u/CitizenNoir977

I have been thinking a lot about the way philosophy moves from what is to what ought to be.

We observe suffering and then say suffering should end. We observe meaninglessness and say we should create meaning. We observe injustice and say we should revolt. We observe attachment and say we should detach. The transition happens so quickly that sometimes the judgment disappears inside the observation.

I am not saying people should stop acting on what they experience. That would be absurd. Humans act because that is what humans do. A parent protects a child. A person in pain seeks relief. Someone who feels oppressed may revolt. Someone who is lonely may seek companionship. These reactions are part of reality too.

What I question is the extra step where our reaction becomes a statement about reality itself. Take suffering. I understand perfectly well why an organism wants less of it. Pain hurts. Fear is unpleasant. Grief can be unbearable. But why does that automatically mean that freedom from suffering is philosophically superior to suffering? That seems to me like taking an organism's preference and turning it into a property of the universe.

The same thing happens with morality. Humans create values because we are capable of valuation. We care about children, fairness, loyalty, freedom, stability, love, dignity, revenge, compassion, hierarchy and countless other things. Those values can become shared, institutionalized and enforced. Eventually we call some of them morality.

That does not make morality fake. Morality is very real. It can determine whether someone is protected, punished, killed, forgiven or imprisoned. But something can be real without being intrinsic to the universe. If humanity disappeared tomorrow, planets would continue moving. Stars would continue forming and dying. Physical relationships would continue whether anyone described them or not. But human ideas of justice, beauty, dignity and goodness would disappear with the humans who were assigning them.

That makes value relational to me. Something is not simply valuable. It is valuable to someone, for something, under some condition. A belief can be valuable to a ruling class because it preserves power, harmful to an oppressed group because it preserves domination, valuable to a society because it creates stability and harmful to an individual because it restricts them. Asking whether the belief is simply "good" or "bad" hides all of these relationships.

This does not mean facts are relative. If one person says the Earth is flat and another says it is approximately spherical, we can compare those claims with something outside their individual judgment. One corresponds better to what can be observed. But factual accuracy and value are not the same thing. A false belief might hold a community together. A true belief might destabilize it. That does not make the false belief true. It only means truth itself does not automatically carry some cosmic value. Someone has to value truth for truth to matter to them.

Even philosophy itself is not exempt from this. Whatever philosophy I hold comes from a brain shaped by biology, culture, language, experience and historical circumstance. I do not think that automatically makes the philosophy false. It only means its origin gives it no special authority. Some claims can be compared against observation. Others cannot.

This is probably why I am suspicious of philosophies that end with salvation. Buddhism, for example, has many observations about attachment, craving and suffering that I find deeply interesting. But I get stuck when the argument moves toward liberation from suffering as the privileged destination. Why? If an organism dislikes suffering, of course it may try to reduce it. But that explains the organism. It does not explain why non-suffering is philosophically higher.

My own idea of liberation is almost the opposite. I think of liberation as accepting what is before demanding that it become something else. Pain can be pain. Joy can be joy. Attachment can be attachment. Fear can be fear. But even here I am not saying everyone should accept everything. That would immediately turn acceptance into another hierarchy. Someone may resist. Someone may revolt. Someone may remain attached. Someone may live through a comforting illusion. Someone may seek truth even when truth hurts them. These are different ways an organism can respond to its conditions.

Acceptance does not mean passivity either. If I accept that my hand is burning, I will probably pull it away. The act of pulling it away is part of what is. If people accept that they are oppressed and then revolt, the revolt is also part of what is. The movement toward what "ought to be" never actually leaves what is. It is simply something humans do inside reality.

I also do not believe in free will in the strong sense. I do not see a separate chooser standing outside the brain deciding what the brain will do. Options appear because of everything that has happened to that brain: biology, memory, habits, trauma, education, culture, present conditions. Training can create a longer space between impulse and action. It can allow the brain to generate more alternatives and inhibit some responses. We can call that "more freedom" if we want. But the process is still conditioned. Randomness would not solve the problem either. A random decision would not suddenly become more mine simply because it was unpredictable.

This also changes how I think about identity. We give a body a name and treat it as one person across decades, but that person is constantly changing. Biology changes. Memories change. values change. Ideas are absorbed, transformed and discarded. A person at sixty can be psychologically very different from the person at twenty. Society may still treat them as the same legal person because society needs continuity. That is functional. It does not prove there is some permanent metaphysical self underneath all the changes.

Meaning works similarly. I used to think "nothing has meaning" sounded depressing. Now I wonder whether the heavier burden is believing that everything must have meaning. There is a difference between saying, "nothing has meaning," and saying, "nothing has to have meaning." The first sounds like something has been taken away. The second can feel like something has been put down. That does not mean meaninglessness is objectively liberating either. Someone may experience it as despair. Someone else may experience it as relief. Another may not care. Again, the relationship matters.

Maybe this sounds like "whatever happens, happens." In one sense, yes. But I do not think that means inquiry is useless. To know that something may not matter in some ultimate sense, you still have to understand what it is. Otherwise you are not arriving at indifference through understanding; you are simply ignoring it. Sometimes philosophy adds information. Sometimes it removes unnecessary weight.

You can study morality and conclude that morality still functions without cosmic authority. You can study meaning and conclude that existence may not require meaning. You can study liberation and wonder whether existence ever needed saving in the first place. So I do not think "nothing matters." Things matter everywhere. Children matter to parents. Political systems matter to citizens. Food matters to a hungry person. A relationship matters to the people inside it. An asteroid matters to a species it destroys. What I doubt is that anything simply matters in itself, without some relation in which that mattering exists.

Maybe there is some objective hierarchy beyond human comprehension. I have no way of knowing that. If there is, I cannot pretend I have access to it. What I can see is that humans value, judge, love, hate, build moral systems, destroy them, seek meaning, reject meaning, suffer, create philosophies and then argue about which philosophy everyone else ought to follow.

And all of that is still part of what is.

I have been thinking a lot about the way philosophy moves from what is to what ought to be.

