Hovering between a portrait and a story, “Shashi Neupane decides” contains many nuggets of wisdom about immigrant lives of Nepalis in the U.S. – all delivered with humor that charms but doesn’t linger for accolades. Neupane felt very real, as if I’d met him on one of my visits to Queens.

– Samrat Upadhyay, judge

Shashi Neupane decides

Shashi Neupane decided to return to Nepal.

For eight of the past ten years, he had been working at a restaurant on Woodhaven Boulevard, lording over novices—his ability to string foreign words into a somehow coherent structure made him an achiever among recent immigrants who had trudged through Latin America to the land of dreams—and managing, on his weekly salary of five hundred dollars, only half of which was taxed, to earn some respect in Kathmandu.

His three-story house, on a four-ana plot in Chapali, brought in rent money. He’d bought the land with 30 lakhs raised through a dhukuti; construction of the house had been financed by a loan against the land. The first floor was a kirana pasal leased by a Qatar returnee. On the second floor lived a family of three: mother and two sons; the father owned a gas station somewhere in New Jersey. Mrs. Neupane doubted the veracity of the ownership account—“He’s bluffing. If he’d had enough money to put into a petrol pump, he would have bought a house”—but was polite to the tenant, Mrs. Guragai, for her husband was a reliable courier for the Neupane family on his biennial trips to Nepal. On his flight to Kathmandu, Mr. Guragai carried a dedicated piece of luggage for the Neupanes in Nepal from the Neupane in New York.

Mrs. Neupane, of course, returned her husband’s favors of Apple products and assorted Macy’s merchandise with gundruk-maseura and suits for her husband still stitched to his 2005 measurements. Unlike most Nepalis, Mr. Neupane had lost weight after coming to America, a fact his wife took pride in. “In America, only poor people are fat,” she said. Her husband didn’t mind the oversize suits; he wore them rarely, anyway: a new suit for the Nepali New Year dinner every year and old ones at the occasional wedding receptions. He didn’t mind the suit also because Mrs. Neupane apparently couldn’t fathom how much her husband had lost in going from 90 kilograms to 180 lbs.—going by Nepali conversion rules that a pound was half a kilogram, she couldn’t account for 18 lbs. in rounding error—and he didn’t want her to start questioning her life decisions.

Mr. Neupane woke up one day not wanting to go to work. Admittedly, he only looked forward to the payday, but he didn’t detest showing up to work. He didn’t have difficult work—in the past eight years, nobody had pointed a gun at him like that time when he worked at a gas station store. Nor had he incurred the wrath of a customer like that of the foul-mouthed woman who threw a fit while Neupane in the driver’s seat was trying to tell east from north in West Village, of all places; the rage had caused the early demise of his career as a cabbie. Those days, he thought, seemed like another era.

He hadn’t returned since leaving Nepal the last time. When he left, his daughter was 6, his son 4, and his wife was three months pregnant with their third child. She miscarried. The children grew up fatherless, he thought. Skype was poor substitute. His children, like many others from middle-class families in Kathmandu, went to schools that charged according to their teachers’ English proficiency and by the time they hit puberty spoke Nepali that sounded unapologetically foreign. Their English sounded foreign too—that’s what Mrs. Neupane thought, at least.

In 2005, Mr. Neupane, fresh off a literal boat—he had crossed the Rio Grande on a float—barely understood what Americans said. Back in Nepal, he was capable of polite conversation in English, but Americanese made no sense to him. He was befuddled by the curious phrases. The first time he went to a food market, he swore off livelihood ambitions in America—there wasn’t a single sentence he could understand. The words made sense, of course, but he had absolutely no idea why they wanted you to have a good day when it was already dark outside. However, once he realized that he was not the only person in America who didn’t understand the country’s brand of English, he found his sea legs. And to think of his kids flaunting their English!

