From silence to articulation: A postmemorial reading of Rohan Chhetri’s Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful

Rohan Chhetri's Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful captures the dilemma of being an Indian-Nepali diasporic writer who oscillates between historical amnesia and the burden of unresolved legacies.The volume is replete with images of suffering, mortality, bereavement, recollection, and ancestral trauma, reconstructing the memories of those who lived through the failed revolution.Using Marianne Hirsch's theory of Postmemory, this paper investigates how the second generation, like Chhetri, recalls traumatic experiences that they did not directly experience but that are passed down through stories, images, and behavior.As Hirsch writes, postmemory 'describes the relationship that the "generation after" bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before' (Hirsch, 2012, p. 5).The paper closely examines the memories of the ancestral figures like his father and grandfather, whose physical absence nonetheless profoundly impacts the speaker's identity and emotional landscape.This allows Chhetri to evoke a past intertwined with communal violence, broken promises, betrayals, and the disillusionment of separate statehood demands, shared by many like his grandfather, juxtaposed with a present that is equally dystopian and devoid of redemption.