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I was at a dinner
party in Kathmandu when a journalist friend looked at her cell phone
and made a joyous announcement: “Mubarak’s gone!”

“Really?”

“He left Cairo for
Sharm el-Sheikh. The army’s taken charge,” she said. No one at that
Feb. 11 party, neither the foreign-educated Nepalis nor the expatriates
who call Nepal home, had any connection to Egypt. Yet the victory felt
personal. A bottle of wine appeared and we toasted Egypt.

As protests spread
in Bahrain, Yemen, Iran and Libya, what is emerging as the “Arab
Spring” continues to resonate here. Just five years ago, the world was
watching Nepal as it now watches the Middle East and we had our dreams
of democracy.

“I don’t know why,
but I love to see people revolting against their leaders,” Jhalak
Subedi, a magazine editor, wrote on Facebook.

“We Nepalis, we
grew up with political movements,” he explained over a cup of coffee.
He had came of age amid student politics, was even jailed in 1990 for
his activism. “Despite all our movements, we still haven’t been able to
have the kind of change our hearts are set on,” he said. “I think
that’s why we feel so happy when we see change taking place elsewhere.”

We also approach
world events seeking correspondences between our history and that of
others. India’s struggle for freedom from British rule inspired Nepal’s
first democratic movement in 1950. Forty years later, our second
democratic movement was energized by events farther off: the fall of
the Berlin Wall and the end of communism in Eastern Europe.

Our third and most
recent movement took place in 2006, when democratic political parties
and Maoist rebels united against King Gyanendra Shah, ending a 10-year
civil war. Millions of Nepalis participated in nonviolent
demonstrations in a show of support. Nineteen days after that, the king
relinquished power; two years later, a newly elected Constituent
Assembly abolished the 240-year-old monarchy with a near-unanimous
vote. With the democratic political parties and the Maoists vowing to
work together peacefully, a “new Nepal” felt attainable.

Five years later, it still has not taken shape.

Instead, we have
learned that it is easier to start a revolution than to finish one.
Overthrowing the monarchy was difficult, but institutionalising
democracy is harder still.

Our democratic
parties are inexperienced, deferring to “big brother” India on all
matters political. But India has backed an inflexible policy of
containing the Maoists. And the Maoists have also been unwilling to
compromise, holding on to their 19,000-troop army and their
paramilitary group, the Young Communist League, and refusing to turn
into just another political party.

The result has been a bitter polarisation between hard-liners of democratic and Maoist persuasion.

The May deadline
set for finishing our new constitution is less than 100 days away, but
the document remains in rough draft. The will to complete it – among
the democratic political parties and the Maoists, as well as in India –
appears to be wholly lacking.

And now Kathmandu
is rife with rumours that the Constituent Assembly – the country’s only
elected body – will be dissolved through a military-backed “democratic
coup.” Equally dismal scenarios in the public imagination are a return
to civil war, the escalation of localised conflicts or the rise of the
criminal underworld.

Whether or not the
worst comes to pass, it is clear by now that the democratic political
parties and the Maoists prefer to prioritise their own struggle for
power. They have left it to us to find our place in the world.

This, we
increasingly do by leaving. Unable to earn a living wage at home, up to
1,000 Nepalis are estimated to leave the country every day to work as
migrant labourers in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and elsewhere in the
Middle East and the Far East, often under very exploitative conditions.
As many as 6 million Nepalis live in India, and hundreds of thousands
more have migrated to the developed world. In London and New York and
Toronto, Nepali is now spoken on the streets.

“Those who could lead a new movement – you could call it the Facebook generation – have left the country,” says Subedi.

And there is no single tyrant against whom to direct a movement. What we have in Nepal is a “ganjaagol,” a mire.

“The thing about
movements,” Subedi says, “is that at a certain point, the ordinary
person experiences power. Beforehand and afterwards, nobody pays him
any attention. But at a certain point, the ordinary person feels his
own power.

‘’That feeling,” he says, narrowing his eyes. “That feeling … .“

He does not
complete his sentence, but we both know what he means. So many Nepalis
have experienced this giddy sense that change is possible.

For now, we watch
others in the Arab world feel their power. We wish them well, and worry
for their safety, and share in their victories.

They inspire us. They make us feel wistful, and also a bit envious.

Manjushree Thapa is the author, most recently, of the novel ‘’Seasons of Flight.

© 2011 The New York Times