In 1859, while Jung Bahadur Rana was busy counting the loot his soldiers had usurped from Lucknow after helping the British crush the Sepoy Mutiny, Charles Dickens had published a novel about a revolution that devoured everything around it, including itself. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” it began, describing an aristocracy so deaf to hunger that a nobleman could run over a child with his carriage and pay him a coin. Paris burned for this. A year since Kathmandu was aflame, that line describes us better than anything written since.

One clear anxiety-pumping point is: is our version of urban spring at risk of devouring itself? We are free, wow, hurray, but now we have to make choices, and difficult ones.

Nepal’s deadliest unrest since the fall of the monarchy broke out in the second week of September. A government committee later put the toll at 77 dead and physical losses at Rs84.45 billion, nearly $586 million. The Parliament was torched to the ground, the Supreme Court was uprooted, and close to 934,000 case files a year in the making were burnt. Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli resigned and left under army guard. Sushila Karki, a former chief justice, became Nepal’s first woman prime minister with a widely publicised Discord voting, albeit interim, keeping the country together until an election almost no one believed would take place on time.

It did. On March 5, the Rastriya Swatantra Party, spearheaded by former Kathmandu mayor Balendra Shah, created a political tsunami, winning 182 of 275 seats. Three weeks later, at an astrologically chosen minute, Nepal’s youngest prime minister took his oath.

The government looked quite on track; the old elites of political theatre were gone. Poof! Dream come true, right? The Westerners would call it a glorious moment in 10-11,000 generations of Homo Sapiens.

As we scroll through never-ending reels and shorts from the Parliament, this is the part of the story we enjoy telling. The harder part is what it did to us in between and what it is doing to us now.

For years, the most honest ambition available to a young Nepali was to leave, run. My own research in labour migration found that people don’t cross borders for wages alone; they leave because home has stopped providing a sense of future, status, mobility and a feeling of being someone. Gen Z-ers briefly reversed that arrow. For a few weeks, ‘Desh ta banaunu parchha,’ (we have to build this nation) sounded less like a slogan than a blueprint. That confused, half-formed urge to stay and build rather than queue for a visa might be the one entirely good thing to come out of last year.

The rest gets a little tricky. The movement was very clear about what it hated—corruption, nepotism, censorship; much less about what should take their place. Some wanted the constitution to be enforced. Some wanted an executive directly elected. Some were for the king. Orwell had warned that political language is designed to make lies sound truthful; Nepal’s problem was closer to the opposite, a language honest about its rage and thin on its plan. Camus penned a name for that kind of revolt: the rebel who says no without saying what he is saying yes to. Nepal in September was a magnificent ‘no’, still awaiting its ‘yes’.

The institutional cost was not abstract. Nepal's National Human Rights Commission, in a report submitted this May, termed the September 9 arson an act of organised crime and named the then prime minister, home minister and information minister as violators. The Supreme Court is still authenticating recovered files by hand. A movement demanding accountability from institutions ended up needing a fire brigade for the one meant to deliver it. Kafka spent a career describing bureaucracies that quietly devour the people trying to reform them; Nepal spent a September finding what happens when you skip the bureaucracy and go straight to the fire.

Which brings us to the test everyone predicted, and nobody wanted: can the swag survive the over-inflated expectations? So how are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns looking with almost five months in with a ‘cool’ government?

First, the unglamorous cleavage. The government sacked 1,594 political appointees from 110 bodies in a single sweep, only to face its own nepotism complaints when a minister was recalled over his wife’s appointment to a health board. Riverside squatters were cleared with little rehabilitation behind. Fuel shocks and local strain brought gas queues and price hikes to a private sector still nursing unrest-related losses; investment decisions remain frozen, by the government’s own admission.

The PM was immature even by the standards of sympathetic accounts— walking out of Parliament mid-policy address, sending a colleague to field questions he owed the House himself, and keeping foreign envoys at arm’s length for months. Religious intolerance, dormant for years, has resurfaced in the Tarai; a reminder that old fault lines never closed.

Now for the fairer forte. This is still a government elected, not installed; a real change from the sluggish, vaguely aristocratic manner of potbellied leaders it replaced. The man at the helm has not had any serious corruption charge stick, and is trying to get the old-style production going. After the walkout, attendance was steadier, and a pledge was made to reply directly to the House. The diplomatic freeze melted into a balanced round of meetings with India, China and the US, treating old partners as equals, rather than choices. The swagger that the old guard sneered at is still a genuine relief for many young Nepalis, proof that power need not look bored with those it serves. That faith howls at every gas line, every question dismissed, but it remains unshaken. Yet, visibly, people want to believe, with never-ending exercise of hope.

The best part this year can take solo credit for is making a younger generation hopeful. We can simply choose to believe that we have passed that Sophistrian illusion to India as well; an exporting nation at last—yay!

There is a contested story about F Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby: that he saw the cover art, a pair of haunting eyes over a fairground, before the novel was finished and wrote passages to make the book earn the cover it already had. Nepal’s new politics does the trick in reverse. First came the look, then the sneakers, then the memes, then a country that finally got its own joke and now awaits to see whether Balen’s government will deserve that image and not just look like it.

Whether it can be the only question will matter in a year. Dickens closed his novel on a scaffold, with a curious, dogged hope that something better was rising from the ashes of Paris. Nepal doesn’t need a scaffold. It needs its politicians, old and new, to remember that the people who put them there are still betting on hope and a shared future. That’s a good bet. It’s not going to last forever.

And yet, what a year these five months have been! Maybe if Jung Bahadur Rana were literate and alive, he would agree with Dickens, wouldn’t he? Revolutions can truly devour themselves from within. Since we are on a roll, I would call it a ‘freevolution.’ Hope I am right, unlike in old times.