We observe suffering and then say suffering should end. We observe meaninglessness and say we should create meaning. We observe injustice and say we should revolt. We observe attachment and say we should detach. The transition happens so quickly that sometimes the judgment disappears inside the observation.

I am not saying people should stop acting on what they experience. That would be absurd. Humans act because that is what humans do. A parent protects a child. A person in pain seeks relief. Someone who feels oppressed may revolt. Someone who is lonely may seek companionship. These reactions are part of reality too.

What I question is the extra step where our reaction becomes a statement about reality itself. Take suffering. I understand perfectly well why an organism wants less of it. Pain hurts. Fear is unpleasant. Grief can be unbearable. But why does that automatically mean that freedom from suffering is philosophically superior to suffering? That seems to me like taking an organism's preference and turning it into a property of the universe.

The same thing happens with morality. Humans create values because we are capable of valuation. We care about children, fairness, loyalty, freedom, stability, love, dignity, revenge, compassion, hierarchy and countless other things. Those values can become shared, institutionalized and enforced. Eventually we call some of them morality.

That does not make morality fake. Morality is very real. It can determine whether someone is protected, punished, killed, forgiven or imprisoned. But something can be real without being intrinsic to the universe. If humanity disappeared tomorrow, planets would continue moving. Stars would continue forming and dying. Physical relationships would continue whether anyone described them or not. But human ideas of justice, beauty, dignity and goodness would disappear with the humans who were assigning them.

That makes value relational to me. Something is not simply valuable. It is valuable to someone, for something, under some condition. A belief can be valuable to a ruling class because it preserves power, harmful to an oppressed group because it preserves domination, valuable to a society because it creates stability and harmful to an individual because it restricts them. Asking whether the belief is simply "good" or "bad" hides all of these relationships.

This does not mean facts are relative. If one person says the Earth is flat and another says it is approximately spherical, we can compare those claims with something outside their individual judgment. One corresponds better to what can be observed. But factual accuracy and value are not the same thing. A false belief might hold a community together. A true belief might destabilize it. That does not make the false belief true. It only means truth itself does not automatically carry some cosmic value. Someone has to value truth for truth to matter to them.

Even philosophy itself is not exempt from this. Whatever philosophy I hold comes from a brain shaped by biology, culture, language, experience and historical circumstance. I do not think that automatically makes the philosophy false. It only means its origin gives it no special authority. Some claims can be compared against observation. Others cannot.

This is probably why I am suspicious of philosophies that end with salvation. Buddhism, for example, has many observations about attachment, craving and suffering that I find deeply interesting. But I get stuck when the argument moves toward liberation from suffering as the privileged destination. Why? If an organism dislikes suffering, of course it may try to reduce it. But that explains the organism. It does not explain why non-suffering is philosophically higher.

My own idea of liberation is almost the opposite. I think of liberation as accepting what is before demanding that it become something else. Pain can be pain. Joy can be joy. Attachment can be attachment. Fear can be fear. But even here I am not saying everyone should accept everything. That would immediately turn acceptance into another hierarchy. Someone may resist. Someone may revolt. Someone may remain attached. Someone may live through a comforting illusion. Someone may seek truth even when truth hurts them. These are different ways an organism can respond to its conditions.

Acceptance does not mean passivity either. If I accept that my hand is burning, I will probably pull it away. The act of pulling it away is part of what is. If people accept that they are oppressed and then revolt, the revolt is also part of what is. The movement toward what "ought to be" never actually leaves what is. It is simply something humans do inside reality.

I also do not believe in free will in the strong sense. I do not see a separate chooser standing outside the brain deciding what the brain will do. Options appear because of everything that has happened to that brain: biology, memory, habits, trauma, education, culture, present conditions. Training can create a longer space between impulse and action. It can allow the brain to generate more alternatives and inhibit some responses. We can call that "more freedom" if we want. But the process is still conditioned. Randomness would not solve the problem either. A random decision would not suddenly become more mine simply because it was unpredictable.

This also changes how I think about identity. We give a body a name and treat it as one person across decades, but that person is constantly changing. Biology changes. Memories change. values change. Ideas are absorbed, transformed and discarded. A person at sixty can be psychologically very different from the person at twenty. Society may still treat them as the same legal person because society needs continuity. That is functional. It does not prove there is some permanent metaphysical self underneath all the changes.

Meaning works similarly. I used to think "nothing has meaning" sounded depressing. Now I wonder whether the heavier burden is believing that everything must have meaning. There is a difference between saying, "nothing has meaning," and saying, "nothing has to have meaning." The first sounds like something has been taken away. The second can feel like something has been put down. That does not mean meaninglessness is objectively liberating either. Someone may experience it as despair. Someone else may experience it as relief. Another may not care. Again, the relationship matters.

Maybe this sounds like "whatever happens, happens." In one sense, yes. But I do not think that means inquiry is useless. To know that something may not matter in some ultimate sense, you still have to understand what it is. Otherwise you are not arriving at indifference through understanding; you are simply ignoring it. Sometimes philosophy adds information. Sometimes it removes unnecessary weight.

You can study morality and conclude that morality still functions without cosmic authority. You can study meaning and conclude that existence may not require meaning. You can study liberation and wonder whether existence ever needed saving in the first place. So I do not think "nothing matters." Things matter everywhere. Children matter to parents. Political systems matter to citizens. Food matters to a hungry person. A relationship matters to the people inside it. An asteroid matters to a species it destroys. What I doubt is that anything simply matters in itself, without some relation in which that mattering exists.

Maybe there is some objective hierarchy beyond human comprehension. I have no way of knowing that. If there is, I cannot pretend I have access to it. What I can see is that humans value, judge, love, hate, build moral systems, destroy them, seek meaning, reject meaning, suffer, create philosophies and then argue about which philosophy everyone else ought to follow.

And all of that is still part of what is.

What Shirishko Phool Is Really About

Parijat’s Shirishko Phool, translated into English as Blue Mimosa, is often described as an existential novel, an anti-war novel, or an early feminist work in Nepali literature. All three descriptions are useful, but each becomes limiting when treated as the whole of the book. Parijat takes questions about meaninglessness, isolation, guilt and freedom and places them inside a painfully human conflict: an aging former soldier hoping that a woman might give his life significance, and a woman who refuses to become anyone’s moral salvation.

