"Qatar took my wife"

Narayan Prasad Parajuli and his wife Durga Kumari Bhandari worked together for two years in Qatar. They had been married for 15.

“After I had worked in Qatar for six years, I brought my wife here to work in a school,” he says. “Even if we worked for different people and could only see each other on Fridays, it was better than before when I was here alone and she was home in Nepal.”

Their five-year-old son lived with them too, and when they managed to get longer leaves at the same time, all three traveled back home together.

“Everything was good, for all of us,” the widower says. “Everything was going well, until one day when my wife got a sudden and horrible headache.”

Doctors said she had a brain tumor. They began treatment immediately, but Durga Kumari Bhandari died after eight months.

“I still haven’t told our son Nayan that his mother is dead. He thinks she’s still at the hospital,” Narayan Prasad Parajuli. “Some times when he is upset, he wants to come along to the hospital and see his mother, and I am running out of excuses as to why he can’t.”

Durga Kumari Bhandari was their rock.

“She was the reason I could keep on living this life,” he says. “Her departure made my life empty, but I try to not show anything to my son. I want him to still feel like his mother is alive and loving him.”

They have received $5,753 from the Nepali government and the salary from the school she worked for, but nothing from the authorities in Qatar.

The widower and son have returned to Punarbas in Kanchanpur District of Nepal.

“I will never go back to Qatar, the country that took my wife.”

(39)