Putting the water to boil, Nadia remembered that she was supposed to call someone about something, but she couldn’t remember who or about what. Was it a gender specialist for next week’s women’s rights seminar? About trafficking, rape, child prostitution, domestic abuse, the lack of basic rights for Nepali women? This hangover was killing her. With shaking hands she picked up the day’s TheKathmandu Post and scanned the headlines before turning, slowly, to the back pages. There was nothing much in the international news. When she heard the kettle hiss she put down the paper and with some effort made a pot of coffee.She took a cup to the living room, along with the paper. Instead of reading it she examined a potted banyan plant she had bought the previous week. A few fresh leaves had uncurled overnight: delicate and moist, vulnerable. Under her breath she sang to them: “Shall I soar above these hills and peaks?” It was a folk song she had learned on a trek a few months after coming to Nepal, when she believed there were simple solutions to simple problems. “These hills and peaks,” she broke off. She didn’t know the rest of the words.She lifted the coffee to her lips but it was too hot to drink. For a while she looked at the corner of the window ledge, where the egg sacs of spiders had appeared a few weeks back. When would the eggs hatch? She looked awhile at their silky bundles. Then she went back to rereading The Kathmandu Post. The local news was in fine print on the third page. “Woman Considered Witch Forced to Eat Faeces by Villagers.” She put the paper aside and gulped down her coffee.At lunch Nadia flipped through brochures for package holidays to Pattaya, Colombo, Goa. Blue waters, white sand. She thought: one gets so wrapped up in the woes of this country, one forgets how easy it is to leave. An hour’s flight to Delhi, three to Hong Kong and eighteen to the apartment she had given up in Brooklyn eighteen months ago.When she got home from work that evening she found the maid standing on a window ledge, dusting a hard-to-reach corner. It always surprised her how Nepali women could manage in saris: all those pleats and folds did not seem to trip them up. There was such resilience in Nepali women. The maid was lithe despite being middle aged. Nimbly, she stretched across the window ledge and, as Nadia watched on, she reached for the spiders’ egg sacs and picked them off with one deft pinch, killing the larvae inside.That night Nadia got through a bottle of Shiraz scanning United Nations manuals on evacuation provisions in case of emergency.Selected by Mini KrishnanReproduced courtesy of Aleph Book CompanyIllustrations by Siddharth SenguptaAlso Read | The question of styleAlso Read | The day Chacha Nehru diedCONTRIBUTE YOUR COMMENTS