Buddha's Orphans Author:Samrat Upadhyay Raja and Nilu are fated to fall in love. — They both have been abandoned—he through his mother’s suicide in the public pond, she through her mother’s constant escape into drink. He has grown up on the streets, she in a crumbling mansion. And yet, they find each other, again and again. First when they are children. Then when they are young l... more »overs. And finally after they both fear they have lost their marriage. But the events of the past, even those we are ignorant of, inevitably haunt the present. And Raja and Nilu’s story is not only their own.
Using Nepal’s political upheavals as a backdrop to demonstrate how we are irreparably connected to past and home, Buddha’s Orphans is an engrossing, unconventional love story, a seductive, transporting read, and further evidence that Samrat Upadhyay is one of our finest writers, thoroughly deserving of his acclaim as “the Buddhist Chekhov” and comparisons to Amitav Ghosh, William Trevor, and Jhumpa Lahiri.« less