“Jai Grihasti!”

The couple and their teenaged daughter Shrijana chimed this cheerful and familiar greeting in unison, their palms joined in a namaste. They’d incorporated this practice into all their trainings to promote the most basic principle of permaculture – “The home is the heart of the farm, all hail to this engine!”

A morning in June. Kathmandu Valley woke up to its monsoon nightmare to discover that the city had transformed into a latrine.

My husband was never there when I needed him. During our life together, he was away most of the time, crossing high mountain passes. He never really had time to spend with me, though his desire to have sons did rekindle the love we had earlier lost.

I stopped being insentient when I considered Bhauju’s life and began questioning my own mother, father and brother. In what way was my home different from the cemetery hill near the house? Why was it that my father – whom I saw as the most intelligent, good and loving person in the world – was like a frightening tiger to Bhauju?

I’m no good at accounting. But I’ve kept accounts of all the little debts owed me by the village in a box in my mind. And when people say they love the village, it makes me laugh. It makes me want to tear Bistini Bajai’s blouse in the middle of the night, and shake the village with my laughter.

‘Line of Thought: Dialogues on Pedagogy and Personal Practices’, running at the Nepal Art Council in Babarmahal until Saturday, 18th January, 2020, intends to start conversations, some beyond pedagogy and practice.

Metal does not come in circles or spheres; they have to be shaped carefully with a hammer or on a steady shaping tool for bigger pieces. The chair’s design was simple, and I began to describe the cuts, bends, the grinding and the welding that had gone into the chair. A friend was amused that a rusty old chair in the middle of nowhere had meant something to me.

In January 2005, my heart was torn between two women. By June, it was in tatters.

Jebin Gautam’s ‘The Last Morning Rendezvous’, a story of a woman navigating a specious relationship, won first place in the fourth edition of Writing Nepal: A Short Story Contest.