Suyog Bir Singh drifts through post-war Kathmandu with little to sustain him beyond alcohol, memory and habit. He claims that drinking is merely a remnant of military life and rejects the comforting idea that suffering automatically makes a person wiser or better. The values that might once have anchored him -duty, honor, faith and social usefulness- have lost their authority, yet he has found nothing convincing to replace them. His life continues, but he cannot explain why it should.

The way he tries to rebuild a sense of self is revealing. Again and again, he looks toward women. Mujura represents the possibility of an orderly domestic life, although he does not appear to desire her as a person so much as the stability she might provide. Sakambari becomes something far more urgent. She is difficult, inaccessible and unimpressed by him, and this very resistance allows him to imagine her as a form of absolution. If a woman like Sakambari could love him, perhaps he could believe that he was no longer the man he had been during the war.

His wartime memories expose how compromised that hope is. Suyog recalls exploiting vulnerable women, raping an unconscious woman and deceiving Matinchi with promises he never intended to keep. When she tries to stop him from leaving, he becomes violent. These episodes show that women have repeatedly served as buffers between him and his fear of death, loneliness and inner emptiness. They provide relief, reassurance and bodily comfort, but he seldom considers the weight of their own lives.

To separate the present from the past, Suyog constructs a moral distinction that allows him to keep believing in himself. He tells himself that he could not love the women he raped and could not rape the woman he loved. The difference matters enormously to him because it suggests that love has transformed him. Parijat gradually dismantles that defence. When he seizes Sakambari and kisses her without consent, his desire gives way almost immediately to dizziness and shame. The act is not equivalent in scale to his wartime crimes, but it rests on the same assumption: that his feeling gives him the right to act upon a woman regardless of her will.

What Suyog calls love has not freed him from possession. It has merely made possession appear more dignified. His emotions may be sincere, but sincerity does not make them ethical. In fact, the depth of his feeling may be part of the danger. He has invested so much meaning in Sakambari that he begins to treat that meaning as something she ought to recognize.

Sakambari is the novel’s ideological centre, although the reader is never allowed into her consciousness. We encounter her only through Suyog’s obsessive gaze, her sharp remarks, her habits and her refusals. Her most memorable statement comes through the insect-killing orchid. She describes with unsettling pleasure how the plant attracts insects, traps them and allows them to suffocate, all in the service of its own security.

When Suyog turns the flower into a metaphor for human struggle, she mocks him for forcing philosophy onto nature. Yet she immediately does something similar herself. Her ideal flower buds for itself, opens for itself, resists the bee and falls by its own choice. From this image she develops a broader claim: love is not inevitable, suffering in love is not noble by necessity, and a person can exist without surrendering herself to another.

That refusal has real force. Sakambari rejects the assumption that a woman must find fulfillment through marriage, service or emotional sacrifice. She refuses to let male desire define the value of her life. Yet she is not a simple figure of liberation. Her treatment of Sanu exposes a limit in her understanding of freedom. Sanu defies her family and chooses love on her own terms, but Sakambari dismisses her as foolish. She appears to respect autonomy most when it leads to refusal, solitude or resistance. When another woman freely chooses attachment, her sympathy disappears.

Her smoking carries the same contradiction. Sakambari resents Suyog and Shiva Raj for their drinking, but she treats concern about her own habit as an intrusion. When Suyog asks whether she would stop smoking if he requested it, she says she would smoke ten cigarettes instead. The reply protects her bodily independence, but it also reveals how reactive that independence has become. If another person’s request automatically determines that she must do the opposite, then he continues to shape her behavior, only in reverse.

Sakambari is therefore not simply free. She is committed to remaining ungovernable. That distinction is important because genuine autonomy should allow a person to hear another’s concern without experiencing the act of listening as surrender. Sakambari’s independence often depends upon opposition, and the people she opposes remain central to the identity she is defending.

This tension is unlikely to be accidental. Sakambari seems to represent the necessary but incomplete power of refusal. She can reject love, marriage, pity, religion and interference, but she offers little sense of how autonomous people might live together without either possessing one another or withdrawing completely. Her philosophy is strongest at the boundary and weakest when it must account for relation.

The novel’s treatment of war is similarly caught between complexity and moral design. Parijat’s war passages are among the strongest parts of the book because they strip away the romantic image of the Gurkha soldier. War appears as hunger, disease, fear, hierarchy and bodily ruin. Men become instruments, valued only while they remain useful to institutions capable of abandoning them without hesitation.

Suyog is clearly shaped by this world. Military authority, colonial power, alcohol, masculine group culture and the constant presence of death all contribute to the person he becomes. The novel understands that morality does not develop in a vacuum. People are trained by their circumstances to accept certain forms of violence and ignore others.

That context does not absolve Suyog. He is both a victim of military power and a perpetrator who directs violence toward people more vulnerable than himself. This is one of the novel’s most valuable insights. Being humiliated by one hierarchy does not prevent a person from reproducing that hierarchy when he encounters someone over whom he has power.

Sakambari’s judgment of war is much more absolute. She condemns Suyog for being a soldier long before she knows what he actually did. When his wartime crimes are finally revealed, her earlier suspicion acquires the appearance of prophecy. Yet she was not responding to evidence; she was responding to a category. The novel quietly merges her assumption with the reader’s later knowledge.

This is where the book begins to feel less like an open inquiry and more like a carefully arranged prosecution. Parijat gives Suyog a reflective, philosophical mind, but also burdens him with enough moral corruption that the reader is naturally inclined to reject him. His ideas never have to be answered fully because the person expressing them has already been discredited. Sakambari, meanwhile, is granted moral authority without having her own motives or contradictions examined from within.

The strongest defence of this structure is that Parijat is exposing the limits of male introspection. Suyog can think deeply about death, alienation and meaning, yet still fail to recognize another person’s freedom. His intelligence does not save him from objectifying women. A simpler villain would have made the argument easier, but it would also have made it less disturbing. Suyog shows that a person can reflect endlessly and still remain trapped inside himself.

