In this nonterrestrial space that is at once a graveyard where lives are exhumed and a park for unrestricted homosociality, bliss abounds.
The women in The Woman Who Climbed Trees, Smriti Ravindra’s debut novel, are always departing. They leave bedrooms after midnight, marriages without divorcing husbands and countries without crossing borders. Yet these departures are neither escapes nor disappearances. The women remain visible even as they unsettle the worlds that continue to observe them. Ravindra’s novel, a rare work of Nepali English fiction, is interested in what happens when a life remains discernible without yielding to the demand for definition. This is the conundrum I want to name as translucence, a way of dwelling otherwise. It describes the gap between apprehension and intelligibility. In Ravindra’s novel, that discrepancy articulated as errant desires, minor attachments, and lives formed at the edges of familial and national recognition becomes a way of inhabiting the postcolony.
Set across the Nepal–Bihar border, the novel follows several generations of women whose lives are shaped by migration, kinship, nationalism, and patriarchy. Although it moves across different time periods its emotional center is Meena, a Madhesi woman who negotiates the contradictory inheritances of family and the nation. Meena’s story is preceded by an old folktale about a young bride who secretly climbs a peepul tree every night until her husband, unable to comprehend her nocturnal disappearances, follows her and ultimately causes her death. The story establishes a contrast that becomes crucial to Meena’s own trajectory as she encounters various challenges on account of not being understood. Interestingly, she later climbs the banyan tree, but does not repeat the folktale’s tragedy. Instead, she discovers an arboreal feminist commons, “upon a silver branch, under a silver moon” where community without surveillance flourishes. The banyan tree does not conceal another world from the one below; it remaps social relations to free women from the control of ethnonationalist heteropatriarchies.
Ravindra anticipates this alternative vision through moments that initially appear minor and inexplicable. A sister’s touch lingers slightly too long; a woman climbs a tree every night without explanation; a Bollywood heroine refuses to remain extraordinary; a song returns decades after it is first sung. None of these moments is sufficient to constitute an event and yet remains too insistent to disappear into the background of domestic life. Their force lies in this suspension. They reveal an altered sensorium through which the ordinary itself begins to look provisional. These moments accumulate until the novel’s closing vision gathers them into a coherent utopic vision. Utopia is less another place and more a relation to the quotidian, one in which its unnoticed possibilities have become perceptible.
This is a novel predominantly about women’s stories, as its initial reviews have noted, and its queer intervention first appears to be a simple critique of reproductive futurity as the presumed end of female existence. However, Ravindra’s women seldom reject the worlds they inhabit outright. Their estrangement takes the form of curiosity, in those moments when ordinary life ceases to be self-evident. Meena, the novel’s first protagonist, exemplifies this disposition. She remains embedded within Nepali-Bihari familial and communal life. However, Meena demonstrates a sensibility that exceeds the conceptual vocabulary available to her. Her desires manifest themselves before they can be captured in an identitarian discourse.
In one of the novel’s most arresting scenes, Meena recalls secretly witnessing an intimate encounter between her sisters, Kirti and Shanti, while touching herself. The scene initially resembles a familiar narrative of sexual awakening: a subject becomes aware of desire through an act of looking that breaches the privacy of the family. Voyeurism often performs precisely this function in narratives of sexuality by placing the spectator at the edge of a forbidden scene. Ravindra makes the scene stranger, as the moment’s viscerality occurs not in the instance of voyeurism but in its afterlife. The remembered scene is a resource for an erotic present. Queer desire, without an identitarian basis here, unfolds through recurrence rather than development. Voyeurism conventionally organizes desire around distance, as the voyeur stays outside the scene, and the prohibition against looking is the cause for erotics. Meena’s later recollection unsettles that spatial logic by introducing another axis of intimacy, one organized through time. The erotic relation is therefore neither simply between bodies nor reducible to identification with one body or another. It is mediated by an image, a memory, and the temporal gaps between them. Finally, while the novel gives the readers a female voyeur, equally significant is its refusal to monumentalize the event. The following morning, Meena discovers no outward signs that the encounter ever occurred. The sisters do not hide because there is nothing to reveal. In fact, as the narration suggests, “It was as though the night had not existed.” Queerness thus appears here through the memory of intimacy absorbed into daily life without becoming narratively exceptional.
As Ravindra’s account of desire emerges through moments that alter the texture of everyday life, so too does her account of politics, locating the political in the ordinary arrangements through which belonging is lived and contested. Borders in Ravindra’s novel are habits of perception. They partition languages, histories, and populations that have never entirely consented to their separation, producing subjects who are simultaneously native and foreign, reliable and suspect, less and more than what they are supposed to be. Meena belongs to the Madhesi community, whose historical location within Nepal has long been marked by this contradiction. Concentrated in the southern plains bordering India, Madhesis share linguistic, familial, and commercial worlds that traverse the border with ease, yet they have repeatedly been cast within Nepali nationalist discourse as insufficiently Nepali because of their ties with Northern India. The novel therefore does not require Nepal to have been formally colonized in order to engage postcolonial politics. Nepal’s state formation and practices of national differentiation developed within a South Asian region profoundly organized by British colonialism. Thus, the recurrence of phrases such as “no country” or the haunting image of “the big, big heart of pain.” are not metaphors of exile so much as diagnoses of postcolonial citizenship itself. The nation appears as an unfinished project of differentiation, continually deciding who counts as legitimate inside its symbolic order. Ravindra’s achievement is to render these abstractions intimate.
