops. Here Beyul is an idyll of a bhitri madhes village, and the Bolero breaks the peace as it arrives, spewing diesel and churning up the gravel, arriving at the house kept by a young mother (Shristi Shrestha) and her newborn infant.

Along the way, Saugat’s character meets a disabled veteran of the Indian Gorkha battalion (Bipin Karki), who served and was wounded in Kashmir. A bitter man, he lives alone in a roadside hut in whose driveway the pick-up parks for the night. We learn that the driver fled his village after his beloved school-teacher was murdered by insurgents. Seeking survival in the metropolis, he ends up as the chauffeur of last journeys.

Between sips of raksi, the conversation between the demobilized soldier and the driver encapsulates the concerns of the times: a polity that forces its youth outward, a nation-state which sends its citizens to fight for another country, and a rural society devastated by internal conflict. But nothing is overplayed in writer-director Fidel Devkota’s expert script and cinematography.

Two spectral episodes bracket the story of the traveling coffin, one involving the wife and another the Bolero sarathi. These are best left for the reader to observe and reach an understanding at the cinema hall.

Whether you are carried away by the story of The Red Suitcase or not depends on your mental conditioning as regards the emptying villages of Nepal, including Beyul where only the women are left to tend the homesteads. The extended silences in darkness and half-shadows allow for reflection on the fate of the characters, and what happened to their resource-rich country.

In the screening this writer attended, a few in the audience were clearly uncomfortable with Devkota’s technique. At the half-time break, some giggled self-consciously and a man asked someone in the next row, ‘Ae bhatija, nidaeko ho?!’ But by the time the end credits came up, he had gone pensive as had others in the hall.

As an aside, perhaps The Red Suitcase can sensitize the Department of Civil  Aviation to provide a more dignified arrival for the migrant dead at TIA. While the earlier practice of the coffins emerging into the regular baggage collection area has ended, the Department must customize special pushcarts for transport to where the grieving families await. Till today, relatives have to lay the coffins sideways across two regular airport trolleys and awkwardly push them in tandem.

The Red Suitcase, meanwhile, does its bit to provide respect to the dead and living. At the village Beyul, the newborn’s name, Asha, holds out the possibility of a better tomorrow.

Let me start with a short disclaimer. I love short stories. I’m a sucker for stories that are a few pages long, especially when there’s a lot of work and I can’t seem to concentrate on longer works of fiction. Short stories also help me get out of the inevitable reading slump. Here, I must admit that I’m not very happy with how much I’ve read this year. Apart from a few rereads and some odd slim novels here and there, I haven’t enjoyed many of the books I’ve picked up.

A short story collection is always a safe bet. I don’t have to invest much time and mental energy into getting to know a character. And since a story takes an hour or two at the most to finish, I feel like I’ve at least accomplished my reading goal for the day. I’ve mostly gravitated toward horror stories like Bora Chung’s ‘Cursed Bunny’ and Carmen Marie Machado’s ‘Her Body and Other Parties’ which is why Cho Nam Joo’s ‘Miss Kim Knows and Other Stories’ was such a refreshing read.

Cho is the author of the best-selling novel ‘Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982’ which sparked a debate on feminism in South Korea while catapulting the writer to global fame when the book was longlisted for the United States National Book Award. Cho is known for highlighting gender inequality and misogyny in South Korea. Miss Kim Knows and Other Stories is a collection of eight stories about women from all walks of life. They are stories of life in South Korea from a female perspective. But the themes—loneliness, domestic violence, dysfunctional families, aging etc.—are universal.

What I liked about the book is that the stories aren’t dramatic but they leave you with some important messages—they might be things you already know and experience but you might have seldom paid attention to them. Women often make room for misogyny by not speaking up and letting things slide, and Cho draws our attention to that. She writes about the invisible labor women put in at home, work, and society at large, celebrating all the ‘little things’ they do to keep the ball rolling. In one of the stories, a neglected worker quits and the entire office starts to malfunction. In most of the stories, women are often repressed and maybe even unaware of what they want.

Some stories were a let-down. They felt a bit too cliché, like ‘Dear Hyunnam Oppa’ where a woman writes a letter to her boyfriend of 10 years, who has just proposed to her, listing out all the reasons why she doesn’t want to marry him. It felt too generic and forced. In ‘Puppy Love’, which explores love during Covid-19, the narrative ends abruptly, leaving you feeling unsettled. But that could have easily just been me and not a problem with the stories. Perhaps, I couldn’t relate to them. Maybe you will. With Cho, you never know, as her writing has the potential to tap into long-dormant emotions.

