The news of Prema Shah’s sudden demise in Utah, America on December 21, 2017, at the age of 75, deeply shocked me. A favourite writer, good friend and contemporary, I always considered her as a great symbol of integrity, creative strength, peace and dignity. She was first and foremost a courageous writer who boldly presented a woman’s persona and pride, body and mind in her writings. Prema was quiet but not a loner. She, like everyone else, went through the rigmarole of life, but she lived her life in the way she wanted. Prema Shah, like Parijat, wrote at a time when Nepali literary writers were making modernist experiments. Were it not for the fact that Prema Shah, Parijat, a poet and fiction writer, Kundan Sharma, a poet and activist of her time, were writing actively, that period would have been entirely dominated by male writers. Kundan Sharma, based in Delhi, is still writing. Though the volume of Prema’s poems is small compared to Parijat’s poems compiled in Parijatka Kavita (1987), and Kundan Sharma’s two volumes of poems, the latest being Mera Kavitaharu (1988), Prema Shah wrote some poems that became very famous in the 70s. 

Though this short piece is devoted to her swan song, Ek tukra gham, mention must be made of one very interesting phenomenon that Parijat and Prema Shah shared in their fictional writings. In Parijat’s magnum opus, the novel Shirishko phul translated as “blue mimosa”, the protagonist Sakambari is physically very frail. She is loved by men despite her physical state, and also succumbs to the gesture of love. Prema Shah’s protagonist in her magnum opus, her story entitled “yellow rose”, is a TB patient who is naturally frail and hospitalised. She is physically loved and cared by her husband whose behaviour is depicted as a love predator. That these oeuvres were published in 1965 and 1966 respectively, speaks volumes about the consciousness. Prema has written several stories on various relational themes.  

The poem Ek tukra gham or ‘a chunk of sun’ published in ‘Kantipur’ daily’s supplement Koseli (March 18, 2017) was a delightful surprise. That was the first piece of Prema’s new creative writing I had read in decades. My first response naturally was one of excitement. To confirm the date when it was written, I phoned the editor of the supplement and became overwhelmed when he told me she had written the poem recently. I didn’t know where she was at that time, but the poem, as she says in the title, was indeed a piece of sun that had fallen out of her sky, out of the blue, as it were. To me, that poem was a minuscule hurricane that had made a landfall in Kathmandu. Prema captured it not as a pervasive static sun, but as a restless cosmic phenomenon that the writer had experienced closely. The sun was her life, her experiments with beauty, honesty and love, trust and betrayal. What a great piece of sun captured in her powerful poetic text! 

I mostly published literary criticism—all of which are published in book forms by the Sajha publication—when Prema and I were students in Kirtipur at the central departments of Nepali and English respectively, around 1968. Prema was already a well-established writer when she joined the MA class. One day after the classes as we walked across the field to Pulchowk after crossing a suspension bridge near Bagbani 

Kendra, Prema said, “Today, Taraprasad Joshi discussed my stories in the class. I felt a little shy when he was talking as though I was not present there”. Joshi was the pioneer of the Nepali MA department. He taught the classic Nepali writers but when it came to the contemporary times, he discussed our works in the class too. That was an exciting period for us. Prema found it too difficult to take the crowded bus that ferried us across the town. She had come up with this brilliant idea of walking across to Pulchowk to her house from where I could easily take a bus to Ratnapark. 

With a twinge of regret for not having written a lengthy criticism about this almost ignored writer when she was alive, I quote some lines from my writing about her swan 

song. She must have read my short discussion about her poem through social media. Referring to the poem, I wrote the following words in what appears to be the last critical observation of her writing by a Nepali literary critic, in an essay published in ‘Kantipur’ (June 8, 2017), the gist of which goes as below.  

Each line of the poem that gives the picture of life in our times thrills me. It says—”What a cruel sun/ Carrying snow all twelve months/ The refrigerator and table/ Never become empty/ The oven that never cools down/ Pocketful of business/ This wretched sun”. The wretched sun that hides behind the plenty of the mundane life is the zero moment experienced after all is gone.” The worldly realism of the sun, the atmosphere of the house and the sun that loosens upon the private life of the individual is indeed a chunk of time that captures the widening reality. This poem on the whole weaves time, space and aesthetic sensibility in one place; it is so subtle that the readers begin to interact with it without being aware of that process. I want to cite some more lines from the poem: 

“A chunk of sun/ In a land where gold blossoms/ Bud like sun you fear to touch/ A thin sun that spreads around/ Sun that vanishes/ When you chase it/ Sun prevails over me/ Like musk smell/ But when I try to smell it/ The sun darts away like musk deer,/ Hit by cold in body and mind/ I try to gather the sun to me/ Out from the veranda…./ The sun is more expensive/ Than a piece of bread!/ A chunk of sun/ Waiting to fill the palm/ A piece of sun/ Slipping out incessantly/ Carrying the selfsame life,/ Dishonest sun!” 

Prema’s sun, the fleeting musk deer, is our precious memory of her now.