Rose’s Odyssey:Tales of Love and Loss is a translation of ‘Gulafsangako Prem1’, a short story collection in Nepali by Sangita Swechcha. Jayant Sharma, the translator, has displayed his incredible skill transmitting the essence and the texture in his translation as they are in the original version.
Swechcha’s writing moves across geographies and emotional landscapes. In Rose’sOdyssey, we see the influence of her own journey: born and raised in Nepal, her time spent in Australia, and her life in the UK. Her experience of multiple cultures gives her work both depth and relatability. She writes not just as a woman, or a feminist, or a diasporic voice, but as a humanist. Her stories resonate because they are grounded in truth and told with generosity.
Several reviewers on Amazon have echoed the sentiments generated by the stories. Dr. Tamer Mikhail describes the experience as “mesmerising,” noting how vividly the characters come to life. Ketan Varia praises Swechcha’s exploration of how life unfolds and the unintended consequences of human choices, while Nirmala Karanjeet highlights the wit, humour, and deep perception of human emotions in every story. These voices of readers moved by the same qualities.
Among the twenty stories, a few stood out with particular force. The titular story, ‘Rose’s Odyssey’, reminded me in scope and ambition of Homer’s Odyssey. Yet this is no imitation. Swechcha’s tale of love, betrayal, vengeance, and repentance transcends a simple love story. It is a story within stories, a tapestry woven with dramatic shifts and psychological insight.
Another memorable piece is the final story, presented in diary format. The narrative offers a poignant glimpse into diasporic life, told in a male voice, which is an unusual and ambitious choice for a female writer. The story’s ability to inhabit male psychology with such authenticity is no small achievement.
The shortest story, ‘Ram Maya’, dealing with the issue of human trafficking, is devastating. In just a few pages, it trembles with urgency. Then there is ‘Shattered Dream’, a story I had previously read in its original Nepali and was eager to revisit in English. The translation, no easy feat, is executed beautifully, preserving cultural nuances while making the narrative accessible to a broader audience. In fact, I was reminded of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), particularly in how Sweccha addresses themes of bodily autonomy, survival, and the commodification of womanhood.
What ties all these stories together is Swechcha’s ability to write about complex emotional terrain with elegance and restraint. Each story is deeply personal, yet universal. The immigrant experience, cultural duality, gender, longing, and resilience are all present without ever feeling heavy-handed. It is heartening to see readers on Amazon responding so positively. One reviewer calls it “an easy and interesting read,” while another from Holistic World notes how each tale is “captivating and alluring,” connected by “the thread of love.” This feedback is not only encouraging, it also affirms the book’s power to reach readers from all walks of life.
In addition to the warm reader responses and literary features, I also recall Shahd Mahanvi, author of White Shoes, at the launch event aptly described Rose’s Odyssey as “a powerful exploration of human emotions.” She added that it is “a compelling collection that delves into themes of control, mistrust, the impulse to hurt those we love, and the complex intersections of human relationships, provoking deep reflection.”
In the year since its release, Rose’s Odyssey has had a successful run, from warm reader responses to literary features, several book signings in the UK and Nepal, and community events. Its journey is far from over. The success of the book is not just a testament to Swechcha’s literary talent, but to her ability to connect across continents, cultures, and hearts.
Dr. Rupak Shrestha, a London-based Nepali poet from Pokhara, is acclaimed for diverse literary forms and translation. He also serves as Advisor to the International Nepali Literary Society (INLS) UK Chapter.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL.
