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Speaking on the occasion of the prize distribution of the Baahrakhari short story competition on December 25, Prime Minister Sushila Karki spontaneously called upon the fiction writers to write short stories about her. There were many fiction writers and youths, including Gen Z leaders. Notably, there was a conspicuous absence of recognised faces of individuals who support the political parties, especially the Nepali Congress, the CPN-UML, the Nepali Communist Party and others who had considerable representation in the erstwhile parliament.

​What PM Karki said struck me for a number of reasons. Though she does not represent any major or even minor political party, she was brought forth by the conditions of Nepali history. “History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues,” said my favourite English poet, TS Eliot, while depicting a character in a famous poem titled “Gerontion”.

​Karki used the occasion to express her existential angst by brushing aside a speech written for her. She said, “Gen Z groups tell me each day to quit the government; we are enduring the harsh criticism of different political parties and their agencies. As a result, our position has become like that of a pendulum.” Furthermore, Karki, expressing both hope and fear at the same time, said we should all wish that Nepal would not have to face a situation like that in Bangladesh today. She asked literary writers to write short fiction about her and her team because she apparently saw their position as resembling characters in a short story. Ironically, stories about her and the government she leads, whose ultimate goal is to hold the election in a short time and leave, are inundating the media. She was asking to be depicted as a character in an existential fiction.

​The appeal elicited diverse responses from the audience that I encountered afterwards. Was PM Karki’s wish an expression of exhaustion or a perception of some imminent crisis? After some thought, I decided to view it as the expression of the first woman chief justice and prime minister in a system entirely dominated by men. It is the question of hegemony in the sense of Antonio Gramsci, the famous Italian thinker. Hegemony is also a common consensus, among other things, about a certain subject or opinion.

​What was probably at the heart of the massive abusive language used by some party statesmen and erstwhile government leaders about Karki and her government was that a woman prime minister is unfit for the job. It is a common experience to see events wrought out by history and characters created as a result. Karki is probably the first character in Nepali political history to be brought to the fore by the times and given the responsibility to lead the country. She had faced antagonism from politicians even in the past. Nepali Congress leader Sher Bahadur Deuba was at the forefront to call for her impeachment at that time, but thanks to the intervention of the Supreme Court, she won the case and served as a reputed CJ for a full term and made some important decisions.

​We should recall that Karki has written a book titled Nyaya (2018) chronicling her experience as the first woman chief justice (CJ) during critical moments in Nepal. The book is a testament to Nepal’s political transformations, judicial events and Karki’s visceral experiences of the metamorphoses. Sushila Karki is not a fiction writer, but a memoir is also a popular literary genre. The first democratically elected prime minister of Nepal, Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala, was a very good writer of short stories and memoirs. But he did not use short stories to express his political anxieties and inspiring moments. Instead, he chose to keep the genres apart. He famously said, “I am an anarchist in literature and a socialist in politics.” He faced some of the most crucial challenges in Nepali history. Koirala saw himself as a socialist. He addressed his aspirations in his political writings, memoirs and, what I strongly believe, his fictional works. Another prime minister who wrote stories was Lokendra Bahadur Chand.

​The reason she expressed her wish to be depicted as a character in short stories is that she feels she is caught in a difficult situation at the moment. Her empathy for fictional characters emanates from her understanding that they experience existential angst. This broad subject calls for discussions and elaborations. But depicting people holding government positions and politicians working on broader canvases has become a common subject.

Information about them abounds in today’s cyber-savvy world. We can see hundreds of such names. They are very well-known Western depictions in the Anglophone languages. Such works trigger diverse responses from the audience and generate questions. I cite just two here: Hilary Mantel’s Margaret Thatcher’s Assassination, which won the prestigious national award, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a political dystopian novel. My other favourite political fiction is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

​PM Karki’s empathy for fictional characters and her choice of short story as the medium that could depict her present position unveil her perception of the current situation, which can be addressed not through political antagonism and the transcendence of the limits of patience, but through open dialogues and the recognition of the creative moments that history has brought out of chaos and disruptions.

But that does not tell the entire story. Karki’s interim government’s responsibility of holding elections on March 5 is waiting in the corridor of history. Hopes and uncertainties stemming from the submission of closed lists of proportional representation by parties, mergers of parties to create new political forces and the SC’s pending decision on the reinstatement of the dissolved House will cumulatively author Karki’s story, if not the story writers. History will judge author Sushila Karki’s story.