On this time’s visit to Letang, to my parents-in-law’s, we (my wife and I) didn’t see some familiar faces at the house. They were the lodgers at my parents-in-law’s house when we last visited. Instead, we saw some new faces in the tenement rooms. Some of them were bright and some others were gloomy.

On the second day, my mother-in-law shared a gloomy story about one of the gloomy faces we had seen the previous day on the floor below. In a room, there were a skinny pale-faced lady, a fat brown complexioned burly man and a couple of elderly man and woman. The skinny lady was not more than 30, but she had many wrinkles in her face. She remained in her bed almost all the time, and we didn’t see her come out of the room. She spoke softly. Actually, she looked very weak.

My in-laws were well-informed about their plight that the woman was suffering from her both kidneys’ failure. Unfortunately, their former house lady had evacuated them from her house thinking that the patient was going to die. Moreover, my mother-in-law was informed about them by the same house lady. But they had been lying to her saying that the lady was suffering from chronic gastritis.

It’s a superstitious belief rampantly found in the Nepalese society that if a person dies, the house becomes impure. Therefore, a house lady often treats the seriously ill renters inhumanely, and expels them out of her house fearing that they might die any moment. But my mother-in-law seemed not moved by the fear psychosis of the possible death at her house. Rather she sounded firm in belief that everyone has the right to die peacefully if one has to. I read her mind and found to be sure that she was not, not at any cost, going to ask the sufferers to leave her house just because the cruel death was lurking above the skinny lady’s head. I felt proud of my mom-in-law for her kind heart and great conviction. :)