Title: The Cave of Echoes: Stories about Gods, Animals and Other Strangers
Author: Wendy Doniger
Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
It is impossible to define a myth, but it is cowardly not to try. For me, the best way to not-define a myth is to look at it in action, which is what have tried to do throughout this book: to see what myth does, rather than what myth is. It seems to me that by the time you’ve defined your terms in an argument, you’ve lost interest in the problem. But at this point, as we begin to reexamine our own assumptions about myths, it might be useful to list some things that I think myths are not: myths are not lies, or false statements to be contrasted with truth or reality. 1bis usage is, perhaps, the most common meaning of myth in casual parlance today. Indeed, other cultures, too, call myths lies. The Malagasy end the recitation of any myth with a traditional tag-line: “It is not I that lie; this lie comes from olden times.” In our culture, in particular, myths are often given the shadowy status of what has been called an “inoperative truth,” when in fact they might better be characterized as operative fictions. Picasso called art a lie that tells the truth, and the same might be said of myths.
What a Myth Is and Is Not
The desecration of the word “myth” to mean “lie” began with Plato, who contrasted the fabricated myth with the true history. It is, I think, an irony that our word for myth in most European languages, together with our basic attitude to myths, comes from ancient Greece, one of the very few cultures in the world from which we have almost no example of real, live myths, of myths as a part of a vital tradition; by the time most of the Greek myths reach us, they have been so thoroughly reworked in artistic and philosophical forms that they are mythological zombies, the walking dead. Plato was, as Eliade pointed out long ago, the first great demythologizer; he “deconstructed” the myths of Homer and Hesiod. It was Plato who challenged, successfully, the status of the poetic myth-carvers and myth collectors and banished them from his Republic. We can see in Plato a spectrum of mythmakers: at one end are anonymous wet nurses, who transmit the old myths to helpless infants; at the other end are the poets, like Hesiod and Homer, the “mimetic clan” who cannot imitate the true forms since no one has ever seen the forms and the poets can only imitate what they have seen.
Plato warns us that we must not tell these poetic myths about the gods even if they are true; in this, I think, he affirms the power of myths to influence human life; for he fears that a bad myth will make a bad life. (We shall see, in chapter 6, other Greek arguments against the evil effects of the myths in Greek tragedies.) Moreover, it is hard to escape from this image of the bad life; the stories that we learn in childhood have a marvelous hold on our memory.
Yet it is necessary for people to believe in good myths, even if they are false; this is the argument that Plato advances for the “noble lie” (gennaion pseudos) in the Republic, the statement that distorts an outside surface in order to convey an inner truth. Some of these good myths come from the old days; Plato distrusts this sort of “mythologizing,” the stories about centaurs and Chimaeras and Pegasus and so forth, but he distrusts even more the people who analyze them away as metaphors for the North Wind and so forth ( anticipating Friedrich Max Miller by some twenty-four hundred years); such analyses are altogether too clever and waste an awful lot of time. 13 People do have to have myths, Plato concedes; if they don’t believe in the old ones, we must construct new ones for them, logically, and this is very difficult to do, for we must convince them, in the cold light of reason, of the truth of the myths in order to make them accept the laws that we wish to give them:
“How can one assert in cold blood that the gods exist? Because we must hate and find unbearable those who, today as in the past, due to having refused to allow themselves to be convinced by the myths related to them since earliest childhood by a mother or a nurse giving them the breast, have obliged us, and still do so, to develop the arguments which take up our time now.”
For this reason, despite his opposition to myths and mythmakers, Plato himself was also a great “remythologizer” who invented the drama of the philosophical soul and made it a new kind of myth, a reasonable, logical, “likely” myth, to challenge the old myths of centaurs and so forth. In this way, when it came to myth, Plato managed to hunt with the hounds and to run with the hare. As Marcel Detienne has put it: “Plato’s work marks the time when philosophy, while censuring tales of the ancients as scandalous fictions, sets about telling its own myths in a discourse on the soul, on the origin of the world, and on life in the hereafter.” It was Plato who transformed ancient mythic themes to make the myth of Er, the myth of Eros, and the myth of the creation of the universe. Though Plato’s “likely or resembling story” can be a myth in the sense of a narrative ( and in that sense is interchangeable with logos meaning “narrative”), it is not a myth in the negative sense of a bad copy, like the myths of Homer ( which are negatively contrasted with logos meaning “reason”).
