Kathmandu, March 9 -- As a 'kuire' living in Nepal, the Nepali language has always been something I know I should learn. Having spent six months of 2018 in Kathmandu, the fact I could only master and muster 'raksi dinusna' and 'arko euta' was my shame. I was unable to rely on some osmotic process to learn Nepali as I hoped, and have done with Latin dialects. I was left performing embarrassing sets of charades to communicate and paying far too much on unnecessarily expensive taxi rides. The result was feeling like just another one of those kuires, expecting all of Nepal to speak English, which was far from what I wanted.

Informally, and definitely not by osmosis, I slowly learnt the numbers -sort of-to stop getting ripped off by taxi driv...