I think my friend is an epitome of loneliness. He sits alone in his room, with clothes and newspapers scattered all around. It is a place he has called home for most of his teenage years — a small cramped place,

the dirty walls left unpainted. The dull colour of cement screams at him. The walls are blackened with dust that strays inside from the street, and all he has for furniture is a steel locker, a cheap wooden bed, and a bamboo coat hanger.

The quilt is covered with white muslin, now turned dirty with use, and perhaps it smells of sweat and dirt, and other mysterious stuff. My friend doesn’t mind. It is almost winter, and it is cold in the evening. He no longer feels like watching TV, which is in the living room downstairs, and he does not feel like looking out of the window. The sun has just set, and had he looked, he would have seen the dull sky outside, turning dark in a slow-moving sequence, the same way one might feel getting old, and disconnected from the world.

When I visit him, he is lying on bed. “I feel strange in my man (heart-mind),” he says. He also complains about the pain in his head that “feels heavy and strange.” He is trying to forget about the US, and about his wife. Something bad has happened to him in the weeks following the Dashain festival. Nor can he forget that he is in Nepal, and he has nothing to do: he has no money and no job. The only thing that drives him is perhaps the will to keep going, until he gets the energy to do something. He knows he cannot let go.

Every evening, he has been watching television, hoping for something. He doesn’t know what he is waiting for, but he wants to hear something good. He doesn’t know what he

wants to hear. But he believes that the news might give him something to go by, some hope. Was he expecting something like Warren Buffet deciding to give him a billion dollars? But nothing comes.

The winter leaves are still sprouting. Out in the balcony, my friend’s brother has planted aloe Vera.One of the plants has grown thick full leaves, shooting up a long stem that produces a sudden burst of orange petals. Inside the room, it is getting cooler, and there, standing between his bed and the balcony door is me, his friend.