The difficulty is that Sakambari is not given an equally developed consciousness through which the argument might continue. Suyog carries most of the philosophical inquiry, while Sakambari becomes the resistance against which he is judged. His contradictions are unfolded through confession; hers remain scattered across gesture and behavior. Her silence protects her from Suyog’s interpretive possession, but it also protects her philosophy from scrutiny.

The title complicates this entire arrangement. The insect-killing orchid belongs closely to Sakambari’s worldview, but the shirish trees belong to neither character. They surround the house, mark the passing seasons and accompany Suyog’s movement from curiosity to obsession, violation and emptiness. Their blossoms appear when he first enters the household, fade with the seasons and return a year later.

Suyog envies the trees because they can blossom again. Nature repeats itself, while human beings accumulate memory and consequence. A new season cannot undo what he has done, nor can it restore the person Sakambari was before he entered her life.

Near the end, the flowers are described as falling “under compulsion.” The phrase quietly unsettles Sakambari’s claim that a flower falls by its own will. The shirish is bound to the branch, to weather, to time and to biological processes it did not choose. Nature does not enact the freedom Sakambari projects onto it.

Suyog projects just as much. The flowers become beauty, desire, jealousy, renewal and loss according to his changing emotional state. In the final pages, he imagines the bare branches accepting their emptiness. Yet the branches accept nothing. The feeling belongs to him. Nature becomes a surface onto which he writes what he cannot otherwise articulate.

This may be the novel’s most convincing existential insight. Suyog and Sakambari offer different responses to a world that provides no guaranteed meaning. He tries to find meaning through another person. She tries to create meaning entirely from within herself. The shirish trees validate neither. They blossom and fall without participating in human arguments about love, guilt, freedom or redemption.

The title therefore does more than decorate the novel. Had Parijat named the book after the insect-killing orchid, it would appear more narrowly concerned with female refusal and male intrusion. By naming it after the shirish flower, she places that conflict within a broader movement of recurrence, compulsion and natural indifference. The title gives the book philosophical space beyond its immediate moral design.

It also makes the novel’s achievement difficult to separate from its manipulation. Parijat’s arrangement is too precise to ignore. Suyog’s objectifying gaze, Sakambari’s hostility toward soldiers, the hidden wartime history, his belief that love has changed him, the forced kiss and Sakambari’s death all converge toward a conclusion that seems to have been present from the beginning.

For this reason, Shirishko Phool often resembles a thesis novel. It dismantles the mythology of the heroic Gurkha, exposes the way men use women to fill their internal voids, and gives serious force to a woman’s refusal. Its argument can feel heavily weighted because Suyog’s consciousness is opened until it becomes evidence, while Sakambari’s remains closed enough to retain symbolic authority.

Even so, the novel does not remain entirely under Parijat’s control. The orchid can suggest predatory isolation rather than freedom. Sanu’s elopement exposes the limits of Sakambari’s tolerance for another woman’s autonomy. Suyog’s horror after the kiss suggests that he is not simply identical to the man he was during the war, even if he has not escaped him. The shirish flowers continue without regard for any of them.

Perhaps this is why the novel survives its own engineering. Its symbols produce more friction than its moral structure can completely contain. Parijat guides the reader strongly toward condemning Suyog, but she cannot prevent us from questioning Sakambari. She presents refusal as strength, but cannot prevent the orchid from looking cruel. Nature gives the novel its widest philosophical horizon, while remaining indifferent to every philosophy imposed upon it.

Shirishko Phool is not a neutral investigation of existence, nor is it merely a feminist condemnation of one violent man. It is a carefully constructed novel about two damaged attempts to live without guaranteed meaning. Suyog tries to overcome emptiness through possession disguised as love. Sakambari tries to preserve herself through a freedom that sometimes becomes another form of captivity. Around them, the shirish blossoms, falls and returns. Human beings interpret, justify, desire and remember because they cannot avoid doing so, even when the world gives them no reason to believe that their meanings are true.

(please let me know your feedback! I know it is a long poem, but the breaks are deliberate and architectural as the poem aims to behave as a barrage of gunfire)

म

म—

पदकको तौल जोखेर

कविको मसीमा

पोतिने भावना,

प्रकाशकको चेकले

मात्तिएका शब्दहरूले

भरिने किताब,

'मसला'को स्वाद नपुगेर

पत्रकारले

रद्दीमा फ्याँक्ने यथार्थ,

म—

अभिनेताको शुल्क

तिर्न नसक्दा

मञ्चबाट खेदिने चरित्र,

घरमा थपिने तल्लाहरूको

भार बोक्न छानिने

व्यथाको गीत,

निर्माताको बोसो बढाउन

चलचित्र बनाइने

गरिबको कहानी,

म—

शब्दकोशका मोटा पानाहरूमा

स्थान ओगट्न

अक्षम शब्द,

अनि,

निरर्थकताको अन्धकारमा

आफूले आफूलाई

चिथोरिरहने अस्तित्व!

म—

सत्ताको सिँढीमा

खुड्किलो बन्न उचालिने

अन्धो विरोध,

अलकत्राले पुरिने

आन्दोलनको

कलिलो र तातो रगत,

चरुवाको लाठीको

इशारामा

खोरभित्र पस्ने-निस्कने भेडा,

म—

टर्चको प्रकाशलाई

मुन्टो कहिल्यै नउघारी

पछ्याउने बिरालो,

सिमानाका खम्बाहरूमा

मुत्दै हिँड्ने

गल्लीको भुस्याहा कुकुर,

रक्सीको गिलासमा

भोटको मसी पखाल्ने

भेलबिहीन खहरे,

म—

रगत पिउने देवताहरूको

तृप्ति मेट्न

शिर काटिने भाकल,

अनि,

सेनापतिहरूले बुनेको चक्रव्यूहमा

बलि चढ्ने

बफादार अभिमन्यु!