In this regard, the recurring marriages between Bihari and Nepali families expose the intimate infrastructures through which postcolonial nationhood is assembled, both in India, which underwent formal colonization and in Nepal which was influenced by colonial policy. Dowry in both countries with shared traditions, for instance, is described as a fund for future dowries, an economy whose temporal logic is reproductive for the families that make up Nepali and Indian societies. When Meena is called a “whore” by her mother-in-law, it is on account of an accusation for claiming jewels that she had received as dowry. Through “whore,” Meena is accused not of erotic excess but of theft for asking for something that had always belonged to her nominally but was supposed to be used for the sustenance of the patriarchal household. Jewelry merely materializes the asymmetry of the marital contract: the bride enters marriage as an asset transferred into the husband’s household, while the wealth attached to her becomes something to which she herself can subsequently be denied access. Her demand to “get them all” reverses that direction of circulation. She seeks proprietorship and pleasure; the patriarchy, via her mother-in-law, names this appropriation “whoredom” because this accusation is the moral technology that converts a conflict over ownership into a dispute over female respectability. After all, such exercises of agency can unravel the economies that sustain the nation itself.
The closest Meena comes to such a reconstitutive exercise of agency is building a friendship with Kumud. Kumud seems not to love her husband, and yet what develops between the two women is not simply an alternative romance waiting to be named as such. It is a composite relation made out of proximity, shared work, erotic possibility, and the ordinary accumulation of time. Both women inherit wealth through dowry, but patriarchy gives that wealth a reproductive telos. It is meant to secure marriage, sustain households, and pass into future generations. Detached from that telos, their wealth becomes difficult to account for and therefore becomes available for other forms of attachment. The queer possibility here is not simply that women might desire women, but that value might circulate without being compelled toward reproduction. Around the time this relationship appears, the novel offers a provocative sentence: “there are no married women in the world.” This sentence expresses a refusal of marriage as the institution that binds women’s attachments, labor, property, and futures to a reproductive imperative. Ravindra extends this to child-rearing, where Meena and Kumud share reproductive labor without submitting it to conjugal authority. Yet the novel is equally attentive to the limits of such female sociality. When Meena seeks a female space in which to live or return, Kumud understands her desire but cannot offer the refuge she needs. All they can do is recognize the desire without being able to sustain the world it would require. The novel’s queer politics thus resides in the gap between institutional form and lived relation: women fulfill the protocols of care those structures demand, yet the care itself exceeds the purposes for which it is institutionally organized, opening onto attachments that the institution cannot contain.
Yet pessimism about denied futures is not the novel’s final horizon. Its most sustained meditation on power emerges instead through its fascination with Bollywood, where popular cinema becomes a pedagogy of postcolonial feeling: teaching audiences whom to love, what futures to desire, and how femininity should be performed. Few figures embody this curriculum more completely than Sridevi. Across the 1980s and 1990s, Sridevi emerged as South Asia’s preeminent female star, celebrated for performances that oscillated between comic excess, melodrama, erotic spectacle, and supernatural omnipotence. Her stardom depended precisely on this contradiction. She repeatedly played women endowed with extraordinary powers only for those powers to be domesticated by romance, marriage, sacrifice, or guilt before the narrative’s conclusion. Female exceptionality could be spectacular, but only so long as it ended in normative femininity.
Meena refuses to imbibe this lesson. Watching Sridevi wield the mythical mani, “a jewel of such strength it could be used for world domination,” she cannot understand why such power should ever apologize for itself. Meena gets inspired by the power Sridevi’s character holds and aspires to reorganize the material conditions of collective life. Her fantasy is infrastructural rather than imperial. She would make “water from air,” provide gas, light, petrol, and water, build bridges across rivers, create wheels that scale heights, and invent machines that collapse distance. Even her fantasy of transforming mountains turns toward the production of “fertile and luxurious land.” The imagined exercise of power therefore takes the form of provision, connection, mobility, and material abundance. While the empire or the nation organizes power through the capacity to command others, Meena imagines power as the capacity to alter the conditions under which others live. Thus, Meena cannot understand “why Sridevi fought so hard to appear ordinary, why she slithered in guilt, hiding her authority from those so obviously below her.” Meena’s incomprehension matters more than her fantasy of power to make the world anew. Long before she climbs the banyan tree, she has already withdrawn from the symbolic economy that teaches women to mistake self-abnegation for virtue. What Ravindra imagines here is not spectacular resistance but the slow erosion of an ideology’s capacity to make itself appear natural.