Yet Plato does apply the word “myth” ( mutbos) to the story of the world that he creates in the Pbaedo, a myth that he says is “worth hearing,” though it is merely another “likely story”:
“Now, to assert vehemently that things like this are really so as I’ve narrated them, doesn’t befit any man of sense. But that this is so, or something pretty much like it, about our souls and their dwelling place, since it is clear that the soul is immortal-it is quite fitting that we say that. “
The likely story is not the truth; but it resembles the truth, and is as close as we can ever get to the truth about certain subjects. Plato confesses that he resorts to telling myths, despite the fact that such stories are not literally true, because there is no other way of using words to produce even the effect of truth.
Plato regards the myth that he constructs in the Pbaedo as an essential vehicle for salvation, a kind of religious or magic charm:
“It is well worth running the risk that these things are so for anybody who thinks them so. (For it’s a fair risk.) And he must recite these things over and over to himself like a magic charm, even as I at this moment and for a long time past have been drawing out this myth.”
Plato ends the Republic with his own myth, the myth of Er, which he certainly does not regard as a lie: “And so the myth was saved and was not lost, and it will save us, if we believe it, and we shall safely cross the river of Lethe and we will not sully the soul. “
For Plato admits that a myth says something that cannot be said in any other way, that cannot be translated into a logical or even a metaphysical statement. A myth says something that can only be said in a story.
Which brings me to what I think a myth is. Let me begin with a rather cumbersome and rather functional definition: A myth is a story that is sacred to and shared by a group of people who find their most important meanings in it; it is a story believed to have been composed in the past about an event in the past, or, more rarely, in the future, an event that continues to have meaning in the present because it is remembered; it is a story that is part of a larger group of stories.
The assertion that a myth is a story is basic to my argument; for I think that the myth is persuasive to us because the action itself is persuasive. Even when what happens in the myth is not physically possible in this world ( as when, for instance, a man turns into a fish), when the event is described in detail, as something that happened, we can see it happening, and so it enlarges our sense of what might be possible. Only a story can do this.
About the Book
The Cave of Echoes celebrates the universal art of storytelling, and the rich diversity of the stories—especially myths—that people live by. Drawing on Hindu and Greek mythology, Biblical parables, and the modern mythologies of Woody Allen and soap operas, Wendy Doniger—renowned scholar of the history of religions—encourages us to feel anew the force of myth and tradition in our lives, and in the lives of other cultures. She shows how the stories of mythology—whether of gods, sages, demons or humans—enable cultures to define themselves. She raises critical questions about how myths are interpreted and adapted, and the ways in which different cultures make use of central texts and traditions. Drawing connections across time and place, she proposes that myths are not static beliefs but evolving narratives, and that by entering into other cultures’ stories, we may unexpectedly rediscover our own.
Written with scholarly depth and characteristic wit, this is a landmark work in the comparative study of mythology. It’s essential reading for anyone interested in how we understand others—and ourselves—through the stories we tell.
About the Author
Wendy Doniger is the author of several acclaimed and bestselling works, among them, The Hindus: An Alternative History; Hindu Myths; The Ring of Truth; Women, Androgynes and Other Mythical Beasts; Dreams, Illusion and Other Realities; Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares; An American Girl in India; and translations of the Rig Veda and the Kamasutra (with Sudhir Kakar). She is Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of the History of Religions at theUniversity of Chicago, and has also taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and the University of California, Berkeley.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
A daily commute or a long-distance one, humans undertake movements that affirm the principle of belief. Belief in certain ideals.
The pull of a dream!
Kinesis is the fundamental science of change; it is the force behind the evolution of species.
You want to grow wings — and soar!
Migrations.
Birds and animals do the challenging migrations across geographies and climates –for survival.
JoF involves love. For the dear ones!
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Embark on the journey of LOVE. It takes you from yourself to yourself.
—Rumi
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Indeed! It is a similar terrain with similar topography yet varied.
