Last year, when cherry blossoms were in season in Japan, I called my father in Nepal. I had not been home for more than two years, and with Dashain approaching, I was wondering whether I could afford to return.
“Should I come home for Dashain this year, Baba?” I asked. “Do you need to ask permission to come home? Of course, come.”
“I came abroad to repay the loan we took to build our house. It is still unpaid. If I come home, the debt will only grow. That is why I am asking.”
“Your elder brother is there to look after all that. And I am here, above your brother.” His words were full of reassurance. I had nothing more to say.
“Who knows who will be alive next year and who won't? You'll get to see everyone. Come home, yes, come.”
He hung up.
After 28 months in Japan, I returned to Nepal for Dashain in 2023. I celebrated the festival with my family and spent a month at home before returning to Japan.
In July 2024, my father died. That October, there would be no Dashain with him.
I often find myself returning to that telephone conversation. Did he somehow know he would not live to see another Dashain? Was that why he had insisted I come home while I still could? When he said, “Who knows who will be alive next year and who won't?”, he may have been speaking about the uncertainty of life in general. But now, those words sound like a farewell he did not know he was giving.
***
It was October 12, 2024. Dashain was underway in Nepal, and we were celebrating it too, thousands of miles away, on an open patch of ground beside the Motoyasu river in Hiroshima, Japan.
The river carries a history of unimaginable suffering. At 8.15am on August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The explosion shook the earth and unleashed intense heat, burning people where they stood. In the chaos that followed, many desperately sought water. Some plunged into the Motoyasu and other nearby rivers, hoping to escape the flames. Many died there.
That day, however, we had gathered beside the river for a different reason. We had come to celebrate Dashain, Nepal’s biggest Hindu festival, far from the country, families and familiar rituals that gave it meaning.
We were in our second year at a Japanese language school. When we first arrived, it took us time to get to know one another. The previous year, in 2023, we had celebrated Dashain at the school, where a Japanese teacher had put tika on our foreheads. Even that small gesture had made a little flower of happiness bloom in a corner of my heart.
This year felt different. We had grown closer, perhaps because we had shared more of one another's struggles. From the following March, in 2025, we would go our separate ways to attend senmon gakkō, or professional training colleges, in different places. After two years of Japanese language classes, moving on to vocational education was the expected next step.
Our time together was drawing to a close, and the festival felt like an occasion to hold on to one another a little longer.
Some friends arrived looking as if they had not slept all night. Others turned up with half-closed eyes, having managed only a few hours of rest. Some came straight from work. Others arrived with their bags packed, saying they would head to work directly from the gathering later that evening.
No one's feet were rested. Even when tired, we had to keep moving. Even when we stumbled, we had to get back up and run towards the distant destinations we had set for ourselves.
And no one's heart was entirely at ease. We missed home, the festivals and the people we had left behind. Everyone carried a private burden. A month's wages barely covered monthly expenses for some of us, while debts back in our villages continued to weigh on our minds. Under such circumstances, even thinking about spending money on a festival could feel like a luxury.
Yet we had gathered here, determined to celebrate.
***
A year earlier, around Dashain in 2023, young Nepalis from different districts had come together in Japan, most of us strangers to one another. In the space of a year, those unfamiliar faces had become familiar, almost like family.
Our friends Sarina, Sabina and Shila brought meat, roti and vegetables they had cooked in their rooms. Before they arrived, the boys' group had already settled in with cans of beer. Some friends, carried away by the drink and the excitement, had begun dancing with their arms around one another.
“Dashain is here!” someone sang, and the others joined in.
For a while, the riverbank became a little piece of Nepal.
We mixed red tika and prepared to bless one another. By age, I turned out to be the oldest among the group. One by one, my friends came forward to receive tika from my hand.
At home, Dashain is marked by rituals that have been passed down through generations. Elders put tika and jamara on the foreheads of younger family members and bless them for health, happiness and prosperity. Families reunite, relatives visit one another, and homes fill with the sounds of conversation, laughter and celebration.
Here, we had none of the usual surroundings. There was no family courtyard, no familiar home, no elder waiting to put tika on our foreheads. We had only one another.
But as each friend bowed his or her head before me, I felt the significance of what we were doing. We were not simply recreating a festival from home. We were trying to preserve a sense of belonging in a place where most things remained unfamiliar.
The tika was a small gesture, but it connected us to our families, our villages and the lives we had left behind.
***
When I lived in Nepal, I had relatives, a house and a place to call home, but little money. In Japan, I had some money, but no home in the same sense and no relatives close at hand.
Life, I have come to realise, is a constant negotiation between what we have and what we lack. The balance never quite settles.
Back in my village, the smell of ripening paddy in the fields was one of the first signs that Dashain was approaching. The crowds heading to the market, buying clothes and provisions for the festival, made the season feel closer. The village would begin to take on a different mood. There was a sense of anticipation in the air.
Abroad, the same season brought a different kind of awareness. A Dashain song playing in the background could suddenly make me miss home so much that it hurt. I thought of friends and relatives, of familiar paths and the ordinary routines I had once taken for granted. Photographs and videos of people playing on traditional Dashain swings, shared repeatedly on social media, stirred up memories I did not know I was carrying so deeply.
When I was in Nepal, I never imagined that living abroad would make me miss so many things. Back then, I thought how wonderful it would be to get the chance to go overseas. I believed that reaching a foreign country would open the door to a better life.
Now, living in Japan, I often find myself thinking how wonderful it would be to go home.
Perhaps that is the nature of longing. When we are in one place, we dream of another. When we have a home but little money, we dream of earning abroad. Once abroad, with some money in our pockets, we long for the home and people we left behind.
We spend our lives reaching for what is missing, often discovering its true value only after it is gone.
***
As I stood beside the Motoyasu river with my friends, celebrating Dashain in October 2024, far from Nepal, I thought again of my father.
In 2023, I had returned home because he had urged me to. I had worried about the debt, the expense of travelling and the money I would lose by taking time off work. He had looked beyond all of that. He wanted me home while we still had the chance to be together.
I did not know then that it would be my last Dashain with him.
When I see photographs of Dashain celebrations in Nepal, I think of my father and the family I left behind. We often postpone going home because of debts, work and the need to save money, believing there will always be another Dashain. But life does not always give us another chance.
Here, beside the Motoyasu River, we celebrate with friends who have become a kind of family. We share food, laughter and tika, yet home remains somewhere far away, in the people and places we miss.
When we lived in Nepal, we dreamed of going abroad. Now, in Japan, we dream of going home. Perhaps that is the strange hunger of life: we long for what we do not have, only to realise its worth when it is out of reach.
Dashain comes every year. Home, however, is not just a place we can return to. Sometimes, it is the people who may not be there when we arrive.