Sooner or later, he thought, his children would come to America. They would go to American schools, don caps and gowns—he’d have their photos framed and hung on the wall—go to work in American offices and become Americans themselves. He dreaded this day as much as he wished for it. His children with their American mannerisms and American jobs would marry Americans—Nepali last names, certainly, but still Americans. And American children don’t live with their parents. But that was a thought he had one snowy night as he worked the register at the gas station store, far back in time. He no longer thought these thoughts.

Mr. Neupane didn’t have a green card. When it came to his immigration status, he had been more cautious than clever. His friends had suggested numerous devices to secure a green card, but the fear of American laws had got the better of him. If he were to be deported, he said, he would like that to happen at his will. If he left, he wouldn’t return. His children, after all, would never come to America.

Mr. Neupane’s announcement didn’t elicit protestations from his wife. Apparently, he went through these phases once every few years, provoked sometimes by misbehaving cashiers and at other times by xenophobic proclamations. “Go back to your country” was what he took the most offense at. Lately, he had been reading a lot about Nepalis going back home; a recent story about an actor returning after 15 years had drawn interest and ire in equal proportions.

Although he hated to admit it, he had become used to a life of relative comfort. True, he rented a room in a railroad, divided into four box bedrooms—the kitchen smelled like the lid of a pressure cooker that wasn’t cleaned too often or too meticulously; the bathroom was a jumble of, among other things, four bottles of shampoo, three of which were identical—but this was still a far cry from, he thought, the vicissitudes of common life in Kathmandu, where nothing useful was ever abundant.

His house in Kathmandu had backup for long load-shedding hours but no heating. How could he possibly survive the cold, he thought. In Nepal, he had lived mostly in Nepalgunj, notorious for its dry heat and oppressive cold. During a Nepalgunj winter, you could bundle up and light a fire, and the groundwater was lukewarm. Kathmandu had its solar panels, but winter days were short and people too many. And he would have the neither the patience nor the fiscal abandon—his wife paid water tankers to transport water from Shivapuri to her house to supplement the sporadic supply from the water supply corporation—to run the shower for five minutes before warm water started spraying out.

Kathmandu had changed a lot in 10 years. The city now had wider roads, more cars, even more motorcycles, bigger malls, plenty department stores. Fancy stores made up for the absence of a king at the end of Kingsway. The international airport was an obvious exception, of course, but that was hardly a deterrent. He was afraid that the city had changed too much for him. He didn’t have friends in Kathmandu; those he’d left behind in Nepalgunj had changed trades and political parties. New York was his home now.

In New York, Mr. Neupane had friends: restaurant workers, cab drivers, neighbors and journalists who made the daily trek to the Nepali-owned deli for tea and gossip. Pretty much like Nepalis in Nepal, Nepalis in America were horrible team players, he surmised from the news discussed at the chiya pasal. In addition to accounts of the usual bickering among members of the numerous all-Nepali associations and committees, regulars at the deli were treated to tales of uxorious men and loose women. Despite these accounts being narrated by a member—almost always male—of one of the ostensibly Nepali organizations, the audience could be relied upon to propagate every salacious detail of the rumor. Drunk on their dollars, they found any number of occasions to wash down gossip and plates of momos with Johnnie Walker Blue Labels.

Mr. Neupane, without many relations in New York, enjoyed the company of these seasoned tattlers. These were the people he had come to call his own. They had their shortcomings, but who didn’t, anyway? After all, it was the Jhapali on the second floor who always invited him to trips to Bear Mountain and Lake George. He had gone apple-picking with the family of the assistant cook at the restaurant. The deli-owner had driven him to half the weddings that he’d been to in a decade. And Bhadraji, who had won the visa lottery, always offered to bring him goat meat from the slaughterhouse in Jamaica.

It was on one of these outings that Mr. Neupane went to Coney Island. They made barbecues on the beach for the Fourth of July; he’d brought shish kebab from his restaurant. He swam in the ocean and drank Corona. He got home at 10 that night, and the only thing he could think about was how much he’d miss the sea if—not when—he went back. Such a silly thing to worry about, he thought—going back to Nepal.