The spaces between

In "Father, Daughter," Shivaram is alarmed by the behavior of his daughter. She has left her husband -- a match Shivaram arranged -- for no other reason than that she cannot love him and has resumed an earlier liaison with the son of a low-caste cobbler. Conscious of the disapproving murmurs all around him, Shivaram declines to participate in her second marriage, so that "people would say less, say that he'd at least attempted to protect his dignity." His speculative knowledge of his daughter's motives and feelings, and his mixture of perplexity, outrage, tenderness and frailty, gives the story an unusual charge.

In "A Servant in the City," a teenage village boy, Jeevan, is a servant to a single woman and witnesses her affair with her former employer, which has made her a pariah. Gradually she confides in Jeevan, who supports her through her low spells. Over time, Jeevan finds that he has become "strangely possessive of her, as if he were the only one who truly knew her." He suspects that her lover will never keep his promise to leave his wife and marry her, and one day Jeevan blurts out these thoughts, turning from a spectator into an agent. Reprimanded by his mistress for his insolence, he thinks about returning to the village, "to remind himself where he came from."

A new pressure is also at work on Upadhyay's characters: politics and recent events in Nepal. The young democracy overseen by a monarchy has endured a turbulent five years. In 2001, the crown prince fatally shot several members of the royal family, including his father, King Birendra, in a drunken fit before turning his gun upon himself. Since then the country has been riven by a bloody Maoist uprising that has taken thousands of lives. "The Royal Ghosts" shows how the tension among the monarchy, democrats and communists has eroded the country's social fabric, demolishing the old stability against which the characters of "Arresting God in Kathmandu" played out their lives. This darkness and violence lie at the edges of several stories in the new collection and are addressed explicitly in a few of them.

In "The Weight of a Gun," the elderly Janaki finds a gun hidden under the mattress of her schizophrenic son, Bhola, who has often boasted that he is a Maoist. She lifts it gingerly, her head buzzing with questions. "Holding it carefully, she peeked out of the window. People were going about their business." Everything is as normal, but this one gesture of Janaki's is revelatory; she has stepped over the threshold and has been sucked into the morass.