म—

गुरुको कोर्राका

नीला डाम

तिघ्रामा बोकी हिँड्ने विद्यार्थी,

पिताको बहीखातामा

हिसाब राखिने

लेन-देनको रसिद,

आमाको न्यानो पछ्यौरीबाट

बेदखल गरिने

अवैध भ्रूण,

म—

सिलौटा र लोहोरोको

किचाईमा

गिदीको सौदा गरिने बुहारी,

वर्षाले ओस्याएपछि

आगो नटिप्ने

चिताको दाउरा,

प्वाँख नउम्रँदै

उडान भर्न धकेलिने

पिँजडा भित्रको बचेरा,

म—

हिलोमा जरा नबस्दै

फूल नफुलेर

उखालिने बिरुवा,

अनि,

चमक खिएर

मोल गुमाएपछि

कबाडीमा बेचिने गहना।

म—

शकुनीको छलमा

दाउ बनेर

नाङ्गिन सुम्पिएकी द्रौपदी,

परम्पराको हत्कडीलाई

चुपचाप

स्वीकार गरेकी गान्धारी,

भक्षकको शिकार बनेर

जंगलमा फालिएको

रगताम्मे लाश,

म—

रंग पखालिएर

आश्चर्य गुमाएको

ध्यान नखिच्ने इन्द्रेणी,

प्रकट घाममा

छाया बिहीन भएर

कुचलिएको आकार,

कोमलताको आभासको

तृष्णाले

व्याकुल बनेको स्पर्श,

म—

कुमालेको कल्पनामा

समर्पित भएर

भविष्य खोसिएको माटो,

अनि,

मन्दिएको मस्तिष्कमा

'म को' भन्ने प्रश्नको

उत्तरहीन बेचैनी!

(please let me know your feedback! I know it is a long poem, but the breaks are deliberate and architectural as the poem aims to behave as a barrage of gunfire)

म

म—

पदकको तौल जोखेर

कविको मसीमा

पोतिने भावना,

प्रकाशकको चेकले

मात्तिएका शब्दहरूले

भरिने किताब,

'मसला'को स्वाद नपुगेर

पत्रकारले

रद्दीमा फ्याँक्ने यथार्थ,

म—

अभिनेताको शुल्क

तिर्न नसक्दा

मञ्चबाट खेदिने चरित्र,

घरमा थपिने तल्लाहरूको

भार बोक्न छानिने

व्यथाको गीत,

निर्माताको बोसो बढाउन

चलचित्र बनाइने

गरिबको कहानी,

म—

शब्दकोशका मोटा पानाहरूमा

स्थान ओगट्न

अक्षम शब्द,

अनि,

निरर्थकताको अन्धकारमा

आफूले आफूलाई

चिथोरिरहने अस्तित्व!

म—

सत्ताको सिँढीमा

खुड्किलो बन्न उचालिने

अन्धो विरोध,

अलकत्राले पुरिने

आन्दोलनको

कलिलो र तातो रगत,

चरुवाको लाठीको

इशारामा

खोरभित्र पस्ने-निस्कने भेडा,

म—

टर्चको प्रकाशलाई

मुन्टो कहिल्यै नउघारी

पछ्याउने बिरालो,

सिमानाका खम्बाहरूमा

मुत्दै हिँड्ने

गल्लीको भुस्याहा कुकुर,

रक्सीको गिलासमा

भोटको मसी पखाल्ने

भेलबिहीन खहरे,

म—

रगत पिउने देवताहरूको

तृप्ति मेट्न

शिर काटिने भाकल,

अनि,

सेनापतिहरूले बुनेको चक्रव्यूहमा

बलि चढ्ने

बफादार अभिमन्यु!

म—

गुरुको कोर्राका

नीला डाम

तिघ्रामा बोकी हिँड्ने विद्यार्थी,

पिताको बहीखातामा

हिसाब राखिने

लेन-देनको रसिद,

आमाको न्यानो पछ्यौरीबाट

बेदखल गरिने

अवैध भ्रूण,

म—

सिलौटा र लोहोरोको

किचाईमा

गिदीको सौदा गरिने बुहारी,

वर्षाले ओस्याएपछि

आगो नटिप्ने

चिताको दाउरा,

प्वाँख नउम्रँदै

उडान भर्न धकेलिने

पिँजडा भित्रको बचेरा,

म—

हिलोमा जरा नबस्दै

फूल नफुलेर

उखालिने बिरुवा,

अनि,

चमक खिएर

मोल गुमाएपछि

कबाडीमा बेचिने गहना।

म—

शकुनीको छलमा

दाउ बनेर

नाङ्गिन सुम्पिएकी द्रौपदी,

परम्पराको हत्कडीलाई

चुपचाप

स्वीकार गरेकी गान्धारी,

भक्षकको शिकार बनेर

जंगलमा फालिएको

रगताम्मे लाश,

म—

रंग पखालिएर

आश्चर्य गुमाएको

ध्यान नखिच्ने इन्द्रेणी,

प्रकट घाममा

छाया बिहीन भएर

कुचलिएको आकार,

कोमलताको आभासको

तृष्णाले

व्याकुल बनेको स्पर्श,

म—

कुमालेको कल्पनामा

समर्पित भएर

भविष्य खोसिएको माटो,

अनि,

मन्दिएको मस्तिष्कमा

'म को' भन्ने प्रश्नको

उत्तरहीन बेचैनी!

म

म—

पदकको तौल जोखेर

कविको मसीमा

पोतिने भावना,

प्रकाशकको चेकले मात्तिएका

शब्दहरूले

भरिने किताब,

'मसला'को स्वाद नपुगेर

पत्रकारले

रद्दीमा फ्याँक्ने यथार्थ,

म—

अभिनेताको शुल्क

तिर्न नसक्दा

मञ्चबाट

खेदिने चरित्र,

घरमा थपिने तल्लाहरूको

भार बोक्न

छानिने

व्यथाको गीत,

निर्माताको बोसो बढाउन

चलचित्र बनाइने

गरिबको कहानी,

म—

शब्दकोशका मोटा पानाहरूमा

स्थान ओगट्न

अक्षम शब्द,

हो म,

निरर्थकताको अन्धकारमा

आफूले आफूलाई

चिथोरिरहने अस्तित्व!

