Slipping Geography

The boy next to me was going to New York. He had taught English in Japan for three years and was driven mad with cravings for dollar menu sandwiches at Burger King. He was going home, and I flying away from mine. Our conversation, obviously, was about nostalgia.

“So,” he asked, “where are you from?”

“Nepal,” I said.

“Ah. Italy,” said he.

“No. Nepal. Not Naples.” I paused to think about geography. “Mount Everest? I am from there.”

“Ah,” he nodded. “India.”

“No, not India. Nepal. The land of Buddha.”

“Tibet?” he asked, finally embarrassed and unsure.

I started to laugh. “Nepal,” I said. “Nepal. It’s that country, smiled-shaped, between India and China.”

He frowned. “Interesting,” he said, then looked at me like I was making myself up.



Six a.m. classes at Padma Kanya College meant a lot of us did not know enough about each other. We were working day jobs and would miss the last lecture to make it to our workplace on time. So, on rare days, when a professor did not turn up and we had the period to ourselves, we would walk off to the canteen and talk over tea. And on a particular morning the talk was about me.

“Where are you from?”

“Maharajgunj,” I said.

My friend shook her head. “No, where? Where are you really from?”

I understood what she meant and answered, “Janakpur.”

She nodded, as though I had suddenly and finally made sense to her, as though all enigmas surrounding my mere existence had been solved. “You are an Indian,” she said.

I sighed. This was a conversation I knew by heart. “Janakpur is in Nepal.”

“Yes,” she said, unconvinced. “So you are an Indian in Nepal.”

“No. I am from Janakpur.”

“That is India,” she said, and took a long, noisy sip.



I was traveling alone and when the train pulled into the Lucknow station I was afraid to leave my things behind and go out for a meal, so I kept sitting, waiting for the hunger to die; but it didn’t and my stomach purred and growled under my shirt. The old woman by the window turned around and said, “Go on, I will look after your things,” so I went.

When I returned we started to talk. “Where are you going to?” she asked.

“Nepal.”

“Where there?”

“Janakpur.”

“Never heard of that in Nepal.”

“It’s in the flatlands, aunty. In the Terai.”

She frowned and I could see that she was getting suspicious of who I was.

“What flatlands?” she asked. “I am seventy and I know Nepal is all mountains.”



In a wedding gathering, the discussion turned to religion, and a man, passionately atheistic was wagging his fingers at us. “Why are we anything, eh, but by accident? Accidently Hindu, accidently Muslim, accidently Jain. What are you now?”

“A Hindu,” I said, laughing at his vehemence.

“Why are you a Hindu?” the man asked.

“By default,” I said. “I was born where Sita was.”

“So you were born in Ayodhya and so you are a Hindu.”

I was startled. “No,” I said. “I was born in Janakpur, in Janak’s kingdom, where Sita was.”

“What is that? That is fictitious, like most of Ramayana. In Nepal there is only Pashupati and nothing else,” and he continued to wag his finger.

No matter where I am, my geography, slippery and untenable, unlike any other geography I know, shifts its shape, and I become something I am not, or rather, I unbecome what I am. It’s a fantastic predicament and had it not been directed at me, I would have been amused.