Smriti Ravindra is a Nepali-Indian writer. She is a Fulbright scholar and holds an MFA in creative writing from North Carolina State University. Her fiction has been published globally including the US, India, and Nepal. 'The Woman Who Climbed Trees' is her first novel. She currently resides in Mumbai, India, where she is a high school English teacher at the Bombay International School.

I maintain that we learn our behaviours in the primary school classroom. If you don’t learn how to listen or respond to each other with respect, you won’t automatically learn it in parliament or after you get married. It’s too late by then.

I had a computer where I worked and I had created a folder for my novel, and I would steal some time everyday to write it. My colleagues soon found out and complained to my boss. He began to bring me large piles of random papers to type, just to keep me busy, I think.

But what we do not need today in Nepal is someone to be a good wife, a good daughter-in-law, a good mother but when she dies, she is nameless. Death is the ultimate silence. The question is what will you decide to do in this one life you have? 

I read a lot of newspapers and I watch talk shows where interesting people are interviewed. I also meet a lot of different kinds of people, who in one way or another become the characters in my stories.

Financial security is the most important thing for a writer. What will a couple of thousand rupees for a piece of article do? Nothing. My mother passed away in February and she left behind her land in Kailali and a bank balance for me. 

There, I was the only Dalit girl. Up until 4th grade, I was not allowed to sit on the benches with my peers. I would have to stand throughout the day. Some teachers who felt sorry for me would allow me to sit on the floor, but otherwise I stood through all the subjects.

I thought that writing 65 books would bring to Nepal Academy’s attention, but that never happened. I spent some time reflecting on why that might be the case, and came away with three things.

I won the first prize, which was a notebook and a pen. It felt like a sign that I should write more. Then came social media, I saw people writing and sharing poems on Facebook.

Like writing, it is an art form. There are many rules to bonsai– one has to identify the face of a tree, the back of a tree, how the branches move, which way to move them. 

Simply put, to write poems. But also to know when to write, what kinds of poems to write, and why. When I was in my early 20s, I wrote poems about everything I saw: the flower, the stone, the mud.

I was a wild horse, you know. Everything belonged to me and nothing belonged to me. But I think the writer in me was seeded by Muwa and my grandmother.

You know, we have such a rich reserve of folklore and folk literature. If we held all of that, I guarantee you it is as rich or richer than those we often read that come to us from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa… I want to continue to collect and make and keep these Tharu songs and stories.

Not everyone who wants to write can write. You can try to wring it out of everyone, but unless you have something in your core, nothing’s going to come out.