And when love calls, nothing stopping the voyager.
Faith becomes the compass.
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Similarly, we began a travel across continents, deserts and sea, mountains and plains, stalked by an invisible and silent killer.
Homer could be heard in a recess of the mind:
The roaring seas and many a dark range of mountains lie between us.
Travel in the Time of Covid!
From Mumbai to Toronto via Maldives — a journey of five days.
And Love and Faith are our guiding angels.
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Exit
September 8, 2021
Kalyan
12.30 pm
It is raining hard. Suitcases are all piled up. The taxi is waiting. Few friends have come to bid us a quick goodbye.
Brief but final.
We spent months together to dismantle a secure life for the “unfamiliar”. You feel nothing. Just a quick bye — a last lingering glance.
It is over– 30 years come unstuck in a gliding instant. Joys, disappointments; tragedies and triumphs; losses-n-gains. Personal narratives unravel and evaporate, simultaneously, in that single gesture.
The anticipated moment arrives as an anti-climax.
No surge of emotions. No sense of loss.
Nothing.
And the ride begins.
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We arrive at the Hilton in the afternoon. The sky is overcast. Hotels around the airport are not fully occupied. Covid-19 is real. Third wave is expected.
Mumbai is unlocked yet locked up. There is pervasive fear.
Hotels are badly hit. We retire early. Next morning the expedition, our JoF, begins.
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We are sleepless in Mumbai.
A new home calls from Toronto.
One home traded for another — and a long arduous journey involved in the transition.
Certain things end.
Fresh things begin.
Hope. Fear. In equal measure.
Travel, real time.
No looking back now.
All set.
Foreign shores call.
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
― Lao Tzu
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September 9, 2021
CSM International Airport, Mumbai
6.0 am
We are in the early-morning queue at the counter which is closed. After half-an-hour, a young female executive sits at the counter of the airline, rest are still closed. In fifteen minutes, the queue gets long, and people wait for their turn. Slow. She takes time to check every document. Finally, another staff comes to open the second counter. Nobody complains.
The jostling passengers in the serpentine queue hardly have the mandatory two meters for practicing social distancing. There are official checks but the global safety protocols cannot be implemented due to the crowds and general apathy.
Nobody minds the non-compliance.
It is India, dear!
After a long wait, we get the boarding passes.
Next, we queue for security and immigration checks. They ask some routine questions. Finally, we are cleared. We move to board the airbus. No social distancing is maintained while boarding.
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Maldives.
Time: 1.15 pm
The small airport is full of tourists.
Maldives is suddenly full of Bollywood celebrities and hapless students on their long and tortured way to Canada.
For the former, it is a luxury getaway — beaches, sun-bathing, the over-the-water cottages; perfect Instagrammable moments, fodder for the paparazzi.
For the latter, middle-class, wide-eyed young adults separated from their small or big-city cages, it is a pricey gateway to Canada, some kind of a Promised Land, a utopia — the western Shangri-La!
Two different sets of travelers in the Corona period.
At this moment, no stars are to be seen in the airport.
Only large number of Indian students, some parents, and workers, all bunched up, bit tense, ready for the official interrogation.
It is smooth sailing for the Indians and few other nationalities, mostly Asians, at that particular hour.
People move and get directed to various counters.
The documents are scrutinized. Faces, uncovered, and covered.
The long lines are quickly cleared. Officers are polite.
Female officers, covered up, are monosyllabic but overall helpful.
There are more female officers visible here than in Mumbai or Delhi airports!
We are relieved.
The immigration officers can be tough. They might ask you reason for transiting via Maldives. Give them the truth. They may detain a passenger but normally will allow the entry.
— Our had agent informed us prior to our departure.
The WhatsApp group discussions had been confusing. Hostile officers! Some claimed. Friendly! Others countered.
That did not help.
The almost two-hour-and-half flight was spent on worrying about which 50 per cent would fall our way!