Short stories

Miss Kim Knows and Other Stories

Cho Nam-Joo

Translated by Jamie Chang

Published: 2023

Publisher: Scribner

Pages: 218, Paperback

Elizabeth Strout has a knack for bringing characters to life. She explores them in great detail, adding layer upon layer of nuances to their personalities, and thus makes us resonate with them. I read ‘Olive Kitteridge’ in high school and remember falling in love with the character and the setting. The character comes back in ‘Olive, Again’. Both the books are set in a fictional town in Maine.

Lucy Barton, the protagonist of ‘Oh William’, which was longlisted for The Booker Prize in 2022, is another character Strout seems unwilling to let go of. Lucy has appeared in Strout’s short story collection ‘Anything Is Possible’ and the novel ‘My Name is Lucy Barton’. It’s a delight getting to know Lucy. She’s every bit as endearing and complex as Olive and I’m hoping Oh William won’t be the last we will see of her, though I fear it is probably where her story ends.

In ‘My Name is Lucy Barton’, Lucy Barton was a young mother. She wakes up after an operation to find her mother, whom she hasn’t seen in years, sitting beside her. The story moves back and forth between the five days her mother stays with her at the hospital and Lucy’s traumatic childhood in Maine. The novel explores childhood trauma and poverty. It’s a portrayal of how childhood trauma almost always defines your life.

In Oh William, Lucy is divorced from her first husband (William). She had remarried but David is no more. In My Name is Lucy Barton, her children, Chrissy and Becka, were young but now they are married. There is some gap in the stories between the two books but we get to know what has transpired in flashbacks. Oh William is focused on William but the story is told through Lucy’s perspective.

After the death of his mother, William discovers that she had another child before him. This shocking piece of information is what sets him off to Maine to look for his half-sibling. He asks Lucy to accompany him and this trip forms the main plot of the book. We get to know William but we also get to know Lucy and all her thoughts and emotions as well as the things and incidents that have shaped her.

William is Lucy’s ex-husband but she ‘has only ever felt at home with him’. Despite his repeated affairs and Lucy’s decision to leave William, the two are still a team for their children. Lucy confesses that David, her second husband, made her happy and that they were made for each other. But she calls William after finding out about his illness and later after his death as well.

Strout is an empathetic writer and the result is that we never judge Lucy for her decisions. Nothing comes across as shallow or callous. Instead, we are left to wonder if first love never really leaves us, and how, as human beings, we are all inherently flawed, as much as we’d like to believe otherwise.

Fiction

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/56294820  

Oh William!

Elizabeth Strout

Published: 2021

Publisher: Penguin Random House UK

Pages: 240, Paperback

‘Finlay Donovan Jumps the Gun’ is the third book in the Finlay Donavon series by Elle Cosimano. Whether it’s the final book perhaps depends on the popularity of the series but I think it’s time to end it. I enjoyed ‘Finlay Donovan Is Killing It’ and ‘Finlay Donovan Knocks ‘Em Dead’ but the story feels a little stretched out by the third book.

Here, Finlay and Vero are trying to reveal the identity of EasyClean who is the hitman hired on an Internet forum to kill Steven, Finlay’s husband. Russian mob boss Feliks, to whom Finlay owes a favor, is behind bars but he wants Finlay to do something for him. She is to find and identify the contract killer before the cops do. But the killer might be a police officer.

Luckily, Nick, a cop who has feelings for Finlay, has just been tasked with starting a citizen’s police academy. Finlay and Vero see this as a perfect chance to do some digging without raising suspicions and join the group. To make matters worse, Finlay has a deadline to meet and she can’t seem to rewrite the parts her editor wants her to change. Vero’s past is coming back to haunt her. The two find themselves in a precarious situation and they, as always, make it worse just by trying to dodge it.

I love Finlay and Vero. They make a nice team. Vero is a great wing woman for Finlay, dealing with her ex-husband, handling her children, and generally egging her on. She is a character you enjoy reading out and getting to know more than the protagonist in Finlay Donovan Jumps the Gun. But the same antics get boring after a while. I searched high and low for the book but now after having read it, I realize I wouldn’t have missed out on much even if I hadn’t found it. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it. Just not as much as I enjoyed the first two parts of the series.

In the third book, something is amiss right from the start. A lot of time goes into reintroducing characters. The buildup is slow. The sense of urgency that made the earlier books work is largely missing in the latest installment. It lacks fun. It lacks adventure. Incidents feel pointlessly drawn out. But I can also understand why it would appeal to some readers. It has fewer of the outlandish moments of the earlier two parts. The things that happen feel more real. Even though nothing much happens, it’s a light read for when you want something to take your mind off things.

Thriller | Mystery

Finlay Donovan Jumps the Gun

Elle Cosimano

Published: 2023

Publisher: Headline Review

Pages: 297, Paperback