Trekking to Ghandruk, a friend once cried, "Look at all these fields, think of the work put into cultivating them. So much suffering! I don't like villages at all!" This was not a typical response to the breathtaking vista before us; but then my friend was not a typical tourist to Ghandruk, which is, let us face it, the Thamel of the hills. She was born in a village in Nepal, and had grown up doing the backbreaking work of fetching water, collecting dung, gathering firewood, weeding the fields, and performing the other chores that make life in the village so arduous. She could not look beyond the hardship of rural life to appreciate the beauty of the land.

Tirtha Shrestha brings to his poems a similar recognition of the harshness of rural life. He writes not just of poverty, but of the dreams, desires, aspirations of those who live in Nepal's villages and small towns. But though he cannot ignore the suffering of people, he does acknowledge the splendour of the land as well. There is a fine interplay of romance and social criticism in his best poems.

The first poem below is an astute observation of adolescent girls, a more sensitive portrayal than many of our women poets make.

TIME AND THE HILL
The girls who cut grass
were cutting grass
and cutting down others in their talk
They didn't realise
as they cut grass
as they cut down others
they were cutting through adoles cence

Reaching the top of the hill
they stopped cutting grass
stopped cutting down others
gathered a few stones
and fixed their time
which had petrified like stone
They made offerings to it
they prayed to it

Their efforts to stop time
stood at the top of the hill
accepting prayers
Time flew like clouds
with the hill

The next poem presents a portrait of Sindhupalchok district in the form of a menacing image.

SINDHUPALCHOK
A corrugated tin roof
is decked above
the corpses of flowers
and the new moon's night
is smiling

The sorrow of lost innocence
becomes an agreeable song
and sounds a monsoon melody
on the corrugated tin roof
The cracked mask of
the festival of bhai-teeka
rocks back and forth
waving the branches of laughter
To one side the moon
covers its face with a shawl
and weeps

A resident of Pokhara, Shrestha has written unsentimentally about his home in the next poem, below.

KASKI
Machhapuchhre himal
won't finish from getting sold
The Phewa lake won't empty because of lines and hooks
No matter how well
the gandharba singers sing
Pokhara doesn't know how to sing
Pokhara doesn't know how to smile

The moons don't revel in cloaking themselves in
the half portion of adolescence gone abroad
Unfulfilled youthfulness
bends into the crevasse of the Seti river
and sings an off-tune song
Itinerant vendors
look for their own lives
in the thick pockets of the white skinned

In the final poem below, Shresth returns to the theme of women, theme that he writes about with an empathy rarely witnessed in today's male writers and poets.

THE WOMEN AT THE WATER TAP
The women at the water tap
are more frolicsome than water
their lips move more rapidly
than the liquid lips
of water

The women at the water tap
fill their jugs singing
songs of dissatisfaction
Sometimes they become
more licentious than
the crests and ripples of water
Sometimes they appear
more peaceable than a pool

The women at the water tap
are most of all like water
They mostly spend their time
murmuring like water

These poems are translated from Shrestha's 2001 collection, Jindagiko Kurukshetrabaata