Between Two Worlds in the Himalayas

The first thing I remember is the buffalo’s tail.

It struck the wooden wall of the hut just before dawn — an uneven, rhythmic thud that seemed less like noise and more like a signal that the day had already begun without me. Five in the morning. I didn’t know that then. Time, in that place, felt like something loose and unanchored, no longer governed by clocks or schedules.

I was eighteen years old, and I had travelled to a remote Himalayan village near Pokhara in Nepal to volunteer.

Back in Britain, my mother was dying of pancreatic cancer.

I did not yet know how to hold those two realities in the same mind.

The journey from Kathmandu had taken hours on roads that narrowed until they barely qualified as roads at all. Eventually there were only footpaths, then the sense of paths fading altogether. Luggage stopped being something I carried and became something I simply endured.

When I arrived, the village did not announce itself. It emerged gradually — clusters of homes, animals moving between them, smoke rising from cooking fires. It looked less like a planned settlement and more like something that had grown into place over time.

I had arrived thinking I understood distance.

I did not.

A different kind of time

My host family were called Laxman and Sita.

They did not introduce themselves in any formal way. There was no explanation of roles or expectations. They simply began including me in their routines as if my presence required no justification.

Sita placed food in front of me without asking whether I was hungry. Laxman nodded rather than spoke, as though language was not the primary means by which agreement was reached.

The food was simple: dal, roti, buffalo milk in metal cups that stayed cold long after they were held. It arrived in the same way each day, without variation or ceremony. At first I tried to analyse it, to ask questions, to locate myself within it. After a while, I stopped.

Language did not fully reach me there. I knew fragments of words, gestures, and patterns of behaviour, but most communication took place elsewhere — in timing, repetition, presence.

On my second morning, Sita handed me a sari.

It belonged, she told me, to their daughter. It was an intense shade of magenta that looked almost out of place against the muted tones of the landscape. I remember holding it and not knowing whether it was an invitation or simply an act of practicality.

I wore it anyway.

Not because I understood what it meant, but because refusal would have required an explanation I could not yet give.

Outside, nobody reacted. There was no comment, no correction, no acknowledgement. That absence of reaction created its own form of permission.

What I had left behind

At the time, I did not fully articulate what was happening at home. It existed in fragments rather than sentences.

My mother was in hospital. The illness was progressing. My father was struggling with alcoholism. There were decisions being made, conversations I was not part of, a future that was narrowing in ways I could not yet understand.

I had left Britain in the middle of that unfolding.

In Nepal, those facts did not disappear. But they became less immediate, as if distance had temporarily softened their edges.

What replaced them was something else: routine.

Morning began before light. Animals moved first. People followed. The day did not feel like it was starting; it felt like it was already underway when I entered it.

There was no sense of urgency in the way I had been used to. Tasks were completed steadily, without interruption or emphasis. Even mistakes seemed to be absorbed rather than corrected.

It was not that life was easier there.

It was that it was less interrupted.

Kesab and the hillside

In the afternoons, I would walk with a man named Kesab, who worked with silk.

He did not so much guide me as allow me to follow him. The path we took up the hillside was uneven and often disappeared entirely. We continued anyway, relying on familiarity that belonged to him, not to me.

From higher up, the village appeared smaller, almost temporary. Smoke rose in thin lines from cooking fires. Figures moved between homes. Everything suggested continuity rather than permanence.

Beyond it, the Himalayas cut across the horizon in a line that did not seem to belong to the same category of reality.

We would often stop speaking.

Not because there was nothing to say, but because speech felt unnecessary in the presence of something that large.

It was there, on those hillsides, that I became most aware of how far I was from the structures that had defined my life until then: school, ambition, expectation, progression. They did not feel absent. They felt suspended, as if they belonged to a different version of reality.

And yet I knew they were still waiting for me.

The presence of absence

At night, lying in the small hut, I would hear the buffalo shifting against the wall, the occasional voices outside, the low sounds of a place continuing without concern for my understanding of it.

It was in those moments that my thoughts often returned home.

To hospital corridors.

To conversations I had not been part of.

To the knowledge that something irreversible was happening while I was here, thousands of miles away, eating simple meals and walking up hills.

The dissonance was difficult to name.

I was not absent from my own life.

But I was also not fully inside it.

That tension — between presence and distance — became the emotional structure of the days.

Kindness without explanation

What I remember most clearly, in retrospect, is not any single dramatic moment, but the consistency of care that required no interpretation.

Food appeared without justification.

Space was made for me without discussion.

Silence was not awkward; it was simply part of how things were.

There is a tendency, when describing travel like this, to reach for words such as “transformative.” But that does not feel accurate.

Nothing was resolved.

Nothing was healed.

What existed instead was a kind of temporary suspension of definition.

I was not required to be anything in particular there — not a student, not a daughter anticipating loss, not a visitor performing curiosity. I was simply present, accommodated within a set of routines that continued whether or not I understood them.

That, in itself, felt unusual.

Departure

Leaving the village did not feel like a conclusion.

There was no ceremony, no articulation of significance. Only packing, movement, and a gradual shift in location.

Sita gave me food for the journey.

Laxman nodded.

Kesab stood at a distance, as he often did, neither approaching nor withdrawing.

The road back began in the same way the journey had arrived: slowly, unevenly, without clear boundaries.

After

In the years since, I have often tried to locate what changed during that time in Nepal.

It is difficult to point to a single answer.

My mother died not long afterwards. Life resumed its own momentum. Education, work, relationships — all of it continued in the way life tends to, regardless of what has been lost or experienced elsewhere.

But I have carried something from that village that does not resolve into a lesson.

It is not gratitude, exactly.

And it is not nostalgia.

It is something more ordinary than either of those things.

A memory of being looked after without explanation.

A memory of being fed without expectation.

A memory of existing, briefly, in a place where care did not require translation.

In a world where so much attention is given to movement, achievement, and transition, it is easy to overlook the quieter forms of human contact that hold people together.

Sometimes kindness does not announce itself as kindness.

Sometimes it simply places food in front of you and waits.