Literature- Major Krishna Basnet jerked his bitten hand back, as if stung. Tooth marks, where the seven-year-old girl had bitten him, left dark indentations in the hollow between his thumb and forefinger.

Sushma Joshi. Photo courtesy: Sushma's facebook account.

The major stared at the tear-stained face of the little girl. Then he spat into her defiant eyes. “You should have learnt to respect your elders, you bitch.”

A cold moon glittered in the black sky. No wind stirred the leaves. The major’s voice carried upward, toward where Ambika lay, hiding. Ambika could hear and see everything from where she was—a recessed ledge of rock embedded in a cliff above the village. Respect, spat out from the major’s throat, floated up with a strange resonance.

Ambika felt like the little girl below, held hostage by the major with his gun on that brilliant moonlit night. How many times had she been told to respect her elders? The rage rose in her with the same uncontrollable force as when she had been a child.

She closed her eyes and remembered the moment, years ago, when she had fallen from a cliff, hunting for wild honey, and almost broken her neck. A little keyhole to death had opened up in her mind as she lay on the ground. Then she had heard sounds of the next world, the atonal moans echoing through red, cloudy vision, the sighs of terror and despair from unseen beings. That’s when she had known, on a visceral level, the certainty of death. Ambika felt her finger tighten on her trigger. “Perhaps I’ll die today,” she thought. Read more at World Literature Today

About author: Sushma Joshi is a writer and filmmaker whose stories have appeared in many publications worldwide. Her "End of the World" was long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Joshi has a bachelor’s in international relations from Brown University and a master’s in English literature from Middlebury College. Her articles are archived on her nonfiction blog at sushma.blogspot.com. See more of her work at sushmasfiction.blogspot.com

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Sushma Joshi (born May 26, 1973) is a Nepali writer and filmmaker based in Kathmandu, Nepal.

End of the World, her book of short stories, was long-listed for the Frank O' Connor International Short Story Award in 2009. She co-edited New Nepal, New Voices (Rupa 2008). Art Matters, a book of art essays, was supported by the Alliance Francaise De Katmandou.

Inspired by Nepali history and contemporary politics, her fiction and reportage deal with issues of social inequality, environment and gender.

Sound of Silence (1997) her first documentary, was screened at the New Asian Currents at the Yamagata Documentary Film Festival. Water (2000) was screened on the Q and A with Riz Khan on CNN International, and the UN World Water Forum in Kyoto. The Escape (2006), a short about a teacher targeted by rebels, was accepted to the Berlinale Talent Campus.

Joshi was born and grew up in Kathmandu. She studied in Dowhill School, Kurseong, for four years before finishing her education in Mahendra Bhawan and Siddhartha Vanasthali Institute. She received a BA in international relations from Brown University in 1996. She has a MA in anthropology from the New School, NY, and a MA in English Literature from Middlebury College, Vermont.

Joshi contributes The Global and the Local, a weekly op-ed, to Nepal's leading English daily, The Kathmandu Post.

-from: sushma.blogspot.com

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