Coming home to a country I’d never seen: Anita’s return

“My parents left Kathmandu in 1979. I grew up on their Nepal — the smell of mustard oil, Dashain phone calls, a black-and-white photo of a stupa on the stair landing. At 41, I finally went to meet it.”

“What undid me wasn’t the mountains. It was the small accuracy of everything: the stair-landing stupa was Swayambhu, and climbing its steps I realised I already knew the way my grandmother must have walked them.”

“We built the trip around family — a Tihar evening with cousins I’d never met, my father’s school lane in Patan, and then, for me, the Everest flight he never took. I cried at the window. The pilot pretended not to notice.”