Nepal – Home and Exile in Seasons of Flight

Manjushree Thapa’s Seasons of Flight takes us to Nepal and America with Prema. Born and brought up in a small hamlet of Nepal, moves to the strife torn Kathmandu for higher education and then to take up a job. However, the increasing Maoism and violence in Nepal suffocates her and she longs to escape ‘home’ and go elsewhere for solace. Home which signifies peace leaves her in a state of restlessness and she flies to America on an unexpected green card lottery. But does changing countries bring her peace? Does America help her forget home? Does the American soil change her love for the beautiful ecology of Nepal? The novel eventually answers these question, but Nepal figures large as both ‘home’ and ‘exile’ for Prema.
While in America, she has to continuously explain where she’s from: so, home, she explains, is near India or where Mount Everest is, or where the sherpas come from. In fact for Prema, Mount Everest is home. When in America she stays for a while in a place called Little Nepal, but she soon finds the place sickly sweet and leaves to find what she calls is ‘Little America’. It is then that she finds love. In America, the shadow of home is that on verge of transition. In a sense, her search for Nepal runs parallel to her search for ‘roots’ in a new land.
In Nepal, Prema worked with a non-governmental organization and she frequently finds herself in the forest. It is this magic of the forest and Mount Everest that she never seems to be able to recreate in the new land. She is constantly faced with the question of identity , an unrelenting anxiety that haunt her all along, but bit by bit she comes to a realize that identity is not of being an American or a Nepali, but a complex mix of both worlds. She constantly lives in state of self-denial, that she does not want to return to Nepal but she intermittently finds herself scanning the internet for news on Nepal and exchanging e-mail with friends in Nepali, the language she had discarded as the “language of sorrow”. What Prema experiences is the ‘immigrant sydrome’. Thapa, shows Prema’s breaking point when she’s in conversation with Louis they say,
‘So take me to your world!’ He said, ‘That’s what I’m saying! You’re shutting me out. When all I want is – Take me to your world!’
‘I do not have a world!’ Prema cried. ‘I left the world I had, and do not belong in the one I am in now – your world. I do not have any place to take you Luis. I do not have a place in the world.’ (186)
Despite moving from one country to another, in the hope of finding answers, Prema is only faced with more pressing question, answers to which she does not have. Interestingly in the novel, Prema gets interested in the political problems of Guatemala. As she traces the history of Gautemala from 1940s to the present times, she realizes that it is not too different from the history of her own country. She begins to think about Nepal yet again. The political history of Gautemala and its struggle for democracy, the rebellion of 1970s, the brutal counter-insurgency by the militarized governments in the 1980s and the peace route of the 1990s, all these events seem similar to the political realities of Nepal. At this stage Thapa gives us an insight into Prema’s chaotic mind,
“After this, Prema began to feel out of place where she was. Living in a flat on a toy street Working as a homecare attendant. Ensconced snugly in Luis’s life, his very American-life. She hadn’t actually reinvented herself, had she?” (150)
But it is only once that she is back in Nepal and meets Bijaya, her sister, that Bijaya tells her that
‘But I love my country’…’Everything I’ve done – I do – is for my country, for the liberation of my country, my people. How can anyone hate where they’re from?’… ‘It’s like hating your mother,’” (212:)
Perhaps it only after this that Prema comes to terms with ‘identity crisis’ that she seems to be struggling with. It is in this understanding with the place that she came from and the place that she lives in that she finds her calling. As Fiona, a lawyer in Seasons of Flight, beautifully teases out the true essence of the novel by saying,
“El Segundo Blues, is a tiny butterfly that stays still for long stretches and then takes flight in a flutter of blue. A creature that goes through cycles of transformation before it is finally ready for a season of flight”.
It takes an absolute stranger to show Prema how to stop meandering and set down roots wherever life might land her.