म—

सत्ताको सिँढीमा

खुड्किलो बन्न

उचालिने

अन्धो विरोध,

अलकत्राले पुरिने

आन्दोलनको

कलिलो र तातो रगत,

चरुवाको लाठीको

इशारामा

खोरभित्र

पस्ने-निस्कने भेडा,

म—

टर्चको प्रकाशलाई

मुन्टो

कहिल्यै नउघारी

पछ्याउने बिरालो,

सिमानाका खम्बाहरूमा

मुत्दै हिँड्ने

गल्लीको भुस्याहा कुकुर,

रक्सीको गिलासमा

भोटको मसी पखाल्ने

भेलबिहीन खहरे,

म—

रगत पिउने देवताहरूको

तृप्ति मेट्न

शिर काटिने भाकल,

हो म,

सेनापतिहरूले बुनेको चक्रव्यूहमा

बलि चढ्ने

बफादार अभिमन्यु!

म—

गुरुको कोर्राका

नीला डाम

तिघ्रामा बोकी हिँड्ने विद्यार्थी,

पिताको बहीखातामा

हिसाब राखिने

लेन-देनको रसिद,

आमाको न्यानो पछ्यौरीबाट

बेदखल गरिने

अवैध भ्रूण,

म—

सिलौटा र लोहोरोको

किचाईमा

गिदीको सौदा गरिने बुहारी,

वर्षाले ओस्याएपछि

आगो नटिप्ने

चिताको दाउरा,

प्वाँख नउम्रँदै

उडान भर्न धकेलिने

साङ्लोले बाँधिएको बचेरा,

म—

हिलोमा जरा नबस्दै

फूल नफुलेर

उखालिने बिरुवा,

हो म,

चमक खिएर

मोल गुमाएपछि

कबाडीमा बेचिने गहना।

म—

शकुनीको छलमा

दाउ बनेर

नाङ्गिन

सुम्पिएकी द्रौपदी,

परम्पराको हत्कडीलाई

चुपचाप

स्वीकार गरेकी गान्धारी,

भक्षकको शिकार बनेर

जंगलमा फालिएको

रगताम्मे लाश,

म—

रंग उतारिएर

आश्चर्य गुमाएको

ध्यान नखिच्ने इन्द्रेणी,

प्रकट घाममा

छाया बिहीन भएर

कुचलिएको आकार,

कोमलताको आभासको

तृष्णाले

व्याकुल बनेको स्पर्श,

म—

कुमालेको कल्पनामा

समर्पित भएर

भविष्य खोसिएको माटो,

हो म,

मन्दिएको मस्तिष्कमा

'म को' भन्ने प्रश्नको

उत्तरहीन बेचैनी!

This poem comes closest to expressing the philosophy of existence I personally hold. I’d appreciate any feedback on its moral and structural framework, as well as how effectively the poem embodies it. Thank you for reading.

भित्र
माटोको भित्तामा
पखेटा सिलिएर
धिपधिप बलिरहेकी
एउटी जुनकिरी।

बाहिर
बयाको चोँच छल्दै
पखेटा फटफटाउँदै
छरिँदै भाग्छन्
अरू जुनकिरीहरू।

टाढैबाट
अन्धकारमा
खुम्चिएका पेटहरू
कुरकुराउँदै हेर्छन्—

पराई गुँड उज्यालो बनाइरहेको
त्यो परिचित धिपधिपलाई
र त्यसकै उज्यालोमा
चलमलाइरहेका
बयाका बचेराहरूलाई।

उचाइबाट
एउटा उल्लु
झम्टिन तम्सिन्छ—

गुँडबाहिर मुन्टो निकालेर बसेको
बयाको एउटा बचेरो
उसका आँखामा अडिन्छ।

चन्द्रमा
डुबुल्की मार्छ।

मिर्मिरेमा
सूर्यको पहिलो किरणसँगै
हावामा उड्छन्
बचेराका प्वाँखहरू।

जुनकिरीहरू
घामसँगै मिसिन्छन्।

माटोले छोप्दै छ
मासु लुछिएका हाडहरू।

गड्यौलाहरू
सलबलाउँछन्।

आँसु सुकिसकेको बया
माटोतिर चोँच झुकाउँछ—
गड्यौलाहरूलाई
नियाल्दै।

Parijat’s Shirishko Phool, translated into English as Blue Mimosa, is often described as an existential novel, an anti-war novel, or an early feminist work in Nepali literature. All three descriptions are useful, but each becomes limiting when treated as the whole of the book. Parijat takes questions about meaninglessness, isolation, guilt and freedom and places them inside a painfully human conflict: an aging former soldier hoping that a woman might give his life significance, and a woman who refuses to become anyone’s moral salvation.

Suyog Bir Singh drifts through post-war Kathmandu with little to sustain him beyond alcohol, memory and habit. He claims that drinking is merely a remnant of military life and rejects the comforting idea that suffering automatically makes a person wiser or better. The values that might once have anchored him -duty, honor, faith and social usefulness- have lost their authority, yet he has found nothing convincing to replace them. His life continues, but he cannot explain why it should.

The way he tries to rebuild a sense of self is revealing. Again and again, he looks toward women. Mujura represents the possibility of an orderly domestic life, although he does not appear to desire her as a person so much as the stability she might provide. Sakambari becomes something far more urgent. She is difficult, inaccessible and unimpressed by him, and this very resistance allows him to imagine her as a form of absolution. If a woman like Sakambari could love him, perhaps he could believe that he was no longer the man he had been during the war.

His wartime memories expose how compromised that hope is. Suyog recalls exploiting vulnerable women, raping an unconscious woman and deceiving Matinchi with promises he never intended to keep. When she tries to stop him from leaving, he becomes violent. These episodes show that women have repeatedly served as buffers between him and his fear of death, loneliness and inner emptiness. They provide relief, reassurance and bodily comfort, but he seldom considers the weight of their own lives.

To separate the present from the past, Suyog constructs a moral distinction that allows him to keep believing in himself. He tells himself that he could not love the women he raped and could not rape the woman he loved. The difference matters enormously to him because it suggests that love has transformed him. Parijat gradually dismantles that defence. When he seizes Sakambari and kisses her without consent, his desire gives way almost immediately to dizziness and shame. The act is not equivalent in scale to his wartime crimes, but it rests on the same assumption: that his feeling gives him the right to act upon a woman regardless of her will.