To be detained in a foreign city can be daunting. Linguistic and cultural differences, poor internet connection, a roaming number that does not work — all these factors add up to the complications in an unknown location buzzing with people from many countries. Anything can go wrong and you are in a modern limbo; incommunicado with the outside world, on your own.
Incognito!
These fears played on our minds, as we land on a sunny and humid afternoon.
Once we embarked on the adventure, there could be no turning back, Covid or no Covid.
Ready for worst, praying for the best!
Breathing easy, we headed for the exit.
Then, the bump!
Our baggage is held up for additional checks. A female officer asks, “Are there idols inside your suitcase?”
“No,” we say. She nods and asks us to leave. Idols and liquor are prohibited items.
Relieved!
“If any other country does this, prohibiting the sacred objects of a given faith, that government will be dubbed as anti-Islamic. Media will call them spreading Islamophobia. What is this? Liberal governance?’’ asks an Indian co-passenger sotto voce.
The hotel is a large property and full of the Indian students. Few whites also. The view of the ocean and sky is terrific!
Maldives. Courtesy: Sunil Sharma
A picture-perfect venue.
Chain of atolls stretches in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The sky and the ocean mirror each other, twinning in blue that electrifies the senses.
Here we saw a green ecosystem curated by the travel industry for the wealthy. The resort packs up natural beauty into a commercial package — spas; massages; food; liquors; boating and fishing; surfing and snorkeling.
Other side of Male is poor where workers and other classes live in bleak condition. Covid-19 ruined the economy, but things hope to improve now.
The barriers had been lowered. Vaccinated tourists were returning.
The hotel was on the edge of the ocean. Young Indian and foreign women swim and relax under umbrellas. Indian couples unwind. Women in swimsuits roam uninhibitedly, feeling emancipated, free, under an alien sky.
Outside, along the narrow strip leading to the airport– small stretch — women of any age get that malevolent male gaze!
We spent the night and the next day enjoying the breeze, ocean and the short walks.
And get revived.
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September11
Time: 2.30 pm
The batch of new arrivals is largely from the north of India—Delhi and Punjab. They are sitting in the lobby, bags unpacked, ears plugged in. Some are talking to parents via video calls and reporting their minor discoveries about Male. Eyes are tired but dreams, burning.
“Headed for Toronto?” I asked a strapping bearded man in early twenties.
“Yeah,” he said. “We have to come here for our RT-PCR report. It has cost us a mini fortune!”
“Same here.” I responded.
“They should have set up a lab at the airport in Delhi.”
“Who?”
“The Canadians. They know we will come, the students, via a third country.”
“Yes. No options.”
“Bizarre! We bring skills and money and that is how Canada is treating us! Making us do additional travel for entering the country.”
I nod. “It is a regular brain drain but our country does not care.”
“Yes,” he observed. “1.3 billion! Deaths or migrations, even on a large-scale basis – it matters not. The youth have to re-write their destinies there.’
He was an engineer going to do the data analytics course from Canada.
“Why you want to leave?”
“Well, for better quality of living. What else?”
“It is tough there.”
“Not for the weak, any foreign country. One thing is sure. Merit is recognised in North America. India lags behind. We do not get what we deserve. Hence, the recent exodus.”
He has a valid point.
Same grit is seen on the faces of the young women. They left the security of homes for a dream.
These are the Young Pioneers doing the Journey of Faith. For a dream of equitable society, merit driven.
The young are obsessed to find better versions of a civilization — humane, well-policed and well-regulated.
To escape the grind of a country mired in extreme corruption, casteism, communalism, regionalism, linguistic chauvinism — and subtle racism.
Each one of the group is in search of a Brave New World, mythical or real.
The Talented are exiting.
No policy maker is bothered.
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The hotel has got staff from India, Nepal and Malaysia. The food is good. Service, impeccable.
We do the PCR tests in the evening and wait.
Next morning, reports come — negative.
We are ready to leave Male for Toronto via Doha.
