“Telling Me My Stories: Fragments of a Himalayan Childhood” by Kunzang Choden
My first introduction to Kunzang Choden was when her manuscript The Circle of Karma was placed on my desk. It was one of the first novels that I edited and thoroughly enjoyed doing so as well. It was also the first book that was placed on the Penguin/Zubaan joint imprint. It was a project that we poured our heart and soul into. We even created a micro-author website for Kunzang to promote her and the book. It was delightful. It was experimental and unheard of. This was in 2004 or so, when the internet was still in its nascent stages and we were using dialup modems to connect to the world wide web. Later, when I organised the book launch at the British Council, New Delhi, it was an incredible experience. The auditorium was packed. Some of us were left standing outside in the foyer. It is then that I noticed a quiet young man standing near the front door, flanked by a bunch of smartly dressed men. It was the then prince and now King of Bhutan, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck. He had just finished or was about to finish studying at the University of Oxford. It was extraordinary to see him at the event. But if you read Kunzang’s latest book, Telling Me My Stories ( published by Bloomsbury India), her association with the royal family is explained. Kunzang’s mother was related to the royal family.
I interviewed Kunzang Choden for TOI Bookmark. Here is the Spotify link:
Telling Me My Stories is a stunning memoir that truly exemplifies the title of the book. It is almost as if Kunzang has taken these fragments of stories that she heard, or were passed down generation to generation, and has tried to create a coherent narrative about her family. She was orphaned at a very young age — her father passed away when she was 9 and her mother a couple of years later. Over the years, Kunzang heard stories about them, or was handed pieces of their belongings by various relatives that made her want to patch together their stories. She has done a fine job in this book.
Her skill as a storyteller and as a collector of forgotten Bhutanese folktales and retelling them has become an important art form. Probably in many ways it enabled and empowered her to share the history of her family in the way she has done so. She focussed on herself and her ancestors, shared their stories pleasantly, gleaning facts from bits and pieces of oral testimonies and memories shared by those who knew her family in the past. The conversion of oral tales into the written word, providing a coherent narrative to the story is not as easy as it looks when read. It requires patience, persistence, and plenty of research to connect the dots and produce a chronological narrative. This is what Kunzang has achieved in Telling Me My Stories.
While weaving together her ancestral history particularly that of her parents, she also achieves a remarkable feat of documenting the change in Bhutan: from a closed nation, relying on a barter economy to becoming the modern country it is today. She refers to the various social reforms that the government instituted, including sponsoring Bhutanese children to be educated in India. Kunzang was one of those who benefitted from this scheme even though it entailed a 15-day trek from Bhumthang to Kalimpong. Quite an introduction to a new life when you are merely a nine-year-old girl, leaving home for the first time.
I truly enjoyed reading Telling Me My Stories.
Listen to our conversation on TOI Bookmark. It is available on Spotify.
Here is a snippet:
I mention somewhere that the death of our parents came to us in such a blasé way and we never really had the time and the opportunity to absorb it, to mourn it, to understand it, and it stayed with me. You are right, it is kind of like a healing process for me to write about it, talking to myself about it, and going through the whole process. The time we learned about the deaths and how we had nobody to really help us or guide us. Even to help us to mourn, to cry, to hold us or explain things to us. We sort of just developed, my brothers and I, developed our own coping strategies and that sort of stays embedded in my psyche.
29 August 2025
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