What Suyog calls love has not freed him from possession. It has merely made possession appear more dignified. His emotions may be sincere, but sincerity does not make them ethical. In fact, the depth of his feeling may be part of the danger. He has invested so much meaning in Sakambari that he begins to treat that meaning as something she ought to recognize.

Sakambari is the novel’s ideological centre, although the reader is never allowed into her consciousness. We encounter her only through Suyog’s obsessive gaze, her sharp remarks, her habits and her refusals. Her most memorable statement comes through the insect-killing orchid. She describes with unsettling pleasure how the plant attracts insects, traps them and allows them to suffocate, all in the service of its own security.

When Suyog turns the flower into a metaphor for human struggle, she mocks him for forcing philosophy onto nature. Yet she immediately does something similar herself. Her ideal flower buds for itself, opens for itself, resists the bee and falls by its own choice. From this image she develops a broader claim: love is not inevitable, suffering in love is not noble by necessity, and a person can exist without surrendering herself to another.

That refusal has real force. Sakambari rejects the assumption that a woman must find fulfillment through marriage, service or emotional sacrifice. She refuses to let male desire define the value of her life. Yet she is not a simple figure of liberation. Her treatment of Sanu exposes a limit in her understanding of freedom. Sanu defies her family and chooses love on her own terms, but Sakambari dismisses her as foolish. She appears to respect autonomy most when it leads to refusal, solitude or resistance. When another woman freely chooses attachment, her sympathy disappears.

Her smoking carries the same contradiction. Sakambari resents Suyog and Shiva Raj for their drinking, but she treats concern about her own habit as an intrusion. When Suyog asks whether she would stop smoking if he requested it, she says she would smoke ten cigarettes instead. The reply protects her bodily independence, but it also reveals how reactive that independence has become. If another person’s request automatically determines that she must do the opposite, then he continues to shape her behavior, only in reverse.

Sakambari is therefore not simply free. She is committed to remaining ungovernable. That distinction is important because genuine autonomy should allow a person to hear another’s concern without experiencing the act of listening as surrender. Sakambari’s independence often depends upon opposition, and the people she opposes remain central to the identity she is defending.

This tension is unlikely to be accidental. Sakambari seems to represent the necessary but incomplete power of refusal. She can reject love, marriage, pity, religion and interference, but she offers little sense of how autonomous people might live together without either possessing one another or withdrawing completely. Her philosophy is strongest at the boundary and weakest when it must account for relation.

The novel’s treatment of war is similarly caught between complexity and moral design. Parijat’s war passages are among the strongest parts of the book because they strip away the romantic image of the Gurkha soldier. War appears as hunger, disease, fear, hierarchy and bodily ruin. Men become instruments, valued only while they remain useful to institutions capable of abandoning them without hesitation.

Suyog is clearly shaped by this world. Military authority, colonial power, alcohol, masculine group culture and the constant presence of death all contribute to the person he becomes. The novel understands that morality does not develop in a vacuum. People are trained by their circumstances to accept certain forms of violence and ignore others.

That context does not absolve Suyog. He is both a victim of military power and a perpetrator who directs violence toward people more vulnerable than himself. This is one of the novel’s most valuable insights. Being humiliated by one hierarchy does not prevent a person from reproducing that hierarchy when he encounters someone over whom he has power.

Sakambari’s judgment of war is much more absolute. She condemns Suyog for being a soldier long before she knows what he actually did. When his wartime crimes are finally revealed, her earlier suspicion acquires the appearance of prophecy. Yet she was not responding to evidence; she was responding to a category. The novel quietly merges her assumption with the reader’s later knowledge.

This is where the book begins to feel less like an open inquiry and more like a carefully arranged prosecution. Parijat gives Suyog a reflective, philosophical mind, but also burdens him with enough moral corruption that the reader is naturally inclined to reject him. His ideas never have to be answered fully because the person expressing them has already been discredited. Sakambari, meanwhile, is granted moral authority without having her own motives or contradictions examined from within.

The strongest defence of this structure is that Parijat is exposing the limits of male introspection. Suyog can think deeply about death, alienation and meaning, yet still fail to recognize another person’s freedom. His intelligence does not save him from objectifying women. A simpler villain would have made the argument easier, but it would also have made it less disturbing. Suyog shows that a person can reflect endlessly and still remain trapped inside himself.

The difficulty is that Sakambari is not given an equally developed consciousness through which the argument might continue. Suyog carries most of the philosophical inquiry, while Sakambari becomes the resistance against which he is judged. His contradictions are unfolded through confession; hers remain scattered across gesture and behavior. Her silence protects her from Suyog’s interpretive possession, but it also protects her philosophy from scrutiny.

The title complicates this entire arrangement. The insect-killing orchid belongs closely to Sakambari’s worldview, but the shirish trees belong to neither character. They surround the house, mark the passing seasons and accompany Suyog’s movement from curiosity to obsession, violation and emptiness. Their blossoms appear when he first enters the household, fade with the seasons and return a year later.

Suyog envies the trees because they can blossom again. Nature repeats itself, while human beings accumulate memory and consequence. A new season cannot undo what he has done, nor can it restore the person Sakambari was before he entered her life.

Near the end, the flowers are described as falling “under compulsion.” The phrase quietly unsettles Sakambari’s claim that a flower falls by its own will. The shirish is bound to the branch, to weather, to time and to biological processes it did not choose. Nature does not enact the freedom Sakambari projects onto it.

Suyog projects just as much. The flowers become beauty, desire, jealousy, renewal and loss according to his changing emotional state. In the final pages, he imagines the bare branches accepting their emptiness. Yet the branches accept nothing. The feeling belongs to him. Nature becomes a surface onto which he writes what he cannot otherwise articulate.

This may be the novel’s most convincing existential insight. Suyog and Sakambari offer different responses to a world that provides no guaranteed meaning. He tries to find meaning through another person. She tries to create meaning entirely from within herself. The shirish trees validate neither. They blossom and fall without participating in human arguments about love, guilt, freedom or redemption.

