Nhuchhe Man dusted off the three pressure cookers one by one, his emotions a swirling mix of sorrow and relief at the thought of parting with them. To him, like the other kitchen appliances he had bought for each of his three sons, the pressure cookers symbolised an extension to his seven-storeyed house and a ‘strategy’ for realising his dream of keeping his family under one roof until his last days.

He had built the seven-storeyed house by demolishing the family’s four-storeyed ancestral house in Ason, in the heart of Kathmandu. Whenever he had suggested to his father to raze the ancestral house, citing its crumbling state and its small size to accommodate the growing family, and to build a multi-storeyed house on the land with the money earned by selling the family’s fallow agricultural land on the outskirts of the Kathmandu valley, his father had opposed vehemently.

This had embittered his relationship with his father, which lasted until his father’s death. As they had agreed, he and his younger brother pulled down the ancestral house and partitioned the land equally between them. Nhuchhe Man built the seven-storeyed house on his plot of land.

Now, Nhuchhe Man spends his old age on the sixth floor of the house, taking care of his ailing wife, Motimaya. He has rented out the shop on the ground floor and the first floor to a Marwari shopkeeper and has allotted a flat on the three floors above them to each of his three sons. To his woes, however, none of his sons lives there.

A month after his marriage, his eldest son moved to a two-BHK apartment in an outer Ring Road area, which his wife had brought in dowry. Breaking the news of his decision a day before the ‘D-day’ to his parents—which was not unusual because Nhuchhe Man rarely conversed with his wife and sons, he had said that the house in Ason didn’t have a garage where he could park his car when he would buy one and that the streets of Ason were too narrow and too crowded for driving a car. He rented out his flat to a family from outside the valley.

Both of Nhuchhe Man’s younger sons are settled abroad—one in the USA and one in Australia, where they had gone under the pretext of pursuing higher studies. Their flats have been locked, with a few belongings inside and neither has visited their home country ever since they left.

Nhuchhe Man had purchased the three pressure cookers a year after his youngest son was born. He schemed to hand them over to his sons when they married and started families of their own. Although each of them would live in a separate flat, with a kitchen and a bathroom, on a floor in the same building, at least on festivals, all of them would worship in the family puja room and then partake in the feast cooked by his daughters-in-law in the family kitchen in the dining hall on the top floor of the house, he had visualised.

But, even after thirty-odd years of buying them, Nhuchhe Man had not been able to hand over the pressure cookers to any of his sons. Whenever his eldest son visited him, which was thrice a year—on Father’s Day, on Mother’s Day and Dashami on Dashain, he would invariably be in a hurry to go back. He would say: “I’ve to pick up Malati and kids (from his sasurali).”

He had refused to take his share of the pressure cooker and other kitchen appliances, saying “Malati has received the ones we need as wedding gifts.” As for his sons who had settled abroad, the last time he had seen them was when he and Motimaya visited them when their daughters-in-law were last pregnant. Now that they didn’t wish to expand their families further, they had stopped inviting them to babysit their grandchildren.

In fact, Nhuchhe Man took solace in the fact that his eldest son didn’t visit him as often as he once wished and his sons who had settled abroad didn’t call him as often as he once desired. He felt unrewarded whenever they grumbled about their past: how he steadfastly refused to buy them second-hand bicycles despite their pleas that it would help them learn to ride motorcycles when they had grown up, that even in their fifth grades they carried to school the threadbare satchels bought when they were in second grade, that the two younger siblings had to wear the hand-me-downs of the oldest brother, that they had to wait until Dashain to savour their favourite goat meat and until Tihar to relish sweets. The list was endless.

Thirty years after buying them, it finally dawned upon Nhuchhe Man that he would never get an opportunity to hand over the pressure cookers to his sons. He realised that the pressure cookers had outlived their purposes and were needlessly occupying space in the storeroom and gathering dust. Worse, they constantly reminded him of his failure to realise his dream of keeping his family under one roof until his last days.

He then took what was to him the bold and bitter decision of parting with them.

Hirakaji, the kitchenware shopkeeper down the street, from whose father Nhuchhe Man had bought the pressure cookers, agreed to buy them back at one-fourth of the price he had bought them for, reasoning that they had become outdated and he would have a hard time selling them. Nhuchhe Man couldn’t protest, “I’m not selling them for money,” he consoled himself.

Nhuchhe Man was too frail to carry all three pressure cookers to Hirakaji’s store. So, he roped in the services of Maila, the local bhariya, to carry them to Hirakaji’s store.

Nhuchhe Man had never felt happier than when Hirakaji took possession of the three pressure cookers and handed him one thousand rupees. At the shop, he remembered that he didn’t have a pressure cooker of a size that was ideal for his family of two—him and Motimaya.

The only pressure cooker that the family had was decrepit, its lid didn’t fit properly, and it was too big and heavy for Motimaya to wash. He added one thousand rupees to the money Hirakaji had given him and bought a two-litre pressure cooker. “I would cook meat in the pressure cooker at least once a week and wash it myself,” he muttered to himself.

While returning from Hirakaji’s store, when Nhuchhe Man felt a deep sense of relief, he realised that he had been carrying too heavy a burden on his mind for far too long. He made up his mind not to carry that burden any longer. As if he had suddenly found the panacea to all his ills, as soon as he reached home, he climbed up to the top floor and entered the storeroom.

He opened the steel almirah where he had kept the kitchen appliances he had bought for his three sons: rice cookers, electric mixers and gas stoves—three each. He surveyed the appliances, picked up a gas stove and pondered for a moment how much the three of them would fetch. Then, he muttered to himself, “Let Hirakaji give me whatever he deems fit for these useless and outdated stoves. It would at least free some space in the storeroom. I will sell the rice cookers next. Pity, people these days do not want gifts in kind at weddings.”

Without losing time, Nhuchhe Man dusted off the gas stoves one by one and packed them in a plastic sack each. His frail legs then descended the stairs to fetch Maila again.