Kul Bahadur Rana

“Where did you grow up — what was the place like, and what is your earliest memory of it?”

I grew up in a small village called Tansen, in the Palpa district of Nepal. The houses were made of mud and the streets were narrow and winding. My earliest memory is sitting on the stone steps outside our house at dawn, watching my mother light the clay stove to make tea. The smoke would rise slowly into the cool mountain air.

6 January 2026

“What was your family like when you were young — who did you live with, and what do you remember most about them?”

I lived with my parents, my two older brothers, and my grandmother — everyone called her Aamaa. My father was a quiet man. He worked the fields from sunrise to sunset and rarely spoke unless it was important. My grandmother was the opposite — she never stopped talking. She was the one who filled our house with stories, songs, and the smell of ghee and cardamom.

12 January 2026

“How far was the school from your home, and what was the journey like?”

The school was three miles from home, up and over a hill that felt enormous when I was small. I walked it barefoot most mornings with my older brother. We would stop to pick wild berries from the bushes along the path. In the monsoon season the path turned to mud, and we would arrive at school with red earth up to our knees.

19 January 2026

“Was there a teacher who influenced you — someone whose words stayed with you?”

There was a teacher named Mr. Sharma. He taught mathematics, and he had studied in Kathmandu. He once told me something that stayed with me my whole life — "Your mind is the only thing no one can ever take from you." I was ten years old when I heard those words.

28 January 2026

“What was your first job, and what did it teach you about the world?”

At seventeen, I started working at a tea shop near the bus station. I served glasses of sweet milk tea to travellers passing through town. I learned that people from every kind of life — merchants, pilgrims, government officers — all sat down at the same wooden bench and drank the same tea. It taught me that no one is as different as they appear from the outside.

4 February 2026

“How did you meet your wife — what do you remember about the first time you saw her?”

I met Sunita at a wedding in a neighbouring village. She was helping carry food to the guests. I noticed her because she was laughing — a real, unselfconscious laugh — at something her cousin had said. I asked for an introduction that same evening. We only spoke for a few minutes, but I thought about her for weeks afterwards.

11 February 2026

“What do you want your children to know about how you raised them?”

What I wanted most for my children was for them to feel safe. Not just from danger, but safe to be themselves — safe to fail, to change their minds, to not yet know who they were. I did not have that as a child, and I felt the absence of it my whole life. Everything I did as a father was me trying to give them something I never had a name for until I was old enough to understand it.

19 February 2026