Hey Little Boat

The Room at the Rosemary
By Muna Gurung

We were reading Romeo & Juliet while Riya and Kishor were expecting a baby. I would leave school after analyzing “my only love sprung from my only hate” just to find that play out at the Rosemary Guest House where Riya and Kishor were staying.

They were Pasang’s childhood friends from Darjeeling who had run away from home two months before the baby was due. Kishor and Riya were both 18. I was 16 and couldn’t wait to be their age. Pasang and I went to the same school; we had just started seeing each other. We had grown up without any siblings, his mom felt like one child was already one too many and my Aama had suffered a terrible miscarriage before me, so in our late-night phone conversations we dreamed of making tons of babies. 22, to be precise; that number stuck because it was the date when we “got together.” Pasang joked that if we wanted to have all 22 of our own, we’d have to start soon. That winter, we had only learned to undress halfway and kiss with tongue.

Riya was an inch or two over four feet, and at seven months, she appeared stocky, not pregnant. “My mother’s been trying to get me on a diet,” she told me one afternoon. “She says I look like a ball… I couldn’t hide in Darj forever.”

I’ve heard that Darjeeling can feel as big as one’s backyard, so I wasn’t surprised when Riya said that all the doctors in town were either her “uncles'' or “aunties.” Not always related through blood, these doctors were often people who knew her, who might have been her friends’ parents or her neighbours. The lovers couldn’t risk the news travelling all over town, especially when Riya’s parents didn’t approve of Kishor or his family, who in their opinion did the “lowly job” of taking care of the Victoria Hospital grounds and its garbage. 

“Do Kishor’s parents know, then?” I asked Pasang over the phone the first night we checked them into the Rosemary, a slim hotel in Thamel, unrecognizable if not for its bold choice of hot pink paint for its facade.

“Khai, his father does re. But Riya’s father can’t know. He is a local don there who rears his own gang of gundas who can kill Kishor in broad daylight,” Pasang said.

“What is this? Shakespeare?” I scoffed at Pasang.

“It’s what I know.”

So for the next few days, we went to school, made it through the day, and when the last bell rang, we ran out of the gate, hopped onto Pasang’s motorcycle, and, still in our school uniforms, rode through Kathmandu’s traffic into Thamel.

Right before we got to the hotel, we would stop at a small shop and buy instant noodles, biscuits, juice packs, whatever cheap junk we could find. Pasang would spend all his pocket money on fuel for his motorbike, so I started swiping cash from Aama every morning before school. I would oil the hinges of the Godrej metal almari the night before because it was there that she tucked away fresh banknotes wrapped in Baba’s plaid handkerchief. As soon as she’d go to the bathroom, I would run into her bedroom and steal a few notes. But was I really stealing if I was acting out of compassion, trying to feed two homeless adults and an unborn child?

/

The first time I met Riya and Kishor, I thought they were rock stars. Kishor wore a black leather jacket and had long wavy hair. He had deep dimples that made him look like a Nepali Jon Bon Jovi. When he spoke, he never looked me in the eye, but he had an incredible ability to make us feel like we were just gathering at his place for a dinner party. Riya’s hair came up to her chin; it was uneven and fluffy, and it hid the kind of cheeks you wanted to squeeze all day long, like smooth satin pin cushions.

The room had a thin maroon carpet that felt sticky to our bare feet. Parts of the carpet were balding, revealing a dark grey cement floor. The twin beds were pushed together to create one large bed in the corner of the room, and there was always a pillow propped upright, like a disembodied torso, leaning against the wall. The backs of the two single sofas faced the bed, creating a space that  felt like a makeshift living room. Hungry from the day at school, Pasang and I would walk into the room with Wai-Wais, coconut biscuits and packets of Tang. As Riya and I prepared the orange drink in small paper cups, Pasang and Kishor broke the Wai-Wai noodles into smaller pieces and mixed in the masala powder and dollops of onion-flavored ghee that came with it. We laid the coconut biscuits out on paper plates. As we ate, we talked about everything but never directly about the baby.

“This Riya is crazy about me, she just pretends like she isn’t,” Kishor said to us. Riya rolled her eyes as she took a sip of her Tang. “But she chose me. You should see all the boys who are still after her.”

“Don’t forget the girls!” Riya added. Kishor and Pasang both laughed.

