Abandoned at Old Age: Aging in Contemporary Nepali Short Fiction

Abstract

Contemporary Nepali short fiction has depicted the plight of the people left at home in their old age when the children seek a better life and settlement in the first world. Such people suffer in silence and perpetually wait for their children to return and embrace them. As the national boundaries have not been able to keep people within them, the family has faced the most critical challenges of our time. It has failed to serve the usual expectations as a social institution. The root cause of such abandonment lies in the crises of family. Mandira Madhushree’s “Ambako Bot” [The Guava Tree] (2017), Neelam Karki’s “Parkhai” [The Wait] (2019), and Bina Theeng’s “Aayam” [A Dimension] (2020) picture the people abandoned at their old age: they lead a solitary life in the most critical phase of their life. This paper reads the stories in the contemporary contexts of Nepal in particular and South Asia in general as the developing world has similar kinds of problems. Since the study is built on the assumption that the study of creative texts helps understand the course of action that society has prepared for itself, this paper attempts to examine the content of the elderly self as presented in the selected Nepali short fiction.