"Darkmotherland"

Samrat Upadhyay was born and raised in Nepal. He is author of the novels The City Son, The Guru of Love (a New York Times Notable Book), and Buddha’s Orphans, as well as the story collections Mad Country, The Royal Ghosts, and Arresting God in Kathmandu. His work has received the Whiting Award and the Asian American Literary Award and been shortlisted for the PEN Open Book Award and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. He has written for The New York Times and has appeared on BBC Radio and National Public Radio. Upadhyay is the Martha C. Kraft Professor of Humanities at Indiana University.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Darkmotherland, and reported the following:

Page 69 of Darkmotherland contains only a few lines (it’s the end of a chapter), but if you turn the page to page 70, it has one of the most pivotal scenes in the book. Two of the central characters in the novel, PM Papa and Rozy, are engaged in a sexual act.

It’s the reader’s first intimate look at PM Papa, a dictator who’s been talked about only indirectly until now as a formidable and unapproachable figure. This scene is an explosive moment, as it reveals him in a secret, private space, engaged in a “forbidden” act of sex that’s described bluntly—warts and all—with a subtext that characterizes him as brutish and greedy and needy. In contrast, Rozy appears vulnerable yet exercising a strange kind of power over this dictator, something that escalates as the plot progresses, resulting in a radical transformation that’s at the heart of the novel.

So, yes, the Page 69 Test works wonderfully in Darkmotherland. Reading that page, the reader gets a good grasp of the power play at work that’s going to reverberate throughout. PM Papa’s inner life, in contrast to his larger-than-life persona in Darkmotherland, is also captured on that page; so is a hint of potential subversion by Rozy.

Darkmotherland took me ten years to write. It has a multitude of characters, and PM Papa and Rozy are two characters that I had the most difficulty writing. Yet they are also characters, perhaps because of their complexities, I found myself most attached to, ones I felt I needed to get right as I was writing them. They come from the opposite ends of the moral universe of Darkmotherland: one an autocrat with an appetite for violence, and the other whose quest for power has its roots in a painful past. In my writerly mind, however, they deserved equally attentive, perhaps even compassionate, treatment.

Visit Samrat Upadhyay's website.

Writers Read: Samrat Upadhyay (August 2010).

The Page 69 Test: Buddha’s Orphans.

--Marshal Zeringue