“Pasang and I go a long way, you know that right?” Kishor asked me. Although we had been introduced, it was clear that Kishor didn’t remember my name. “We grew up running around half-naked in the hospital quarters where we lived.” Pasang had told me briefly about Kishor’s mother, the Victoria Hospital’s gardener. She made Darjeeling’s most stubborn and high-maintenance orchids grow with such ease and elegance everywhere around the hospital’s premises.

“Did you guys not have clothes or something?” Riya asked, smirking, her hand holding her bump.

“What we had was a small plastic pool some white Russian volunteer had donated. So all the children stood in line to take a dip. We were half-naked because we were ever ready to jump into that pool,” Kishor said, pushing his hair behind his ear. Pasang was blushing. I looked at him and suddenly felt a warmth for him I hadn’t before—a half-naked tiny Pasang in Darjeeling waiting in line to get into a plastic tub.

“Imagine all the pee in that pool!” Riya squealed.

“Eew,” I let out. It was the first and only thing I said that day.

“It was what made the water warm, meri jaan,” Kishor crooned, leaning over towards Riya, planting a big kiss on her forehead first and then her belly. “Imagine all the pee this thing is creating in you! Like your own personal swimming pool of pee!”

“Chiiiiii!” Riya squealed even louder, playfully pushing Kishor away.

I guess this is what being a couple looks like, I thought. We would spend hours just talking about things that didn’t require too much energy. It was usually Riya and Kishor putting up a little show for us, sometimes flirting with each other, and I left that room always wanting to hold Pasang’s hand. I thought, maybe it’s easy to be with someone. To have a child. Run away from home. No worries. No care in the world. How romantic.

At night over the phone, I would ask Pasang all the things I couldn’t during the day.

“So, when did they do it?”

“She’s seven months, so count backwards.”

“Were they drunk?”

“Kishor says it was their first time.”

“Do they want it?”

“Khai, they keep changing their minds.”

/

 “No, not today,” Pasang said, as I climbed on his motorbike. “I need you to see Riya on your own.”

“And you?” I asked. But he didn’t say anything for a while. He wasn’t looking at me. He was squinting his eyes beyond the school gates, towards the shop where he bought his loose cigarettes, where a group of men and a youngish woman were drinking tea.

“That lady called me last night. Aruna—she is apparently Riya’s cousin who lives in Kathmandu. I think that’s her,” he said, now wiping his side mirror and looking at me. “When you get to Riya, don’t tell her about Aruna. Get her to eat something first. Then, if Kishor is there, ask him to meet me at Lemon Slice.”

“And Riya?”

“Just stay with her until I call.”

“I need to be home by 7.”

My parents weren’t as cool as Pasang’s. He was raised by a single mother who was a doctor but let him smoke at home. He was allowed to have female friends visit him and when I went over to his place, we could sit in his room with the door shut! I had a curfew and if I was even a minute late, Aama would stand with a cordless phone on our terrace, watching out for me, ready to call the police. But as soon as I made it home, although relieved to see me, Aama’s worry would harden into rage. She would lecture me about neglect, curse upon me a daughter as unpredictable as the wind so that I would one day know how she felt. After a while, she would soften into a story, always the same story about how I mustn’t forget that she dreamed me into being. How after the miscarriage, she had told the doctor to get rid of her womb, all of it. The doctor, a son of a fisherman from Pokhara, had smiled and told her that there were two things that a fisherman could do when a storm arrived. They could row with the current towards a shore, stop and watch the storm build and die down. Or they could throw their paddles at the storm, and hope to win but also be ready to lose.

“They are dangerous people. Remember what I told you about Riya’s father?” Pasang asked.

“So, why meddle? Let’s go to Thamel together, tell Riya about this mess, and you can drop me off.”

“I can’t just lead them to Riya and Kishor. Don’t you understand?”

I didn’t, but I admired Pasang’s loyalty to Kishor. Later, it would be the very thing that would break us up. But right then, I felt close to love for him.

“I’m scared,” I said as I climbed off the bike.

“Here, look at this,” he said, fishing out a small black rectangular box from his jacket pocket. “This is a pager. Whenever you are scared, find a phone and call this number and send a message to me,” he said, peeling the masking tape with a number off the box and pasting it on my wrist. “I will call you right back. Wherever you are. I promise.”

He patted the area where the tape sat on my skin, the edges curling up away from me.

/

I guess it all started when Pasang and some of his friends began prank-calling girls from our school. They would put on different American accents and rap over the phone, but I was the only one who called them out on how horrifying their act was—the word choice, the rhyme, the rhythm, everything:

Gimme yo’ sunshine,
I gib you da paradise mah gurl,
We drank some moonshine,
I take you all around the world. 

