Personal Essays

Once I saw my brother studying in Kitchen, and wondered how could he possibly study there: its distracting, noisy and smelly. I was not in Kathmandu then, I was home. I had two rooms back then- I had my bed and study materials in one, and in another; broken or to-be-broken electric devices. I came to Kathmandu after SLC to stay with my cousin brother and sister in a room. We had our kitchen, two cloth-hangers, two beds, book-case, water-drums, rice-sack and ourselves- all squeezed in one tiny room. It had only one small window, that was symbolic of the size of our room when compared to the house we were living. Whenever I told people that I lived in a room, they would say how wonderful life I was living. When I asked why they would reply that I had no intruder in my private or personal life, I could do anything I wanted. Well, this is partly true, but there is an inner-story to this. When you are living in a room, you don’t have a personal life that is attached to you only, ...

                 I was having a conversation with my sister about our family members, but later it ended as an altercation. She resented the way I was proving her wrong and trying to change her opinion about our Uncle’s decision of making our cousin-brother to study in India. I was with this decision, but she reprimanded it, she thought this decision to be waste of time and money as our cousin-brother never wanted to study anything, but for the sake of his father’s decision and the guilt set by his interminable-leisure with no productivity, he reluctantly had to accept it. I remember we were talking about him first, but later we were yelling at each other about each other’s dogmatic opinions. Now, it was not about him at all, now it was about us trying to prove ourselves in what we believed in. I kept yelling my ideas and refuting hers, she was doing the same. But what I got to listen in the end was unexpected. She said, with drenched ...