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[REVIEW] “Fathers Aren’t Mountains: A Closer Look at Buddhisagar’s Karnali Blues” by Abhinav Tulachan

Buddhisagar (author), Michael Hutt (translator). Karnali Blues, Penguin Random House, 2022. 422 pgs.

What role does a father serve in a story centred around boyhood?

More often than not, this question can be answered simply by saying that a father is a “foundational model” through whom the growing son comes to define himself, as conventional narratives have portrayed this figure time and again.

The father is someone who inspires awe. He commands respect and establishes the rules by which the boy learns how, and how not, to navigate the adult world. Often, a father serves as a blueprint against which sons measure themselves, rebel, or, in some cases, desperately seek to emulate. That much is already well known.

But I believe there is a more nuanced and thought-provoking question to consider: What happens when we strip away the grandiosity of this dynamic?

Buddhisagar’s Karnali Blues offers readers that very answer, or at the very least, the answer I inferred from the story, as there are various lessons to be drawn from this tale. The novel, translated with scrupulous care by Michael Hutt, is presented through the eyes of Birsha Bahadur, a young boy growing up in rural Nepal who travels with his family from place to place in an effort to sustain their lives. In the process, they encounter a succession of hardships that threaten the very life they are striving to preserve.

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There is a lifelike quality to Buddhisagar’s writing that allows us to see a land confronting hardships far removed from the illusory luxury presented by the capital. This is far-western Nepal, a place far, far removed from Kathmandu’s glow, separated from it by terrain and roads that, to this day, remain poorly defined. It is a world not yet fully touched by modernity within a country that is itself still developing.

This isolation is best conveyed through the author’s descriptive writing. The distance of each journey can be felt, as travelling from one town to another takes days. The tracks are so muddy and so steep that vehicles simply cannot manage them, requiring travellers to hire porters to carry their luggage from one place to another. Even moments spent resting in the woods, far from any sign of civilisation, convey just how isolated these towns are from the rest of the world. Even without having lived in, or experienced, such places, Buddhisagar’s descriptions allow the reader to feel, or at the very least to envision more clearly, how life in this landscape operates.

And it is precisely this lack of definition that Buddhisagar exploits, or rather, elevates to devastating effect in developing one of the novel’s central themes: its representation of fathers. For if the roads are undefined, then so too are the roles. And what is a father, after all, if not a kind of road?

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I particularly enjoyed reading about Birsha’s relationship with his father. During childhood, you grow up beneath the towering figure of your father, seeing him as an impassable mountain that seems impossible to overcome. Birsha views his own father through this same lens of mythic infallibility.

This perception is strongly reinforced by his father’s behaviour. Harsha Bahadur is my favourite character in the story because of what he ultimately comes to represent. He is the primary, and indeed sole, breadwinner for his family of four as they move from town to town. He runs a once-prominent but now-failing medical clinic whose fortunes gradually deteriorate with each place they pass through, yet he continues to struggle onwards for the sake of his family.

He is stern, strict, and quick to admonish, but above all, he is a father who dearly loves his son, even when that love becomes a flaw. He will become visibly upset and scold his son for slacking off and failing his examinations, yet he will personally visit the school to ask the principal to promote him to the next grade. He will stubbornly refuse to buy his son the expensive things he desires, such as a bicycle, a Walkman, or a brand-new pair of shoes, only to return from his next trip with those very items in hand. It is these contradictions that I found so endearing about Harsha Bahadur. His strictness never quite manages to overpower his tenderness, which is perhaps why, regardless of how unyielding his father may seem, young Birsha always arrives at the same conclusion at the end of each chapter: “My father is the greatest person.”

This is where Buddhisagar’s writing becomes particularly perceptive, and what truly caught my attention during my initial reading. A lesser novel might have allowed the father to remain the idealised and capable figure the child believes him to be, that immovable mountain carrying the entire family upon his back. Buddhisagar instead begins, piece by piece, to dismantle that mountain and show the reader what lies beneath it. Once those pieces have fallen away, we see that fathers, of course, are not mountains.

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As much as I like Harsha’s character, I came to admit, after considerable deliberation, that he is not without flaws. Regardless of his intentions, Harsha makes many poor decisions throughout the story that drive a wedge between him and his family. His ventures do not always succeed. He struggles to provide for his family, moves them from one place to another, and repeatedly attempts to construct some semblance of stability within a life that he does not realise is already falling apart before his eyes. Yet he stubbornly refuses to acknowledge this and continues moving forwards.

It becomes devastating to watch Birsha discover this for himself. The father he once perceived as someone who could simply make things happen is gradually revealed to be someone who has merely been trying his best to prevent everything from falling apart.

Perhaps that is the more honest definition of fatherhood at which Karnali Blues eventually arrives.

Perhaps fathers only look like mountains when you are small enough to stand beneath them. A father is not necessarily the person who knows where the road leads.

Sometimes he is simply the person willing to walk it first.

Harsha is constantly looking ahead, searching for the next place where his family might survive. He continually tries to keep pace with circumstances that are forever changing, spiralling faster and further beyond his ability to adapt to them, let alone repair the damage they cause. Yet no matter how sturdy the father may appear, no matter how long he walks or how determinedly he continues to guide his son along that road, roads, like fathers, deteriorate. This becomes the lesson Birsha himself must eventually learn. He has to forge his own path by leaving for a better life in Kathmandu.

Such are the harsh realities Buddhisagar depicts in the harsher regions of western Nepal, and this is what makes the novel’s treatment of fatherhood far more moving than the familiar story of a son attempting to surpass or rebel against his father. Birsha spends the novel learning to see his father for what he actually is, and that understanding becomes more profound than the distance of any journey could convey.

At the beginning, Birsha assumes that his father knows the way and will continue to guide them. By the end, he understands that even his father never truly knew where the road led, but continued to lead for the sake of his family. There was only a man walking ahead of him, doing what he could, taking one uncertain road after another, and making the journey feel safe simply by being there.

That is a far less grand version of fatherhood.

It is also, I suspect, a far truer one.

^{How to cite: Tulachan, Abhinav. “Fathers Aren’t Mountains: A Closer Look at Buddhisagar’s Karnali Blues.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 7 Sept. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/09/07/karnali-blues.}

Abhinav Tulachan is an undergraduate student in the Department of English Language and Literature at Hong Kong Baptist University. He loves reading, writing, and sharing the knowledge he has gained through his academic journey. [All contributions by Abhinav Tulachan.]