The King's Harvest by Chetan Raj Shrestha offers two captivating novellas. The first one, An Open & Shut Case, takes place in a village in Sikkim where Kamala ruthlessly murders her husband Puran, a police constable, and hacks him into forty-seven pieces. She then walks to the nearby police station along with her daughters and surrenders. It looks like a clear open and shut case but it’s actually not as straight-forward as it seems.

Caught in Kamala’s story is also the famous Nepali song: Resham Firiri. The story was initially called A Song and Two Years and this song was always central to it. “It became the thread on which the ornaments of the story – incident, subplots, characters – were strung,” says Shrestha. “If the story succeeds, it's because the song itself has many facets. It has the tune of a cheerful lament.”

In the second novella, The King’s Harvest, a man named Totem emerges from thirty-two years of self-imposed isolation and embarks on a journey across endless rain, leech-infested forests and forbidding valleys to meet his king in Gangtok. So far Kaila Sardar has been the only person who visited to collect the king’s share of harvest, but he’s gone missing for three years now. The crops have started to rot and now it’s up to Totem. But when he reaches the kingdom he’s shocked to see how much has changed during his long exile.

These two novellas are united by their strong sense of place and open a wide spectrum of humanity between the rural and the urban, the isolated and the abundant. It also tells us interesting things – like how cleansing is forbidden when attacked by leeches, for a wiped-out leech is bound to be replaced by a hungry one.

The King’s Harvest won the Tata Literature Live! First Book Award in 2013. It was also shortlisted for the Shakti Bhatt prize.

Published in 2013.