But what I didn’t admit to Pasang for the longest time was how I thought the word “moonshine” literally meant light from the moon, and that to drink it was to consume it poetically. The next day, I found a little note in my desk that gave me directions that led me to the window, then another note there that brought me to a shelf where our class teacher kept all our journals, then yet another note that led me to the shoe rack outside the classroom, and eventually led me to my own left shoe. Stuffed in it was a crumpled piece of paper with the rap lyrics spoken over the phone the night before with the title: “Where it belongs. Under your feet.”

We started spending lunch time together, then our time after school, then he started to drop me off at home on his motorcycle. But I believed in none of it. Or rather, I didn’t invest myself much in it because I was skinny with acne and a sizable gap in between my two front teeth. The boys in the class called me kaalo ghoda, a horse with a long dark face who outran them all. Also, they had begun to make whirring noises imitating a vacuum cleaner whenever they were around me—I later found out that what they meant was that my face was so flat that it looked as though a vacuum cleaner from behind my head was sucking all the features in so that they looked like one of those lenses we learn about in science class, concave. I knew that it was only a matter of time before Pasang would come to his senses and dump me. He was tall, had thick hair, and a blue-and-white dirt bike. His girlfriend before me was the beautiful fair-skinned, freckled, Angela, who had left our school to go to a better international school.

But a year later, after all this, Pasang and I will wander off on a trek one evening and find a long step made of large stones. From there, we will see part of Annapurna I in the distance, silver and blue in the evening light. I will sit beside him and it will be cold, so we will move closer. He will have a flask of warm rum on him and we will sip it as it gets dark around us. The clouds will roll over the Annapurna and soon cover it. We will sit quietly, tired from the day’s walk, warmed from a large plate of rice and dal and cauliflower earlier for dinner. The rum will make me so cozy, so comfortable, I will want to sleep. I will put my head on Pasang’s shoulder and he will wrap his arms around me. Then, I will turn towards him and place both my legs across his lap. Closing my eyes, for the first and last time, I will feel completely at ease with Pasang. He will whisper a Bon Jovi song: “Sitting here, just watching you sleep, wish I could slip inside and be, in some technicolor dream…”

/

When I entered the room at the Rosemary, remnants of an argument lingered. The room smelled like Lux soap, flowers, and chemicals all at once. Riya got up from the bed where she was propped up against the wall and shuffled to the bathroom. Kishor was walking in from the small verandah outside, a useless waste of space, plastered with pigeon poop. How sour must it have been in the room for him to step out there?

“Pasang asked you to meet him at Lemon Slice,” I muttered, looking at the closed bathroom door.  Was Riya okay?

Kishor didn’t say anything. He just grabbed his black Jansport from the sofa, tucked his hair behind his ears, walked right past me and out the open door.

When Riya came out of the bathroom, she didn’t ask for Kishor. She sat on the bed and poured a glass of water.

Then fluffing up one of the pillows, she asked, “How was school?”

“School was school,” I said. “I got samosas.” I held the paper bag up in my hand, but she didn’t take it from me.

“I used to be class-first, you know,” she said. “Before all this.” She was pointing at her belly. Her thin cotton kurta was faded blue over her bump, then something under her moved.

“It’s moving.” I said, moving closer to her.

“This stupid child is probably hungry,” she said. She looked and sounded like a different person from the Riya I had talked to yesterday, joking, laughing, caressing her bump. She lifted her kurta up to reveal her skin, her belly button looked taut and pushed outwards, a dotted line of hair moved towards her unbuttoned pants. Then, I saw the skin move again in uneven ripples.

“You have an alien inside of you,” I said. I didn’t mean it. But it made Riya laugh loud and long as she slowly fell backwards onto the pillows.

She grew quiet, and then said, “Sometimes, I wish this thing would just come out while I’m in the toilet. I would just flush it down Kathmandu’s sewer.” She pushed down her right index finger as though pressing an invisible button. “I wouldn’t even look back.”

I thought I misheard. Was she joking?

She got a faraway look in her face, and for a moment, I thought of a young pregnant Aama. She must only have been a year or two older than Riya when she lost her first child. The child who still visits her dreams today, the child who is evoked each time Aama calls for me, for she calls me not chami, which would simply mean “daughter,” but instead chamichyon, “smaller daughter,” the one that came after the first. I wondered if Aama ever had the kind of thoughts that Riya did—even by accident, even if just for a moment. I wondered then, what would happen if Riya decides to fall in love with her child. Would she apologise?

