What Dictates the Will? Writing Suffering in Indra Bahadur Rai’s Selected Short Fiction

What Dictates the Will? Writing Suffering in Indra Bahadur Rai’s Selected Short Fiction
Komal Prasad Phuyal, Mumaya Thapa and Bhanu Neupane

Abstract

Indra Bahadur Rai (1927-2018) presents the precariousness of human existence in his short fiction. Writing from the hills of Darjeeling, India, he sees the play of human existence through a unique lens as he delves deep into the underlying sphere of free will. He explores the factors that limit and dictate human choices in the large universe of being. This article reads Rai’s two popular short stories: “Tyasari Bacheko Chha Tyasari Nai” [This is How He has Lived on] from his collection of stories in Kathastha [Faith in the Narratives] (1971) and “Jayamaya Aaphumatra Likhapani Aaipugi” [Then Jayamaya Alone Reached Likhapani] from Bipana Kaitpaya [Waking Moments] (1960). Rai sets the protagonist in Darjeeling in the late 1950s, in the first work of fiction to examine his quest, suffering, and acceptance of his present state of being in the precarious world. The second fiction depicts the struggle of people returning home to Nepal from Burma after World War II. The author writes a frightening narrative of the protagonist’s struggle to reach Likhapani as they lose everything along the way. These two works of fiction show that Rai writes about human fate, their struggle, and the determinants of human fate. Rai’s characters struggle to awaken their inner selves and accept them as a means to the potential within them. By writing about human suffering, Rai contemplates human existence in general. This article reads Rai’s selected short fiction through the lens of Sartrean existentialism to explore the role of suffering in awakening the inner sensibility, enabling one to telescope the inner being.