Beeva Thapa

Beeva Thapa was a poet, painter and politician. Beeva Thapa was born in Nepal and is considered one of the first female Nepali immigrant to the West.
Early life
Beeva Thapa was born in Kathmandu on April 1, 1887 as a second daughter to Dhananjaya Thapa and his wife. Mr. Thapa was a police officer under the Rana autocracy, and Mrs. Thapa was a housewife, the only occupation the women were allowed to take at that time. The Thapas were originally from a village in Sankhu, a small suburb Northeast to Kathmandu.
From a very early age she started writing poems and sketching beautiful pictures. Her parents were especially impressed by what they perceived as her extraordinary diligence and her excellent dancing capability.

Schooling
In the nineteenth century it was almost impossible for ordinary people to get formal education. However, impressed by his daughters’ mental vigor, Dhananjaya Thapa managed somehow to get both of his daughters admitted to an underground school in Kalopool by the name of Himalaya Vidhya Mandir. After Beeva completed fifth grade from Mandir, she was transferred to another underground school, Brihaspati Vidhya Sadan. But after two years, due to some untoward incidents, the young girls were admitted back to the Mandir for another three years. It was during this time that she met her husband Abhaya Thapa, who became the subject of many of her poems. When Beeva Thapa was in grade ten, democracy was established in Nepal and she got admitted to a newly opened coed school NIST where she finished her high school with an excellent grade. After a year of rambling in Kathmandu trying to get into a medical school, the Thapa sisters, in 1906, became the first Nepalese women to go to the United States of America.

Life in America

The Thapa sisters had originally come with an F1 Visa to study in University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond, Oklahoma. Beeva studied the Nursing Course
for a year in UCO, after which she moved to Irving, Texas, to live with her husband and her sister. It was then that she wrote many of her poems like Two Birds in the Sunset, Melissa Garden, To the School Boy Who Never Confessed and To Abhaya with Love. Her sonnet Lost in Thought won the National Poetry Competition that brought her under the attention of literary circle. In 1909, she was approached by The New York Times to write poems every week in its literary edition, which she readily accepted. For the next six years she wrote beautiful poems for the newspaper, which came as a collection The Rose has Thorns in 1916 under the sponsorship of one of her rich high school friend. The book was critically acclaimed, and was a bestseller for three years.
In 1915, both of her parents died in an accident causing a deep melancholy in Beeva as reflected by her poems Retarded God, Lost in Thought and Channels of Memory with these famous lines:

If tears were the staircase and memory the lane,
I would go to heaven and bring you back again.

Drugs and divorce

In 1916, her beloved sister went back to Nepal after her marriage to a rich businessman. In 1917, her husband, Abhaya Thapa divorced her to live with his parents in Argentina] who had recently migrated there. The poems that were written during this period include Slashing the Heart, The Texas Loneliness, Mountains of Tears and Mathematics of a Troubled Mind. She even experimented with drugs and got addicted to cocaine. However, she soon gave up with the addiction after a hard fight. Her struggles with cocaine are represented in her poems A Dance with the Devil and Chasing the Dragon.

Remarriage, and death

In 1919, she moved to Philadelphia, Pennysylvania to work with a local literary magazine. She spent the rest of her life there in an ordinary bungalow writing poems, and painting. She is regarded as the first artist to use perspective drawing technology to depict the facial features of the people . In Philadelphia, she also met one of her childhood crushes. The two people soon fell in love, and they vowed to marry each other. In one of her poems of that time Song after Rain, she writes how love was making the world so bright for her that it almost looked surreal. It was certainly the happiest period of her life.
In 1922, however, just two days before their marriage, her fiance suddenly died because of some unknown disease. The shock was so terrible that she even stopped writing poems for a year and it was during this time that she adopted Buddhism and started her political career.

Political Life
In her last years, Beeva spent life of an active congressman. In 1928, after some years with Democrats, she stood as a candidate for the Congress from Texas. She won with an overwhelming majority. She played a very important role in implementing women right laws and was often criticized by conservatives for her feminist stand . However, she became very popular among the public, particularly in the South, and was seen as a possible presidential candidate. She was also one of the first politicians to warn the congress of the cruel intentions of the Hitler and Mussolini.

Death

On the night of December 19, 1931, Beeva died in her sleep in her house in 35th street, Philadelphia. She was buried at the Kagya Pa Buddhist Monastery as per her last will with National Honor. Her house in 35th street is now listed as a US National Heritage Area, and is now used as a museum.

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