I placed the bag of samosas on her bedside table; the oil had created marks like uncharted continents all over the paper bag. The wet crumbling sound of the paper was dramatically loud. I wanted to disappear. Or have Pasang appear. Riya’s face became serious, and then she did something weird: she shook her head a little, as though coming back to the room, then she looked at her belly long and hard, and she spat at it.

“I’m a good person.” She said. “I don’t know why God is punishing me like this.” She looked up at me. “Who gets pregnant the first time they have sex? The first time! Like come on. I am not even a slut. And I know plenty of sluts back home, I mean my own sister is one, and she’s not pregnant. What the fuck!” I wished the tears that had gathered in her eyes would hurry on down her cheeks, so that I could wipe them with my hands, so that I could do something, anything.

“You’re a good person, Riya,” I said. “And your baby knows that.”

“Don’t call this monster my baby,” she said. “It’s ruining my life! I am supposed to be enjoying my days in floral skirts, drinking milkshakes with umbrellas or something. And look at me now. I can’t even walk down those bloody stairs outside this room to make a phone call. The guy at the reception looks up at me helplessly, like come on down here, fat lady, what is your problem? THIS is my problem,” she said, pointing at her bump. “This. This. This.”

She formed two tight fists and started punching herself rhythmically, in time with each “this”—first her knees, then her thighs, and when she lifted her hands to hit her belly, I grabbed her wrists. Riya’s wrists were small, they fit right in my palms. She was struggling to loosen my grip and in that moment, I became aware of how I barely knew her. We had only met a few days ago. Yet I felt comfortable sliding behind her. I wrapped my legs around her waist, and tucked my feet under her thighs, and that was when she began to wail. She lowered her head and stopped struggling to free her hands. I let go of her wrists but held her hands, her palms wet from sweat. I didn’t know why, but in that moment, a song that Aama would always sing came to me, a song about a boat out in a storm.  I whispered the song to Riya and slowly let go of her hands. They landed gently on her belly in which her child slept swimming, probably like the images I had seen in our biology textbook, eyes shut, in a ball, an astronaut.

“I’m scared,” Riya muttered.

I pulled down my left coat sleeve to see if the tape Pasang had stuck on my wrist was still there. Its edges had caught bits of lint from my school blazer and had become navy blue. I peeled it off my wrist and pasted it across Riya’s forearm. What little glue was left on the tape caught on to her arm hair. “If you call this number and leave a message there for me. I will call you back. Anytime. Anywhere,” I said. Not knowing quite how I would do that. But knowing that it was the only thing I could offer Riya.

It was getting dark outside and I was already imagining Aama pacing the terrace looking out for me. Riya’s body grew heavy against my chest. Was she falling asleep? I didn’t move. Then suddenly she got up.

“We should eat something,” she announced and grabbed the bag of samosas. I gestured towards the restroom and got up to use it. When I returned to  the room, she had spread newspaper on the floor and created a makeshift picnic spot for us with samosas on two paper plates, puddles of red tamarind sauce on the paper bag the samosas came in, two paper cups of orange Tang and a Kit Kat bar. “Cheers to us!” she said, lifting her paper cup. “Fuck the boys!” Then she started giggling. “I mean, don’t fuck them. You will end up like me.” She started laughing at her own bad joke. It was like she was back to being Riya from the night before.

When Kishor didn’t show up, I went to the reception and paged Pasang. I waited by the reception desk. The man there, a skinny young person who wore a sharply-ironed, blue shirt, was looking up towards Riya’s room.

“How is didi doing?” he asked pointing upwards with his lips. “She ok?”

“She’s fine, why?” I asked. People should mind their own business.

“I hear her cry every time dai leaves, so I ask. Today, no dai?” he asked.

I didn’t know why he was speaking to me in English. So I replied in Nepali, “She’s fine. Sometimes when people are laughing really hard, they can sound like they are crying.”

“Well, in that case, don’t you think it’s weird for someone to laugh very hard as soon as they are all by themselves?” he asked.

I turned towards the phone in an attempt to ignore him. Just then, the phone rang. I picked it up. “Hello, Pasang?”