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September11
Time: 4.50—7.45 pm
Male airport
The horror!
The counter at the business class had a long queue. When our turn came, the female staffer went ballistic. She asked for all the documents related to our son based in Canada. Other documents — RT-PCR reports and vaccine certificates, passports and tickets — were ready but not the papers like sponsorship letter, address, and proof of kinship. She was stern, asked us to leave the counter and return with the soft copies of the documents. It was most harrowing! We pleaded. Told her the embassy had given us visas, but she did not relent.
Paperwork.
Bureaucracy.
She was more of a controlling clerk than a sympathetic customer-care staff willing to help tourists.
Cold logic.
We had a mild shock.
Never expected this treatment from a customer-care agent of an airlines.
No relief was in sight. She was deaf to our requests.
The internet link was unstable in the airport. There was a language barrier. No other senior officials were around to help. The time zones were different. We were stuck.
Boarding would commence soon.
We were almost detained. If denied passage, our schedule would go haywire. We would be spending night in the airport till alternative plans could be made.
Uncertainty can be crippling!
We made frantic calls. Somehow, things worked out. Papers were shown. Boarding passes issued.
We rushed, exhausted but happy.
Bye-bye Male, a city of contrasts. Leaves a bad taste.
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September 12
Doha
Night layover
We tried to rest in the Lounge. It was a crowded airport and all the lounges full for the business class passengers. It was chilly. I stretch out my legs and try to grab sleep but give up in that lit-up space. The big airport is buzzing with passengers. Few passengers managed to sleep bent over the chairs.
Lucky ones!
Middle of the journey, near dawn, I heard Odysseus singing:
I long for home, long for the sight of home.
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September 12
Doha
Early Morning
It was 8.50 am.
We had boarded the long-haul flight to Toronto — finally. The bunks were narrow in the business class. The entire flight was full. Families. Young students. Everybody in a hurry to reach their destination. About 14 hours to spend on board. It is a demanding job to remain fully masked in those tiny but pricey cubicles.
The economy class is packed.
We are slightly better in that limited area. Bit secluded and safe.
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I watched two movies. Lay down. Sat propped up. The food was not very appealing. The crew was a mix of ethnicities. Polite but bored. Most passengers were sleeping. I was unable to take a nap…instead I dreamt of the spires of the city of Toronto beckoning from afar under a bright sun in a clean blue sky, the latter a heavenly sight for the sore eyes.
I waited for that site as a conclusion to the long journey.
Like every journey, this would end soon.
And that was the award.
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Arrival
September 12
4.0pm
Destination—reached!
Almost on time.
It is sunny outside.
And a magical city springs into a startled view!
It is Sunday afternoon. And we have arrived in a single piece!
We walk briskly across the less-crowded Pearson airport. Minds relaxed. Luckily, the queues were not long. We were cleared fast by friendly officers, collected our bags, came out, tired but delighted…and united with our family, after a long gap.
At last!
It was intoxicating!
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PS: The ban on the India-Canada direct flight got lifted on September 27th onwards. But we do not mind. It was a long odyssey of love and faith on choppy waters and variegated landscapes.
We enjoyed the thrill of becoming mobile again during the endemic curfews imposed by a monarch called Corona and understood the benefits of a science termed kinesis.
Takeaways
…Third day, morning, I have this gnawing emptiness typical of a traveler: Now what?
— Next morning, the epiphany: The end of a formal journey signals the beginning of the other journey.
— Endings. New beginnings.
–That life is a series of journeys only, some within and some, without– constant flux, transformations.
— Every journey delivers this enduring message: Embrace the change, otherwise die by stasis, stagnation…you are already dead inside, if stuck up inside a black hole!
Adventures! We all need them.
Ask Alice. Or listen to Ibn Battuta:
Traveling—it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.
Or, to this shout out by Jack Kerouac for the ones restless for another expedition of body-mind-spirit:
There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.
Borderless 