The novel’s final revelation is therefore less a discovery than a change in perspective. The opening folktale forms a chiasmus with the epilogue, its motifs and figures returning at the text’s close in transformed form. The utopia disclosed later emerges through this formal return, as the text’s recursive structure opens onto the possibility of a different ordering of social relations. The prologue recounts the story of a young woman who marries an older widower and at night, she leaves the household to climb a peepul tree, sitting silently among its branches beneath the moon. The husband, unable to comprehend a form of feminine life that exists beyond his possession, follows her by tying a thread to her hair. The villagers and the husband speculate various reasons for her behavior and eventually punish her by drowning. The woman’s crime is not adultery, insanity, or sorcery. It is that she exceeds interpretation. Only retrospectively does the reader recognize that the husband’s thread reproduces a broader postcolonial desire for legibility. Like the census, the border, the map, or the household ledger, the thread assumes that following a mappable path will yield mastery over the life it records. This is the epistemic ambition that underwrites nations and borders: the conviction that visibility guarantees knowledge.
The epilogue returns to a tree to destabilize this conviction. Meena’s ascent into the banyan tree does not disclose an alternative reality concealed from the narrative until its final pages. Rather, it reveals that the world misrecognized in the prologue has existed alongside the visible world all along. The question is no longer why the woman climbs the tree but what becomes visible once one ascends with her. Women from different times and spaces cook, weave, sing, keep accounts, smoke bidis, write in notebooks, knit scarves, play hopscotch, skip ropes, gossip, and care for animals. In this nonterrestrial space that is at once a graveyard where lives are exhumed and a park for unrestricted homosociality, bliss abounds. Domestic work persists, yet it no longer functions as coercive reproductive service. Detached from patriarchal obligation, labor circulates as creative expression and shared pleasure. The juxtaposition of accountants, singers, cooks, smokers, children, and artisans dissolves the distinction between productive and reproductive work upon which both capitalist and patriarchal economies depend. When Meena asks whom she is to marry, a barber’s wife responds not with the name of a husband but with a series of female collectivities: the singers, the smokers, the cooks, the accountants, the girls playing hopscotch. Meena chooses the latter because she can “beat them in no time.” The exchange is playful, yet its political implications are profound. Marriage ceases to secure lineage, property, or reproductive futurity. It becomes synonymous with companionship, play and most importantly, symbiotic cohabitation.
Meena’s fantasy of remaking landscapes, abolishing obstacles, and refusing domestic submission is actualized in the world atop the banyan tree. The songs sung beneath the moon, in local Bihari idiom, articulate the philosophical centre of Ravindra’s utopia. Earlier, Meena’s mother had sung, “O, the heart is never your own… It is but a fraudulent bird on a tree,” capturing the precariousness of attachment under patriarchal and nationalist conditions. Hearts belonged to histories larger than themselves. In the final chorus, however, the metaphor returns altered: “My heart is no fraudulent bird / That will flit off your branch so easily.” The heart ceases to be disciplined; it becomes capable of attachment without the need for possession. The refrain crystallizes what translucence has allowed the novel to discover gradually: that intimacy need not resolve into ownership, and that to remain with another need not mean being absorbed into a prescriptive and punitive social order. “Give me a kingdom of women,” the closing refrain declares—not as a separatist fantasy, but as a demand for an alternative distribution of value. This kingdom is an ecology before it is a polity. It persists beside the nation, apprehensible yet never entirely incorporable into its orders of belonging.
The Woman Who Climbed Trees thus offers neither a program for political change nor a consoling discovery of a separate world. It offers a way of reimagining life in the postcolony. Ravindra’s world is marked by imperial afterlives, unfinished decolonization, patriarchal violence, and the unstable geographies of the Nepal-Bihar border. Yet these histories do not exhaust or totalize the worlds they scaffold. Alongside them, and sometimes within them, critical orientations towards the world continue to emerge. They are visible yet fugitive and remain irreducible to the epistemologies that seek to possess them. The novel locates this possibility in a peculiar spatial position, suspended between a mappable terrestrial reality and an uncharted celestial infinity: the intermediate altitude of the tree branch. If translucence names the mismatch between appearance and intelligibility, intermediate altitude names the vantage from which that disjunction can be inhabited rather than corrected. Thus, elsewhere is not another place awaiting arrival or another country waiting beyond the border. It is the difficult, unfinished work of learning to see what has been visible yet not seen all along. After all, to climb a tree is neither to leave the earth nor to remain entirely on it. It is to occupy an intermediate altitude from which familiar landscapes become strangely rearranged, or queered. The woman who climbs the tree does not vanish. She remains visible against the night sky. What changes is the angle from which she is seen.
Abhinav Bhardwaj (he/they) is a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland who works at the intersection of transnational queer theory and Global Southern literary and cultural studies. When not making a playlist for the treadmill or thinking of his next meal, he relishes the cringeworthy on many digital platforms.