But it wasn’t Pasang. He didn’t call that night. But I knew I couldn’t leave Riya all by herself, so I asked the receptionist if I could take the phone upstairs. He told me that he would never allow such a thing usually and that he was only letting me do it because there was a sad pregnant lady involved. So I took the phone up to the room and dialed home. I made up an elaborate story to my parents about how I was staying over at a girlfriend’s place because we had a big exam the next day and she had a tutor coming to her place to go over all the lessons and that the two of us were going to study all night. I told Riya to pretend to be that friend and to speak to Aama. I was impressed with Riya’s use of honorific Nepali, and maybe it was because of how “cultured” she sounded that my parents relented. Aama only had one question, “And what about your toothbrush and underwear?”

That night Riya did my homework for me. She said she actually missed going to school. In between math sums, she told me about life in a convent school, the strict rules, the disciplining by the sisters they called “rabbits”.

“Why?” I asked.  

“You know Catholic nuns wear that cloth covering their heads? It’s called a habit, which rhymes with….?”

“Eh, eh. So convent school was not like Sister Act,” I said, referring to the movie that had just come out that year. But Riya just shook her head. It was clear she didn’t know what I was talking about.

She sat on the floor with the notebook on the bed, her legs folded to the side, leaning her cheek on her left forearm, her mouth slightly open, writing away. For a moment, we both became the two girls we were supposed to be, studying for our exams the day after. Suddenly, she complained about a sharp pain right under her chest above the bump. “It’s probably heartburn,” she said. She began letting out long burps. She put the pen down and sat up against the wall, her legs stretched out in front of her, her eyes shut tight in pain. Her ankles and feet were swollen, her toenails dug deep into her skin.

There was no sign of Kishor. “Should we be worried?” I asked Riya.

She waved her hands as though to say, “Let it be.”

When we got into bed, she laid on her side facing towards me. “Sometimes I have a hard time breathing, so I might snore. Kishor says the soundtrack makes his dreams quite adventurous.”

“I sleep through everything,” I said.

Because the beds were joined together, there was a long strip of gap between the two mattresses, so I could feel cold air seeping up from beneath us. I turned away from Riya and wondered if I could fall asleep. I was angry at Pasang for not calling back. What good was his pager? Or his word?

“Do you know how it works?” Riya asked from behind me.

“How what works?”

“The baby coming out and all,” she said.

“No clue,” I said.  

  /

The next morning, when I woke up, Riya was lacing up her Converse. She was in a yellow floral kurta with a large shawl wrapped around her that made her bump inconspicuous. Her duffel bag was packed tight like a short sausage. There was a woman standing near the door. I was startled, but Riya came to my side and held my hand as though to comfort me.

“I’m going home,” she said.

“To Darjeeling?” I asked. “But they’ll kill you!”

“Who?” the woman spoke. “Who will kill her?”

I suddenly felt stupid. Montague. Capulet. Romeo. Juliet. “But the baby’s due anytime now,” I whispered, unsure if the woman knew about Riya’s pregnancy. 

“She knows,” Riya said, looking at the woman. “She’s my cousin Aruna. She’s here to get me. I’m going home with her. I don’t want to hide anymore.” Maybe it was the shawl, the morning light or the bright kurta, but Riya felt like she had grown up overnight and become a woman.

And then, as though to break that feeling, she did something really weird and Riya. She ruffled my hair and told me to get up, go to school and not to fuck around with the boys. “Try girls or something else,” she said. And I don’t know now if this really happened, or if I was indeed half-asleep, but I swear she floated away from me, as though swimming through air and out the door, laughing, her body like fluff through space.

/           

Pasang tried to speak to me at school but I wasn’t interested. Kishor was sad, he said. He had needed company, he said. He was feeling lonely and scared, he said. So they got drunk, he said. I’m sure it was all true. But in that moment, all I could hear was Riya’s fuck the boys ringing in my head.

A few weeks later, I heard that Kishor left for Darjeeling.

A few weeks later, Pasang and I broke up.

A few weeks later, we were done with Romeo and Juliet.

/

For the most part, life was back to normal. Aama had started to lock her bedroom door, so I was no longer getting into her Godrej almari. At school, it was the usual eight periods a day peppered with the science teacher’s bad breath, the math teacher’s incomprehensible way of teaching formulae, and the Nepali teacher’s anger. That month, Baba won a year-long cable subscription through a lucky draw he entered at his high school’s centennial celebrations, which meant MTV for me.

