Radha Paudel’s Madan Puraskar-winning ‘Attack on Khalanga’ has been out for 13 years now. The English translation itself, ‘Jumla: A Nurse's Story’, is coming up on a decade of being on the shelves.

The book recounts Paudel’s experiences leading up to, during and after the Maoist attack on Khalanga, Jumla’s district headquarters. It is a record of the poverty- and misery-filled lives of the everyday people of Jumla. There are striking examples of this misery in the book. For example, in one part, Paudel offers a bar of soap to a lady washing herself by the river. The lady begins to bleed from her hands after she uses the soap, her skin not used to it.

The book is also about the Nepali Civil War. Paudel shares such extensive details of the Maoist attack on Khalanga that one can picture what it might have been like.

But along with these two popular ideas about what the story is about, there is another increasingly relevant one—that of migration in the author’s case but also generally of immigration.

It is through listening to her father’s stories of Jumla when she was a child that Paudel grows curious about the place. He often used to tell her, she writes, that she should return to Jumla as an adult to do what she can to help the people of the district. Paudel herself grew up in poverty, but whenever she brought it up as a child, her father used to tell her that they may be poor, but poorer still were the people of Jumla.

The author does well for herself. After completing an undergraduate nursing degree, she goes on to get her master’s in public health. And when all of her friends from nursing school move to the cities and sometimes abroad, like to the United Kingdom, Paudel moves to Jumla.

She recalls with much disdain how her friends who have moved to the UK would call her up and tell her to join them. They would tell her about all the facilities and opportunities awaiting her there, only if she would move. Multiple times in the book, Paudel shares the sentiment that there is no lack of nurses in the UK; if she does not go, someone else definitely will. Where there is a lack is in Jumla, and there, no one is willing to go. This is her reason for going. Jumla needs her; the United Kingdom does not.

At times, it feels to Paudel that not going to Jumla would almost be immoral. It would be a betrayal of the people there, for whom her services could be and are the difference between life and death. Her retelling of the death of a pregnant woman in her arms, just days after she arrives in Jumla, is a particularly jarring one.

The question then asked of the reader is what their duty is and to whom their duty is. As someone with the ability to help, to not help is simply wrong action—the way Paudel sees it.

In the middle of a civil war, with increasing Maoist activity around Jumla, Paudel’s friends, her siblings, her mother and even her father, who had sown the seed of Jumla in her mind, all plead with her not to go. When the Maoist attack on Khalanga does come, and Paudel’s employers come to airlift her out of the district. She leaves, but as she does, she laments for the Jumlis who have no safe place to which to flee.

Paudel comes back to Khalanga four weeks after the attack. When writing her book in 2013, she was still actively working for the betterment of the people of Jumla. She wins awards and recognition for her work; she manages to raise tens of lakhs and help thousands of families.

It is difficult not to feel hypocritical or greedy when reading ‘Jumla: A Nurse’s Story’. Here is a woman of such drive and education and courage, someone who could create a comfortable life for herself no matter where she went and what she did.

But she chooses to live with the poor and the downtrodden, to eat and sleep and live like them and with them, even when she could very well end up dead. Throughout my read of the book, I was in awe of Paudel’s sheer selflessness and sense of duty. It very rarely felt like she did anything for herself.

She has unshakeable resolve and an ability to work through the darkness of doubt and uncertainty. And in the wake of life’s rat race, in the race to secure your passport and then your acceptance to a foreign university, then your visa and finally your ticket away from Nepal, Paudel’s book is a discomforting yet necessary read that asks the reader to think about what they should do with their lives and why.

______________________

Jumla: A Nurse's Story

Author: Radha Paudel

Year: 2013 (in Nepali); English translation in 2017

Publisher: Nepalaya