The music video for Where Have You Been is a veritable groundbreaker. For much too long, large shares of Nepali music videos have been monotonous and unexceptional. Conforming to a traditional mantra of dancers performing in synchrony with a backdrop of picturesque landscapes, an undiscerning eye, at first glance, would accuse the industry of being stuck in a bygone era. Even as new exciting artists continue to transform Nepali music with tracks that fuse traditional sensibilities with modern tastes, their music videos seem stuck in the throes of a sappy and shallow formulae best consigned to the past. 

Which is why, Astha Tamang Maskey and Rohit Shakya’s song, performed under the moniker The Author x Astha, is such a breath of fresh air. Surreal and bewitching, Where Have You Been is a visual treat. Put together by directors Prasiit Sthapit and Rohit Shakya, this obscure and enigmatic video is undoubtedly a benchmark for an artistically tasteful and perceptively liberal strain of videography in Nepal. 

The storyline itself is only loosely associated with the lyrics—which for a change, works rather well. The video begins with Rohit Shakya, The Author, waking up in the middle of a magenta forest. The settings of Nepali music videos are easily recogniseable—a Chobhar here, a Godavari there or maybe even an occasional Mustangi desert. But with Where Have You Been, the outlandish woods are strangely familiar yet eerily purgatorial. The Author, awoken from a slumber, traces his way through the forest, seemingly following the singing female voice of Astha Tamang Maskey. He himself, in turn, is followed by a bare-chested wildling, glazed in ash and dirt. The wildling is fascinated by an instrument Shakya is carrying. A cross between a harmonium, an accordion, and just an ordinary tree stub, the instrument radiates a golden aura and entices both the wildling and the viewer. After some journeying, the two reach the source of the song, a strangely majestic wooden throne at the foot of a massive old tree. On the throne sits Astha, dressed elegantly in a long, white dress. Having found the source, the wildling jumps and crawls around Astha and The Author, in an intriguing and bizarre sequence. But just as the viewer begins to decode this climax, the video abruptly ends with the two journeyers returning back into the forest they emerged out of. 

What is fascinating about Where Have You Been is that it is open to a viewer’s own interpretation, as all artistic expression should be. The creepy but harmless wildling, who is enchanted by the golden instrument, a beautiful nymph with a haunting song and a wooden throne, and a man whose mere presence reverses the course of rivers—the symbolic threshold of light and dark, life and death—the characters play their part in accentuating the surreal setting. Yet for the discerning audience, however, the narrative will vaguely resonate with the fateful story of Orpheus, a mythical musician and poet who could enchant all living things and even stones, but failed to rescue his wife Eurydice from the darkness of the Underworld.

The contrast here is that The Author is no rescuer but merely a traveller passing through a purgatory where he mesmerises a wildling and catches the fancy of a nymph. He does not stay as the nymph would’ve wanted. There is no joyous coming together. He leaves ultimately, but not without making things happen—changing the air and stimulating the mood. The allure here is that she wants him to turn back as he’s leaving but is unable to enforce her will, despite her position on the throne. As for The Author, he walks back into the forest and that is all he does, and strangely enough that is adequate for the whole thing to work flawlessly. 

After the video was put up on YouTube, it naturally attracted mixed reactions. Given its cryptic symbolism and obscure plotline, the video did come under some fire for portraying little meaning and even less association with the lyrics. Others have lauded it as a modern masterpiece. I maintain that a lucid mind can easily decipher its essence, and perhaps years down the line, chroniclers will peg this music video as the turning point where the industry departed from the purely commercial to a more creative and artistic domain.