Kul Bahadur Rana

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

Kul Bahadur Rana grew up in a small village called Tansen in the Palpa district of Nepal, where the houses were made of mud and the streets were narrow and winding. His earliest memory is of sitting on the stone steps outside his home at dawn, watching his mother light the clay stove to make tea, the smoke rising 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?”

He lived with his parents, two older brothers, and his grandmother, whom everyone called Aamaa. His father was a quiet man who worked the fields from sunrise to sunset and rarely spoke unless it was important. His grandmother, though, never stopped talking — she was the one who filled the 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 as a child. Kul Bahadur walked it barefoot most mornings with his older brother, stopping to pick wild berries from the bushes along the path. In the monsoon season the path turned to mud, and they would arrive at school with red earth up to their knees.

19 January 2026

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

There was a teacher named Mr. Sharma who taught mathematics and who had studied in Kathmandu. He told Kul Bahadur something that stayed with him his whole life: "Your mind is the only thing no one can ever take from you." He was ten years old when he heard those words.

28 January 2026

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

At seventeen, Kul Bahadur began working at a tea shop near the bus station, serving glasses of sweet milk tea to travellers passing through town. He 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 him 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?”

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

11 February 2026

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

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

19 February 2026