Whenever I was not doing homework, chores, or helping Aama in the kitchen, I was allowed to watch MTV. A band called Nirvana was playing a lot on the channel. The lead singer was an unwashed-looking white man who barely opened his mouth when he sang, but when he did sing, I suddenly realised that I knew all the songs because these were songs that the boys in class had been practicing on the guitar during lunch breaks.

When I saved up enough pocket money, I went to TikTok in New Road to buy their album. When I saw the cover of the album, I burst out laughing. It was a photo of a newborn naked white baby in what looked like a swimming pool, eyes wide, smirking, swimming towards a dollar bill in a fishhook.

And just like that, Riya came back to me. I thought about the baby. Was it still swimming inside her?

For weeks after Riya left, I thought about what she had asked me right before we went to sleep on her last night in Kathmandu. “How does it work?” she had asked. And I had scoured through all my science textbooks to figure it out for her, for us. In the reproduction chapter of our biology textbook there was hardly anything on the actual process of childbirth. There was the word “contraction”, and a mention of “amniotic fluid”, but there was no mention of swollen ankles, heartburn, or what those contractions might feel like. I saw Riya’s face in my mind, all scrunched up, her eyes shut in pain. I searched and searched and realized that so much of our pain was not catalogued, not explained. It was missing.

I listened to the Nirvana album from start to finish and studied the cover. Was it really true that babies knew how to swim right out of the womb? Did Riya know that the place where her baby floated was called her womb and not her stomach?

While helping Aama prep for dinner one evening, I asked her to tell me the story of her miscarriage again. But this time, instead of asking her what the baby looked like afterwards in the jar of brine, or what the doctor from Pokhara said, or how it all happened, or how she decided to still have me after that miscarriage, I asked her what the whole thing had felt like to her.

“Like someone had ripped my liver right out of me,” she said, chopping cilantro into confetti. “But I am glad I withstood the storm, chamichyon. I’m happy I didn’t give up.”

I had never asked for it, but I realised that Aama was apologizing.

/

Late one night, the phone rang and Aama brought the cordless to my room. It was Pasang.

“Riya just paged me,” he said. “She wants you to call her right away.”

I took down the number from him and then I explained to my parents that I had to call my study buddy. That she was actually in Darjeeling having a baby. They looked shocked, but the beautiful thing about adults was that sometimes they decided to be adults. Without asking any question, Baba simply pressed a few numbers that unlocked the phone for international calls, and then walked away to give me some privacy.

Why did she want to talk to me? What was I going to say to her? Was I nervous?

“Riya,” I said, as soon as she picked up the phone.

“I’m at the Victoria right now. It's time, my friend! Some gooey pee water shit just came out of me. But, man, I’m a total Humpty Dumpty right now,” she said. She sounded out of breath, and I could hear what sounded like bells in the distance, voices in the background, and machinery whirring, beeping. “Are you still going to school and wearing your cute ironed uniform and stuff?”

I laughed. “Yah, but no one to do my homework for me now.”

She grew silent. I thought I had lost her.

“I’ll be fine, right?” she asked.

“Of course,” I said. “Don’t be scared,” I told her. “It might feel like someone’s ripping your liver right out of you, but you’ll be fine. Cause you’re Riya.”

She laughed her Riya laugh. I could see her in my mind, her head falling slightly backward, her mouth wide open. “Hey listen, can you sing me that song?”

“Which song?” I asked.

“That one about the boat in the sea,” she said.

“Now?”

But Riya didn’t answer. I could feel her press the phone against her ear because all the background noise dimmed right then. Only the sound of her breathing came through, like a metronome. 

I closed my eyes to go back to the room at the Rosemary the night before Riya left. How I was holding her like an egg, terrified that she would crack open.  I opened my mouth to sing the song and as I sang, I realized what Riya was doing. How had she known that I needed to be held, too?  That I had needed to sing this song as much as she needed to hear it.  

Hey little boat, little boat
Out in the dark, in the stormy  waters of the sea—
Hey, little boat, little boat
Out on the waves, rolling  waves where you are free—
Hey little boat, little boat
Out in the wind, howling wind, how far will it carry? 
Hey little boat, paper boat,
Out on your way, on your long, long way to me.

Muna Gurung is a writer, translator, and educator based in Kathmandu, Nepal. Her translation of Sulochana Manandhar’s poems, Night, was published by Tilted Axis Press in 2019. She has edited over a dozen children’s books, and is the founder of KathSatha. When not writing or teaching, Muna runs an inter-generational pickle company called ĀMĀKO.