Mahesh

The next morning I had a meeting with Shyam Pokhara, owner of SASANE an organization that helps survivors of Human Trafficking by giving them paralegal training.

In Nepal if you are a victim of human trafficking your family will not accept you back into their home and no one will marry you so most women end up beggars on the street or have to continue prostituting themselves to survive. So as paralegals, not only can they support themselves but they work with the police stations to help other victims because the police wont write up a report for a family of a trafficked relative without charging a fee. And since most victims come from poor rural farming communities, they cannot pay.

To translate Shyam brought Surendra Bdr. Nepali, from the National news Agency. Surendra wears thick coke bottle glasses and laughs all the time. No matter what I said, he laughed. He also shook his head “no” a lot. Especially when he was saying yes. In fact the stronger his yes, the more his head said “no.” So we shared nepali tea and talked about the very serious issue of human trafficking and chuckled our way through the meeting. We arranged to meet at the SASANE offices tomorrow where I will be able to interview some of the women.

It was time to meet Mahesh at Hotel Lucky Star so I grabbed my camera. Mahesh is the skinniest person I have ever met. He is also the sweetest human being on the planet. Love and kindness exude from his eyes and his smile. He decided to take me up to the Bouddhanath. The Bouddhanath is one of the holiest sites in Kathmandu and has one of the largest spherical stupas in the world.

It was a bit touristy for me but I was glad I brought my camera anyway. That is until I discovered I had no battery or card. We walked around for a bit then had pizza on a rooftop restaurant. Mahesh is an interesting young man. He grew up in a small village with eight other siblings. At fifteen he moved to the city on his own to continue his education and to start a business. Now he is 23 and has three shops. He wants to get his degree in management in London then come back to be a business man probably in the clothing business. I asked him how the whole marriage thing worked in Nepal. He has never had a girlfriend or even kissed a girl. He said he doesn’t believe in ‘love’ marriage, only arranged marriage. He said women from the city are too complicated and it’s better to have your parents choose a simple girl from a village. When he is ready his parents will show him some pictures of some girls and he will choose one. The parents will arrange for a family meeting so he can see if he likes her in person. If so then they will get married right away, within a week or two. He said he is in no hurry, he would like to wait until he is 30 and has established his business first. After lunch we returned to his shop and hung out with Ram and some of their friends. There is Dipendra, he is the suave one with two teeth in each spot where most of us only have one. Then there is Mahesh’s nephew who is t

he same age. He is the intellectual handsome one. Another guy has a huge overbite and likes to tell me how beautiful I look today. Ganesh playfully gives me language lessons and Surrendra and I discuss his tour business. We spend hours discussing politics and love. Somehow these two topics blended seamlessly throughout the evening as we devoured delicious bowls of chicken noodle soup with chicken feet and chiapati under a single small lightbulb. Some of the friends came and went and so did the electricity.

When it did we would huddle around a candle and continue our passionate discussions while the din of taxi horns and rickshaw bells harmonized in the background.