English · Chapter 21
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
Abhi Subedi (born 1945) is a Nepali poet, playwright, critic and translator who taught English literature at Tribhuvan University for several decades. He writes in both Nepali and English. "Soft Storm" comes from his collection of English poems about the capital, Chasing Dreams: Kathmandu Odyssey (1996). It is a free-verse poem in which the speaker wanders through Kathmandu by moonlight and by day and is stirred by what he sees into a storm of feeling. The storm is "soft" because it is made of sympathy, tenderness and bewildered love rather than rage.
The poem is built around a refrain. Again and again the speaker tells us that he became a soft storm when he saw or heard something in the city. Each time, the trigger is a small, concrete scene, and each time the scene opens outward into a wider comment on the condition of Kathmandu and of the country.
The first movement belongs to the night. The speaker is out in the moonlit city, and the moon seems to slide down over the hills and the roofs, spreading a serene light over temples and empty streets. On the surface everything is calm and beautiful. But beneath that beauty he notices the homeless children of Thamel, the tourist quarter, crying with hunger under the trees where bats hang in the dark. The contrast between the peaceful moon and the hungry children produces the first storm inside him, and it is a gentle one: he is moved to sorrow, not to fury.
The second movement gathers other figures of suffering seen on his walks. A bent, hunchbacked woman carries a child on her back through the cold, moonlit streets. The poor sleep or lie hurt on pavements while the traffic and the crowds pass without a glance. Mothers have nothing to feed their children. Each sight makes him "soft," and that softness is the poem's word for compassion.
The third movement turns to the day and to noise. Kathmandu by daylight is chaos: horns, dust, crowds, loudspeakers, processions, and the endless clamour of political speeches full of slogans that promise everything and change nothing. Walls are covered in posters and graffiti; disputes flare into violence in the streets; leaders quarrel while people go hungry. The speaker feels the hard storm of public life around him, a storm of empty rhetoric and callousness, and he answers it with his own storm, which remains soft.
In the fourth movement the speaker turns inward. He confesses that he cannot remain a detached observer of his own city. Its contradictions, beauty beside squalor and tenderness beside cruelty, enter him and become a tempest that he can express only as love and bewilderment. He would like to spread that softness over the whole valley, over the hills, the trees, the temples and the people, so that the harsh storm of the streets might itself grow gentle.
The poem closes without a neat resolution. The speaker is still a storm and still soft, holding the beauty and the pain of Kathmandu together in one feeling, and inviting the reader to see the city with the same sympathetic, unsettled eyes.