The title therefore does more than decorate the novel. Had Parijat named the book after the insect-killing orchid, it would appear more narrowly concerned with female refusal and male intrusion. By naming it after the shirish flower, she places that conflict within a broader movement of recurrence, compulsion and natural indifference. The title gives the book philosophical space beyond its immediate moral design.

It also makes the novel’s achievement difficult to separate from its manipulation. Parijat’s arrangement is too precise to ignore. Suyog’s objectifying gaze, Sakambari’s hostility toward soldiers, the hidden wartime history, his belief that love has changed him, the forced kiss and Sakambari’s death all converge toward a conclusion that seems to have been present from the beginning.

For this reason, Shirishko Phool often resembles a thesis novel. It dismantles the mythology of the heroic Gurkha, exposes the way men use women to fill their internal voids, and gives serious force to a woman’s refusal. Its argument can feel heavily weighted because Suyog’s consciousness is opened until it becomes evidence, while Sakambari’s remains closed enough to retain symbolic authority.

Even so, the novel does not remain entirely under Parijat’s control. The orchid can suggest predatory isolation rather than freedom. Sanu’s elopement exposes the limits of Sakambari’s tolerance for another woman’s autonomy. Suyog’s horror after the kiss suggests that he is not simply identical to the man he was during the war, even if he has not escaped him. The shirish flowers continue without regard for any of them.

Perhaps this is why the novel survives its own engineering. Its symbols produce more friction than its moral structure can completely contain. Parijat guides the reader strongly toward condemning Suyog, but she cannot prevent us from questioning Sakambari. She presents refusal as strength, but cannot prevent the orchid from looking cruel. Nature gives the novel its widest philosophical horizon, while remaining indifferent to every philosophy imposed upon it.

Shirishko Phool is not a neutral investigation of existence, nor is it merely a feminist condemnation of one violent man. It is a carefully constructed novel about two damaged attempts to live without guaranteed meaning. Suyog tries to overcome emptiness through possession disguised as love. Sakambari tries to preserve herself through a freedom that sometimes becomes another form of captivity. Around them, the shirish blossoms, falls and returns. Human beings interpret, justify, desire and remember because they cannot avoid doing so, even when the world gives them no reason to believe that their meanings are true.

यहाँ कसले कसलाई खाएको छैन र?

नदीले पहाड,

पहाडले घाम,

घामले पानी,

पानीले माटो,

र माटोले जीवन।

फेरि

नदीले पहाड नखाए - बेँसी कसरी बन्थ्यो?

पहाडले घाम नखाए - शीतल ओत कसरी बन्थ्यो?

घामले पानी नखाए - बादलले तिर्खा कसरी मेट्थ्यो?

पानीले माटो नखाए - रसिलो कसरी हुन्थ्यो?

माटोले जीवन नखाए - नयाँ सृष्टि कसरी हुन्थ्यो?

अब भन-

म कसलाई खाऊँ? तिमी कसलाई खान्छौ?

खै, यो प्रकृतिमा-

को शिकार?

को शिकारी?

the 4 haiku (modern english haiku) form a set of haiku under title "Fatal Illusions"

i will appreciate any feedback. thank you

Flowers - colors blend

luring scents and bright petals

traps where many fall
/

A cuckoo observes

unwitting nest to lay eggs

parasite or curse
/

Stars look down on me

fragile, weak, impermanent -

death makes me equal
/

Untangled, unbound

emptiness - bliss or anguish

feelings still unheard
/

(I will greatly appreciate any feedback)
(It is a set of 4 haiku attempting to explore an overlapping arc)

मानसपटलको एउटा आदिम विप्लव,

तरङ्गहरूको आँधी-

अनियन्त्रित, दिग्भ्रमित,

अनन्त भवसागरको अगाध शून्यमा एक्लो।

भरोसाको त्यान्द्रो

शिशिरको चिसोले काठ्याङ्ग्रिसक्यो,

प्रेमको अभिलाषा केवल

मृगतृष्णामा विलीन।

सत्यको धरातलमा ओर्लिने आशाहरू-

अब जीर्ण।

स्वयंको परिचय धुँधलिएको,

अस्तित्वको मौन पलायन-

निःशब्द, निरलंकार,

समयले छोडेर गएको

एउटा भग्नावशेष मात्र यो शरीर।

यो शून्यताको अनुभूति-

कुनै महानिर्वाण वा सम्पूर्णता होइन,

ब्रह्माण्डकै गर्भमा सदा गुञ्जिरहने

व्याकुलताको प्रतिध्वनि।

आत्मबोधको अधुरो कथा।

(I will appreciate any feedback- both in style and meaning)

कोक्रोको च्या-च्या

डलरको छन-छनीमा बिलायो।

अँगालोको आभास

बिरानो बिछ्यौनासँगै चिसियो।

गिलास ठोक्ने हातहरू

बजारमा छ्यास-छ्यास्ती।

मोतिबिन्दु ग्रस्त आँखालाई

इन्द्रेणी छाउँछ धब्बासरि।

दाउरा दनकिँदा ताली मारामार,

गाग्री रित्तिँदा अम्खराको व्यापार।

लौराको सहारामा बढेको यात्रा,

जमिन खस्किन्छ, इतिहास जात्रा।

झुन्डबीच मिसिएको एक भेडा,

अनगिन्ती मार्ग, यता न उता।

कोक्रोको च्या-च्या

डलरको छन-छनीमा बिलायो।

अँगालोको आभास

बिरानो बिछ्यौनासँगै चिसियो।

गिलास ठोक्ने हातहरू

बजारमा छ्यास-छ्यास्ती।

मोतिबिन्दु ग्रस्त आँखालाई

इन्द्रेणी छाउँछ धब्बासरि।

दाउरा दनकिँदा ताली मारामार,

गाग्री रित्तिँदा अम्खराको व्यापार।

लौराको सहारामा बढेको यात्रा,

जमिन खस्किन्छ, इतिहास जात्रा।

झुन्डबीच मिसिएको एक भेडा,

अनगिन्ती मार्ग, यता न उता।