The Girl From Kathmandu by Cam Simpson

Author:Cam Simpson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

When the Dashain festival came around that year, the fourth since Jeet’s death, Kamala and Kritika fought through the crowds at Kathmandu’s transport terminus to squeeze into a hot, tightly packed bus bound for Gorkha. Little had changed in the village on the ledge. Kamala’s in-laws remained distant, but she cared far less now. She watched with joy as Kritika took to the freedom of the hills, where there were no walls or streets, running barefoot with her young cousins up and down the dirt tracks worn into the hillsides. During the two-week holiday, Kamala made her way back around the length of the horseshoe, spending as much time as she could with her aunts and uncles and with Maya and her family. It was the first time Maya had seen Kamala since she left the ashram, and she marveled at how confident and contented her nani had become.

Kamala also had struck up a friendship with Surya Bhujel, a man she had known for years from another village in the horseshoe. He had started a business ferrying passengers in a microbus along dirt roads from the bottom of the horseshoe ridge to the nearest towns, where they could shop or catch buses to the bigger cities, and he sometimes took villagers all the way to Kathmandu. He always checked on Kamala whenever he heard she was en route back home, and made sure he was available to take her anywhere she needed or wanted to go. He was waiting when her bus from Kathmandu arrived, and drove her and Kritika toward the horseshoe ridge. Sometimes he would take them on his motorcycle after the point where the road was too narrow for his microbus to continue. In just the three years since she donned the white sari at the well below the village, Kamala had come far, but some inequities surrounding widowhood remained unshakable. Some villagers from all around the ridge, even friends of hers, could barely mask their disdain when they saw her and the driver in each other’s company, and some members of Jeet’s family openly chided her, saying that she should never think of remarrying. Kamala appreciated Bhujel’s many unconditional kindnesses to her and Kritika, but she decided to maintain a certain distance from him, for everyone’s sake.

Kamala had met the families of the other men murdered in Iraq a few times when they came together for special functions, but the families of the twelve stayed fairly guarded in such moments, mostly because their grief was on public display. Although Kamala was keen to get to know them, especially the other widows, such opportunities never seemed to avail themselves. At one event, held in a hotel ballroom, she was hounded by television reporters as she tried, for the first time, to share a private moment with the other women. The families also had gathered together a few times for meetings at the offices of Ganesh Gurung and the small think tank he ran on the north side of Kathmandu.

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